Rest Week Randomness

 

I'm pretty sure a few days ago I rode for 3 hours in close to 60 degree weather.  Although you wouldn't know it from the snow that's falling right now.  I won't complain too much however since the weekend is going to be sunny again, and we had a gorgeous ride this past Saturday with the team.  A few more months and us Portlanders can start complaining about the rain interrupting our Spring sun instead of the snow interrupting our Winter commute.

Training has been progressing along nicely.  Last week was a rest week for me, and I spent about 95% of my in-saddle time in endurance and active recovery zones.  I did my late winter / early spring maintenance to the Felt, changing out the BB (after getting the housing refaced), cassette, chain, and degunking all the other drivetrain parts with Simple Green and some elbow grease.  This week I'm back to threshold intervals, building to the goal to hit Jack Frost TT in two Sundays for a hard effort, and make my 2009 road debut at Piece of Cake at the end of March.   Need to get those 5 to 20min average power numbers up!

The team is gearing up for the 2009 season,  with a small handful of the team spending the week in Arizona at a training camp.  Check out Heidi Swift's blog for some awesome articles about the experience.  We are already making plans for next year.  The race season kicks off with Cherry Pie this Sunday.  I really would love to join them on the road, but I know I wouldn't be much help right now.  Unless a miracle occurs and we get our Team Edition Velo Vie rides this Friday, I'll probably contribute to the team by lending big Ron my Felt.

Last week I also started up a new medication to work in conjunction with my insulin pump.  It's called Symilin, and its a lab created form of the hormone amylin.  Type 1 diabetics don't make any insulin, but they also don't make a lot of amylin.  Amylin tells your liver to stop putting sugar into the bloodstream, lets your brain know you've had food, and tells your stomach to digest stuff.  Pretty important stuff!  Not having amylin in your system basically means you have a huge appetite even though you've eaten, and your blood sugar will go up a lot due to the intake of food plus the liver not shutting "off" for a short period of time.   I don't know how many times I've had a huge meal and still be hungry afterwards. 

With the addition of the Symilin injections before the meal, I'm eating a lot less, and my post meal blood sugars are very stable taking half the insulin I was taking for each meal prior to starting Symilin.  I'm still in the building phase of the medication, so I have to be very careful about getting super low blood sugars but so far so good!