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keeping blood levels up during endurance sport

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Lindsay McMenamin

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My son does adventure racing - out there for about 10 hours at a time. he battles to keep his levels normal and even if he constantly eats high glucose content sweets etc, the levels drop dangerously. What to do?
 
The advice for prolonged exercise is to reduce both basal & bolus insulin's by 50%, the following site was set-up for sports people who are insulin dependent:

http://www.runsweet.com/
 
The advice on runsweet is invaluable but my real (although not infallible ) answer was to get an insulin pump so that I could reduce basal insulin to a trickle for exercise.
I think it depends where you are in the UK as to whether the consultant would consider it. It depends on their interpretation of the NICE criteria which includes one about quality of life and hypos.
I'm in France and got mine because of the hypos I got during exercise.
 
Lindsay McMenamin said:
My son does adventure racing - out there for about 10 hours at a time. he battles to keep his levels normal and even if he constantly eats high glucose content sweets etc, the levels drop dangerously. What to do?
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For something like that, i.e. ultramarathons, and any training going over two hours, I've been dropping my basal that morning by 50%, adn restricting my breakfast bolus to 1 unit (normally 2-3 based on 1unit:20g carbs)

I also trickle in the carbs while running/cycling. Over that kind of duration about 15g every 15 mins or 30 g every half hour.

EIther drinks (mine is about 200ml=15g), bars based on nuts/dates/oats, typically 45g per bar in my case, or gels, approx 30g per gel.

I've laid out my strategy and a few experiments with it on my blog. Also the pitfalls of not having enough carbs post exercise.

Runsweet is a good starting point, but their forum is not very active.
 
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