after a Half marathon

Hi, Paul Coker her from 1bloodydrop.com. For those of you that don’t know me, I ran 40 half-marathons to mark 40 years of living with Type 1 diabetes, and in this short video I want to share with you some of the techniques I use for managing my diabetes after a half-marathon. If you’re not a runner or you’re aspiring to be a runner, don’t worry. You can do it, and the other thing is in your first few runs, the techniques that I’m using for after I run a half-marathon apply to you equally if you’re only going out and running for half a mile or 5k or 10k.

After I’ve run a half-marathon, my body wants to recover the fuel that is used to run a half-marathon. Your muscles contains an internal fuel store called glycogen and during a long run, you’ll definitely be burning glycogen. If you’re a novice runner and you’re starting up, you’re likely to be burning glycogen on even a short run, but as you get more and more experienced, then you’ll be reserving that glycogen for longer and longer runs.

What does that mean? If you burn glycogen, you need to recover it and your body will recover that glycogen store from free circulating blood glucose in the period after a half-marathon. Sorry, not just after a half-marathon, but after a run. If you’ve done an aerobic run, which is what you typically experience on a longer run like 5k, 10k, a half-marathon, or a marathon, or even longer, that recovery period is going to happen somewhere typically in the 8 to 12 hours after you’ve run, and that means that if you finish a half-marathon at midday, somewhere around 8:00 in the evening to midnight, your blood glucose levels are going to plummet because your body is trying to recover those glycogen stores from the freely circulating blood glucose.

The other thing that happens is that you have activated a system of glucose transport, called glucose transport for in the muscle cells themselves, and that continues for 24-48 hours after you have exercised. That’s whether you have done 5k or a half-marathon or a marathon or cycled on your bike. It doesn’t matter. You’re going to try and recover them, and that means that you become very, very sensitive to insulin afterwards.

Most exercise physiologists agree that you should try and eat protein in the first 30 minutes after you have run. For me, that doesn’t make any sense because my blood glucose levels are already climbing after a run because of adrenaline that’s circulating, and my insulin response cannot deal with that, so I’ve already given a small dose of insulin of about half a unit of insulin for me at the finish line, which actually just tapers off that climbing blood glucose level, and then what happens is I wait until my blood glucose levels starts to normalise before I eat.

That means that somewhere in the one to two hours after I’ve run that I actually even start to consider eating, and when I do eat, I give a much reduced amount of insulin. I’m talking in terms of somewhere between 70 and 80% of my normal dose of insulin because I know that the response is active. My response to insulin is heightened. I’m much more insulin sensitive, so I don’t want to get the normal dose because I know that if I do that, I’m going to have a high dose, and that’s the last thing I want. I want to be allowing my body to recover fully and to be building those stores of glucose up in the liver and the muscles. A low dose of insulin, even if it means that my blood glucose levels are marginally higher, is fine.

The night after I’ve exercised like that is the time to be really, really careful because nocturnal hyperglycemia, nighttime hypers, are a huge risk for those of us with diabetes that are using insulin after we have run like that or exercised like that. Reducing the amount of insulin, reducing the amount of basal insulin is absolutely essential.

I’ll see you on the next video.