Cammino di San Giacomo in Alto Adige #7

Cammino di San Giacomo in Alto Adige #6

Cammino di San Giacomo in Alto Adige #5

Cammino di San Giacomo in Alto Adige #4

Cammino di San Giacomo in Alto Adige #3

No, just no. 7.5 meters of climbing per kilometer is no joy, not the slightest. Well, it can be, but not in Serbia and Romania and not over 320 km. I awoke, I started cycling, 60 km to some kind of climb. Before the climb, I had a nice chat with a Serbian truck driver. I climbed. On top of the climb I had a little break to empty a pouch of chips, when suddenly an English car stopped in front of me and one of the useless TCR photographers jumped out of it, stretched a bit, made some Photos of the excitingly breathtaking act of me eating chips and disappeared again.
I rode towards the Danube valley, in which it felt crazy warm, had a last stop in Serbia, destroyed a lot of ice cream and made my way to the Romanian border.

Since that day is really dull, I want to use the space instead to explain some of the challenges, I had to face due to my illness. As you might or might not know, I am diabetic type 1, which means, that my pancreas doesn't produce any insulin. Insulin is quite an important hormone in our body, it is responsible for letting the energy in form of glucose in our cells, for sport important our muscle cells. If I wouldn't take my daily insulin, I would die of ketoacidosis, because due to the lack of insulin, the body cannot use glucose as energy anymore, because the glucose doesn't get into the cells. The blood sugar levels are rising and the body burns fat to ketones, which is not necessarily bad, the ketogenic diet uses that for energy production, but the amount of ketones produced during lack of insulin is much higher and therefore deadly. For me, the ketoacidosis is usually no danger, as long as I don't forget to take my long-lasting insulin.
The other way around, when I take too much Insulin and eat too little, I get into hypoglycemia, which every sportsman knows as bonking.
In ultra-races or even just one long day on the bike, we pretty much have to eat all the time, to compensate for the energy we are spending. While the healthy one can eat and the rest is regulated by the pancreas, I have to think about the dose of insulin, I take before the sport as long-lasting insulin and the one I take during the sport as short-lasting insulin, to cover my meals.

I've attached a picture of my blood sugar, of that day. I'm using a continuous glucose monitoring, which I can access over my smartphone. This has made my diabetes management a lot easier, but it's still not perfect. An optimal solution would be, if I would see my current blood sugar on my cycling computer. There are solutions which make that possible, but not with my current equipment. Back to the picture. This is what I call a "sitting on the couch and eating chips" day. While in everyday life, the blood sugar should stay in the green stripe, during sport I try to keep it on the upper limit or slightly above. Most of my TCR days looked like that. I was eating something, my blood sugar went up. Somewhere around a peak, I checked my blood sugar, saw that it was too high and took some insulin. The blood sugar went down. Now I had to make sure, that I didn't miss the time to eat again, otherwise I would bonk. The blood sugar rises again. 
Even though I was hungry and could eat pretty much all the time, what I'm quite happy about, at the upper blood sugar peaks I won't eat. So, I'm always in a higher energy deficit than I might be, if I've got my diabetes under control.
One possible explanation for all that is the following. Usually I do rides with much more climbing. During the climbs, my body demands much more energy and is more sensitive to insulin, while in the descents I can rest. While riding in the flat, at a lower intensity, my body needs less energy but a constant flow, it is less insulin sensitive, and therefore I have to take more insulin for the same amount of food. 
During the TCR, I raised my dose of long-lasting insulin by 25%, where the suggestion of the physicians is to lower the insulin dose during sport. I almost had to cover my meals completely by short-lasting insulin, where usually for a large lunch break even one or two units can be too much.

What I want to say with that is, that I had a hard time managing my diabetes, since the TCR for me was no hard exercise and I have to invest a lot more time to learn how my body reacts to certain situations. Sure, one aspect is also fatigue, but that's even harder to calculate. Most of that research I have to do myself, because the amount of diabetics doing intense sport, especially ultra-endurance sport, isn't that large. To my knowledge, the sample size of ultra-endurance cyclists at my level is one.
I hope, that made it a bit clearer, what I'm facing during such an event.

Back to the race. I reached the border between Serbia and Romania at the iron gate Portile de Fier 2, a power plant on the Danube. I wasn't quite sure, if I could cross the border here, and the situation at the border didn't fill me with much confidence. No queue of cars, in fact no cars at all. I stopped before the barrier at the border office, no one there. I waited and started circling around. Suddenly someone shouted, coming out of another building, we greeted each other, he stepped into his small office, took my ID card and waved me through. I crossed the Danube, resisting having a pee from the bridge. 
Romania, the country I feared the most beforehand. All the stories about bad roads, horrible traffic and all the dogs. Arriving at the Romanian side of the Danube, I immediately got chased by a pack of smaller dogs. A good start so far. The way to the Romanian border control luckily was long enough, so I could shake them off. At the border, the same picture as on the Serbian side, nothing. After a while, again, someone came out of the main office building. We had a nice chat about where I'm from and where I wanted to go, he checked my ID card and suddenly had a hint of authority. He straightened himself, asking "What's in these bags?" "All the stuff I need." I opened my upper frame back. "My rain jacket, my pump, my tool." "What's that?" He pointed at the small bag, I had my rain jacket in. "My rain jacket." I pulled it out a bit. "Ok, have a nice day." I entered Romania, packed my stuff again and continued.
It took some time until I relaxed. I wasn't chased every 100 meters, the roads were really ok and at least on the smaller roads, the bit of traffic gave me plenty of space. I was surprised, how green the villages were. We weren't allowed to cycle on E roads in Romania, except for some stretches, specified by the race organization. When I reached one of the E roads, I had to cross, I understood why. These roads are carnage, with trucks being the sovereigns. The tempo is extremely high, and I imagined, that trucks wouldn't overtake me, they would go straight through me. I continued on some smaller not too nice roads, sometimes gravel, until I reached the main route, leading to the Transalpina, a bigger good rideable road, with a bit more traffic. 
From time to time a dog decided to chase me, but often just for 10 meters, then they stopped. The whole day, I just had one dog, that made a longer attempt, keeping up with me for several meters at about 37 km/h, staying on the other side of the road, since there was traffic heading in both directions. On top of a small hill I had to climb, a bunch of stray dogs were waiting for me. I rode straight towards them, shouting at them to piss off. They immediately got quieter and stepped back.
After another hour of stupidly flat get somewhere road, I reached Târgu Jiu. I booked a room here, so I could do the Carpathians and parkour 4 by day. After I organized something for dinner, it took me another stressful hour of calling forth and back with the landlord until I finally checked into my room, had some food and a shower and laid down.

Top Sports

Mort 💀

TCR Stint 8

5 Photos

Sign up to see the comments.

Segments

Sign up to view more activities from Mort 💀

Cammino di San Giacomo in Alto Adige #7

Cammino di San Giacomo in Alto Adige #6

Cammino di San Giacomo in Alto Adige #5

Cammino di San Giacomo in Alto Adige #4

Cammino di San Giacomo in Alto Adige #3

Want to see more?

The #1 app for runners and cyclists

Sign Up for Free. Track your progress and reach goals. Join 100 million active people on Strava.

See More from Mort