I read in the Wall Street Journal this morning about Kris Freeman’s experience last Saturday in the 30-kilometer cross country ski race at the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Kris was trailing the race leader by just six seconds. He was in a very good position be the first American since 1976 (five years before Kris was born, I might add) to medal in an Olympic cross-country skiing event. This achievement is made all the more impressive when you know that Kris has to manage type 1 diabetes right alongside his rigorous training schedule.
As the Wall Street Journal story describes it, Kris was suddenly down in the snow calling for help. His blood sugar had gotten low. He needed some sugar and he needed it fast.
In a bike race or just out for a ride, I have felt those symptoms of low blood sugar — the shakes, the cold sweat, the confusion, the weakness — and it’s not a good feeling so boy, I can relate to what Kris was going through. Of course, I’ve never had as much on the line as he had in this race.
No, wait, that’s not true. I’ve had just as much on the line as Kris did. Hypoglycemia is a dangerous condition that, if not treated, can very quickly leave a person incapacitated or unconscious or in a coma or even worse. So, Kris and I and all other athletes out there with type 1 diabetes — and there are a lot of us — put our lives at risk every time we go out to exercise, no matter what the activity is. It’s only through careful monitoring of our condition and knowing very well how our bodies react to exercise that we know that we have minimized that risk.
If a person objects to that risk, well, the alternative is to do what the doctors used to tell newly diagnosed diabetic patients back in the 1970’s when I was first diagnosed: take it easy, don’t try to do too much, don’t think about strenuous activities because the risk of severe swings in blood sugars was too great. Well, you know what I say to that? To hell with that, is what I say.
There are endless ways that people can receive a wake up call that life is way too short and must therefore be lived to its fullest. Diabetes, for me, was that wake up call. It took probably 15 years for that wake up call to register inside my thick skull and sometimes I wonder if it still hasn’t fully registered, but I think the diagnosis of diabetes is probably one of the more gentle wake up calls to receive. I mean, think about it. The other classic “hey, stupid, life is short. Enjoy the gift while you can” wake up calls are things like cancer, a serious car accident, the death of a close friend or family member, etc, etc. I could go on, but you get the point. Getting diabetes is really pretty tame compared to those things.
So, I will continue cycling for the rest of my life. With any luck, on the day I die, I will finish my daily bike ride, dismount, and fall over dead. And until that day, I will do any and all other things that look like fun to me whether it’s bicycling to all 50 states (only Hawaii is left), learning to sail, reading all of the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, visiting New Zealand, bungee jumping from the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado, or simply taking a long nap on a rainy summer Saturday afternoon.
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