We’ve posted a small sampling to Flickr.

As I write these lines, I’m “watching” the Tour de France prologue and waiting for my temporary basal insulin rate to kick in, since I’m going to go for a run in a few minutes. This will be my first since Alice Springs about three weeks ago. That morning was cold! So cold — 3ºC — that I could see my breath, shivered whenever I stopped to photograph birds or whatnot, and wished that I’d brought a long-sleeve running shirt. (Today we’re supposed to have big-time summer heat at home. Lisa is already out for a walk, not having slept at all overnight.) Despite the lack of running, I managed to lose weight on vacation — though I was quite surprised to see the number of the scale. We’ll see how much all of that hiking and walking has helped with my muscle tone and how much “outback lunch” has hurt.*

Time passes . . . Running went well. No jiggly-ness in places where there shouldn’t be. No gasping for breath. No sluggishness. No hypos or high blood glucose readings. Those are all good signs. I guess we did manage to keep active on our trip, probably more throughout each day than we typically would have been sitting in front of our computers at work.

All that activity wasn’t enough to reach blood-sugar nirvana right off the bat, though. In fact, it was kind of a weird diabetes trip, all things considered.

First off, I’ll get a confession out of the way. I’m pretty obsessive when it comes to traveling with diabetes. I carry almost twice as many supplies as I’m going to need, and I worry that I’m going to forget stuff.

I bring more supplies (even though they take up a ridiculous amount of space) because I almost ran out of infusion sets in Chicago in 2003 when I got a bunch that I just couldn’t get to work and had to keep changing them until on the morning of my return I was contemplating how to give small amounts of insulin by syringe for the next ten hours.

And I worry about forgetting supplies because in the past I (a) left my meter at home at the beginning of a two-week road trip and had to buy a new one in Milford, CT, (b) I left my insulin in the minibar fridge in Shimla, India and was lucky enough to have one of the hotel staff track me down on my way to the railway station, and (c) I didn’t bring a quite enough insulin with me on an unexpected trip to Kansas last year.

So I obsessively carry lots of stuff with me. On this trip that really came through for me.

See, my pump broke in the middle of nowhere in the Northern Territory of Australia about three weeks ago. Yup that’s right: dead. A button on he controller got stuck, and that was enough to cause the pump to give up the ghost.

This isn’t the first time this particular error — “Button Error” — has happened to me. In fact, it happened about a year ago. In the US, this is an annoyance: Call Minimed, explain the problem, have a new pump the next day. In the interim, I’ve used my older Minimed 511 pump. (It uses all of the same supplies and is mine to keep because my health insurance system lets me get a new one every five years or so; and Minimed is eager to help me get the latest model.) It’s a pain, but it could be much worse.

But in the Outback in Australia. In a campervan. Without a fixed itinerary, without my own phone, without the Internet. It’s a bit more difficult. I had my backup plan, but it was now only one failure away from EPIC failure. My safety net needed me to do something. Fortunately, I had three things going for me:

1. I brought a backup pump.
2. I had the foresight to bring the list of Medtronic Minimed distributor phone numbers that comes in every box of supplies.
3. I have a naturally sunny and charming disposition. Okay, that’s a bit of a stretch, but I wait to freak out until after I’ve taken charge of the situation.

Getting a replacement pump in Australia is not the same 24-hour experience as it is in the USA. First, dial Medtronic Minimed from a pay phone. Hang up. Deposit 50 cents. Dial Medtronic Minimed. Tell them in the Northern Territory. Hang up. Dial the free call number (1800 777 808). Listen to crappy hold music. Get connected to US Minimed tech support. Explain the problem. Tell them I’m in the Northern Territory. Get put on hold. Listen to more crappy hold music. Give them the location of my next fixed address in Alice Springs in a week. Tell them to have the Australian office leave a message on my home voice mail (which we were checking via Skype when we had Internet access) if they need to.

