Pickled

 My good type 1 buddy sugar diabetic Don has this stash of goodies he brings to all our runs and rides as promotional freebies and stuff for anyone who wants it.  Don is probably the most self disciplined person I know of because he never takes any of this stuff for himself just for everyone else to try.  You get Jeff and myself around Don's goody stash of give aways and we clean him out of half his stock.  One thing Don has in this stash of freebies are these "Pickle Pops" that are a simple and neat item.  you can drink the pickle juice straight or freeze them, put them frozen in your jersey (sometimes on hot rides I slide one frozen one on each side of my cycling shorts), but the idea behind pickle juice is to stop or prevent cramping during events.

 Now I am no scientist or wizard as you can tell from the picture above but, I will try most anything once.  On our 100 mile journey through the gates of hell and back the humidity was like at 60% and from what my wizard friends tell me, or are they scientist friends I have?  Either way that humidity can cause cramping.  I am a man that has missed out on many of life's fun items and cramping is one of them.  As I reached mile thirty and this lady next to me was jabbering on how she is going to skip the 100 miles and just do the 100K because she is going too slow (quitter, diabetics can't quit because we will die) and that is when the backs of my legs started to feel this biting feeling.  So I stopped at a rest stop to stretch my legs because my thinking was that maybe I tweaked something and I needed to stretch it out but stretching did nothing.  Then I remembered Don and those Pickle pops I used to always drink during our training rides and how he said they were for cramping and not for scaring off the pretty ladies.  Then I remember my triathlete friends talking to me about how you can drink too much water and that can lead to more problems and that switching to a Gatorade or pickle juice to increase the salt or potassium levels in your blood can help.  Remember I am not a wizard nor a scientist so these are things that I have heard in classes, inter-web discussions, or just hanging out with people so none of this is advice and if you take it as advice you are on the wrong blog, I went to school for accounting not a medical degree.

I don't think there are any wizard studies that prove pickle juice or salt actually is like medicine to cramping but from this diabetic to you I will tell you it got me to the finish line of a 100 mile ride.  I switched to only Gatorade and pickle juice and at every stop I filled up, check my BG's (my blood glucose was a steady 156, thanks Dr. Mark for your book!), and felt better after each drinking of the stuff.  Now I know that pickle juice is not just for pickling pigs feet, eggs, amputated body parts, eyes and small animals.

Here is the stuff they had at our rest stops:

http://www.goldenpicklejuice.com/

Here is the stuff I steal, I mean get from Don:

http://bobspicklepops.com/