Adjusting your game plan

 So last Sunday I ran the Cowtown Marathon in crazy Fort Worth.  The week before I did my last long run to prepare for the marathon and it was a horrible, slow, and bad 20 miles.  I couldn't keep my heart rate down and I was sweating crazy and my stomach kept turning.  My post run recap made me thing that I had some sort of cold or sinus issue that was keeping me under the weather.  So I just worked out on Monday and decided to rest the last of the week to hopefully feel as close to 100% as possible for the marathon.

The morning of the run I woke up in my hotel room in a pool of sweat.  With diabetes we all know what the pool of sweat means, I must be low.  I checked my numbers but I was a constant 140 something the entire night.  That made me realize either I just sweated out my bug or it was blowing up into something big.  So with that in mind the game plan for the marathon was to run slow, don't push myself too early and listen to what my body was telling me to and act at that moment to it.  The pace I started at was about a tick slower than a slug going through salt but I was feeling OK.  Then at mile 22 it hit me like a rock.  When I tried to run I got extremely dizzy and my heart rate would jump to 159 which causes me to waste energy.  So I changed the game plan one more time and decided to just walk the final four miles to the finish line.  I could have pushed it and came in with a respectable Dave time but I have a thing about issues like this.  I would rather have a bad time and finish the event than to wake up with blood all over my body in a hospital room.  Then the final blow to my pride was when I crossed the finish line and they give you your finisher medal.  they put this little ribbon over my head with a piece of paper attached to it.  I looked at it and thought it was like some sort of participation ribbon for doing a 1k fun run.  Then the guy explained to me that they ran out of finisher medals and everyone else past a certain point got these lovely IOU pictures of a finisher medal on a ribbon.  So to say it was a disappointment on many levels could be made but I look at it as a success that I was willing to not let pride almost kill me and I changed my game plan to wrap up another marathon.  The next day I felt so amazing that maybe it was the marathon with all that sun, sweating, and running that finally got this bug out of my system and in three weeks I should be getting my finisher medal in the mail.  Diabetes is exactly like this, we have a game plan for something but life always throws us for a loop and you have to put your pride to the side and do the right thing to live and enjoy another awesome day with diabetes.