A week later, show up in Alice Springs. Find no pump at the hotel. Get on Skype with the Aussie office of Minimed. “Your pump left Hawaii this morning. It should be there in a few days when you return to the same hotel after going to Watarrka and Uluṟu.” Go to Watarrka and Uluṟu. Pick up new pump about two weeks after it failed. Program all of the settings that I had (fortunately) written down on an index card I keep with my meter… you know, just in case. E-mail nice dude at Aussie Minimed to ask what to do with the broken pump. Put the pump in my luggage as a souvenir until I get home.

So what did we learn for the next time?

• Assume that a pump is going to fail at some point. Over the last decade, I’ve had at least two fail with the “Button Error” locking failure and one fail with a motor sensor problem.**
• Carrying a backup pump is a necessity (if you have one).
• When leaving the country, bring along Lantus or some other kind of long-acting insulin as the backup plan for the backup plan.
• Carry manufacturer contact info.
• Wait until you get to the US (or home) before contacting Minimed about getting a replacement pump. I suspect supplies would be easier to get if they got lost, etc.

Other than that, diabetes didn’t really affect my trip any more than normal. Hiking and swimming are things we do frequently, and I managed the trip to the Great Barrier Reef pretty well. I probably could have used a little more insulin before disconnecting pump before I put on my wetsuit; that’s good to know for next time, but this was the first time, and I feel it was a good trade-off.

Not exercising and changing my diet and eating schedule exposed a few problems with my basals . . . or at least required some changes. After those changes, I did pretty well for the rest of the trip. Sitting on a plane for long periods of time is going to suck for so many reasons, so just increase every bolus insulin dose 10% and hope for the best.

Now it’s late, and I’m hoping for a bit more sleep tonight. Wish me luck!

* — Remember, “outback lunch” = ice cream + chips/crisps + Diet Coke + optional Oreo cookies.

** — I suspect, but cannot prove, that this is related to water getting into microscopic fractures in the pump casing. I try to keep the pump dry, but I’ve noticed it twice after steamy summer exercise sessions. So I’m trying harder to keep the new one in a less humid environment, putting it in a plastic zippy bag when I run or ride and keeping it out of the steamy bathroom when I shower. We’ll see. Let’s hope the FDA takes notice.

We’re having a great time, and it’s hard to believe that our trip is half over. It took a while to feel like we actually were in a different country, despite having crossed the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, the Equator, and the International Date Line on our way here. But I think it felt real after that first day with the campervan, having driven on the left side of the road through a strange landscape and then that night having seen the southern stars for the first time. Now, eight days later, there’s no escaping the fact that we’re a long distance from home — if only when measured by mileage.

We’ve been in the Northern Territory for the majority of our trip. First in Darwin and then in a string of national parks. Other than being on the Timor Sea and having a beautiful climate for the middle of winter, there’s really not a lot to Darwin. (At least not as we saw it.) The parks are pretty amazing, though.

But first: A few words about our temporary home away from home. We rented a 22-foot long, two-person Euro Tourer campervan. It wasn’t the biggest RV on the road, but it was definitely plenty big. And the steering wheel was on the wrong side of the vehicle — which makes sense, since it’s there to facilitate driving on the wrong side of the road. I think the only thing that saved me that first day was that it was an automatic transmission. It was a beautiful, almost blemish free vehicle with all kinds of amenities: toilet, shower, TV/DVD, air conditioning, water heater, fridge, etc.

It was blemish-free, and then I started driving it. Within the first 30 minutes I had made a nice big dent on the left side of the camper. The appropriate answer to my question of where to get groceries should not have simply been “Palmerston . . . just down the Stuart Highway.” It should have been a question: “How comfortable are you driving your behemoth machine in a tight car park at a mall where there’s a grocery store?” It was a split-second choice I had to make between getting very close to a tree on the left-hand side or another person’s car coming toward me on the right-hand. I thought the tree had it coming, so I let it have it. But I kinda freaked out while we shopped in the supermarket. A quiet freakout, but almost a complete “I just want to forget about this part of the adventure and go home and curl into a little ball and whimper” freakout.

But a few hours later, when we made it to Litchfield NP, I felt much better. Not perfectly secure in my decision to continue forth with the adventure, but much better nonetheless.

