Friday, December 17, 2010

Fueling with Veggie Oil

A couple of weeks ago, my Triabuddy's mom came to my house and dropped off 5 gallons of peanut oil. Keaton, my Triabuddy had seen that I run my 1982 Mercedes on vegetable oil, and asked me whether it could run on peanut oil. Diesel engines were actually originally designed to run on peanut oil, so I said of course, and that would be great. Lo and behold, his mom gave me 5 gallons of it.

As I was thinking how cool that was, I also was pleasantly surprised by the fact that he in essence fueled the length of the Ironman. My car gets 28 miles per gallon. With 5 gallons of peanut oil, I can go 140 miles. Well... the Ironman is 140.6 miles (2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, 26.2 mile run). Cool awesome coincidence.

I'll be fueling with some equivalent of veggie oil too (well only actually oil if I drink Gatorade which actually does have oil in it), but I'll be fueling all the same. I just thought that was a nice cool little factoid.

On a different note, I am a vegetarian and have found that the simpler the foods I eat (ie not processed) without exception the more clean energy I have to burn as I'm exercising. More on that another time.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

How a Low Feels

I was talking with my friend the other day, who is also a type 1, and telling him about my severe feeling low the other day. He related that the last time he described how it felt to be really low to a friend, she suggested that he write about it. So, here is my attempt (note that I am not writing about it AS it's happening).

It was Tuesday, and I injected more insulin than I should of. I was planning to eat a bigger breakfast, but after running 5 miles (3 at LT), and 2 total warm up and cool down, I injected 4 units of Humalog, again, planning to eat more, but was so content with my frequent buy rewarded free mocha, I stopped there.

All of a sudden, in the midst of trying to balance the budget for work, write emails back and forth, check Quickbooks budget reports on one computer, sliding back to my computer, adjusting project proposals, I started feeling like this was all so important, yet unimportant simultaneously. That is, that every single last detail, of printing out an insert to send along with an alternative gift card, and getting the cropping on the paper perfect was the most important urgent thing to do, while also, responding to my emails, and I felt a growing sense of urgency. All the while, I was beginning to sweat, and at a deeper level think about how I was going to finish this all. Probably it was my sympathetic nerve system actually asking that very question, but in reference to "how are you going to get out of this". But maybe because of the limited blood sugar I had in my system, I took that message and immediately applied it to the task I was doing. So, suddenly in that moment, I have this urgency of survival instinct and importance, but I'm thinking it's about the many tasks I'm doing at once. Of course, this is a trigger, as it feels odd, so I test. And it's only 60, but I think it must have been dropping FAST. I drank a juice, ate a bar, scrounged around in my purse for other old candy I carry around, and waited. All the while though that feeling of "what is happening to me, this is so strange, I can't figure out why I'm so stressed, I feel like I'm dreaming, like life is not that important anymore, but yet, I have omniscience about everything all at once"

At any rate, re-reading this, it doesn't capture all of it, but writing it, I began to better understand the physiological relationship between the feeling and brain's alarm for survival, and how strange it feels in relationship to what I was doing

Maybe others can relate or share it. Maybe next time (after I have drank the juice, and while I'm waiting for it to come up), I'll write more.