After the shock of being diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at the beginning of September, many things started dropping into place about how I had been feeling over the previous three months. That aside what I learnt about managing the condition also sits true with good cycle training – watch what you eat, managing blood sugars on a day by day basis and don’t overtrain. This level of thought that was going into my daily life spurred me on to think about focusing these new thoughts into becoming the best cyclist that I can be. It’s not going to be an easy journey and I thought I would share my journey with you all.

I was advised to rest for a few weeks after being diagnosed and get stable – I managed a few days, maybe a week of that (those that know me well will understand). After 3 weeks I decided it was time to get on bike and see what happened, a 10 mile ride in about 40 mins, felt good, got home, had a hypo (completely out of blood sugars). I knew at this point I had a lot of work to do.

I left it a week and decided it would be safer to start on my turbo trainer, trying to work out how much blood glucose I would lose over half an hour at a set heart rate. This was last week 4 sessions, 4 hypos. First one was on the turbo after half an hour, the rest in the shower after finishing. The one thing I learnt from this is that after finishing riding, you are still burning fuel and using blood sugar. 

I have had advice from a couple of our sponsors, Mountain Fuel and Cycloform so, taking on board good training advice and nutritional information. I worked on the information learnt last week and waited for my assessment with John at Cycloform on the Wattbike.

I over fuelled a little before we started and managed quite a rigorous session, finishing off with an 8 step ramp test – that was so painful at the end but John is so encouraging! After the assessment with John, he was able to start me off with a training plan to build me back up to a good strength with my two goals on mind – to ride the Flat 200 in 2020 followed by a triple ascent of Mt Ventoux – I’m nothing if not ambitious!