At first, I wasn’t so sure about these parks. In the Northern Territory, you drive for hours through the same scenery, and then — all of a sudden — you’re doing something truly amazing. In Litchfield it was looking at the beautiful waterfalls, swimming in the plunge pool of one of them, and seeing the southern stars for the first time.

After Litchfield, we went to Kakadu NP, which was on my list of things that I absolutely had to see while in Australia. I couldn’t exactly say why I wanted to see this park, but I had a sense that it was something I had to do. Maybe it was the 20,000 year-old Aboriginal rock art. Maybe it was floodplains and billabongs that are home to crocodiles and 1/3 of Australia’s bird species. Maybe it was the pictures of the Yellow Water wetlands or Jim Jim Falls. Whatever it was, it turned out to be even more spectacular than I imagined. The 2-hour dawn wildlife cruise we took was more than worth getting up at 4:45AM to be at the jetty on time. And the rock paintings at Ubirr and Nourlangie are so amazing; it’s like they’ve come from a different planet.

Kakadu is also where I learned that vacation doesn’t always have to be packed full of action. In fact, sitting around the campground in the afternoon after a morning’s hike and before an afternoon’s swim in the pool can be quite enjoyable. Doing nothing but reading a bit or writing in my journal as the breeze rustles the leaves is pretty nice, too. (Australian national parks are quite a bit different than American ones, which are all about the nature. Here it’s all about the tourist experience.)

After leaving Kakadu, we started a long bit of driving to Alice Springs, 1500km to the south. The first day was short, only about 400km to Katherine. We stayed in Nitmiluk, another national park. And then we had a 600km drive — in a campervan, it’s worth remembering — to Tenant Creek. The last day was shorter, but even more lonely.

This drive was epic. Long, flat, unbending roads punctuated every 70-100km by an imperceptibly small town or (more usually) a roadhouse. The latter is a gas station attached to a pub/tavern with a few rooms and a caravan/campground nearby.* Staying there seems like it would be an act of pure desperation or the kind of thing one would do whilst on the lam. The straightness and flatness of the road allows for lines of sight in excess of 5km at a stretch and unbroken passing opportunities of 20km or more. The speed limit of 130 km/h is fast, and I never approached it in the campervan. It’s no wonder that we saw about a dozen overturned or destroyed cars and an uncountable number of swerve and skid marks that spanned the width of the road.

The road trains are easy enough to pass on the Stuart Highway, unless they’re carying an enormous piece of mining equipment. It just takes some extra caution and time to go around a cab towing four wagons that total more than 53 meters (170 feet) in length. It’s their highway, we just use it and try to stay out of their way.

Alice Springs is nice enough, and I’m glad that we’re going back for a couple days after we visit Uluṟu tomorrow and on Lisa’s birthday on Sunday. We stayed near the Todd Mall, a pedestrian walk with lots of Aboriginal art galleries and nicer restaurants, along with some more kitschy stuff, too. We’re going to see if we can find anything that we like when we go back. We don’t really know much of anything about Aboriginal art, and some of it’s unpleasantly close to modern and abstract art for Lisa’s tastes; but we’ll see if there’s anything we can’t live without that’s also within our price range. We just need to make sure that it’s authentic and not the typical knock-off stuff that you seem to be able to find all over the place here.

Yesterday we drove from Alice Springs to Watarrka. This morning we hiked Kings Canyon just after sunrise. It’s a beautiful canyon and has made my top-5 day-hikes. The six kilometer (about 3.5 miles) hike over two-and-a-half hours yielded an ever-changing view of the canyon and some beautiful light that never seemed to illuminate the same rock face the same way twice. The ghost gum trees and the spinifex provided nice contrast to the fiery rocks. It was a well-traveled path, and we were usually surrounded by a bunch of older walkers or a large group of college-aged backpacker folks on organized bus outings.

This part of Australia is much more picturesque than where we’ve been. And tomorrow we’re off to the most “iconic” Australian locale.

Details of our Trip to Uluṟu to follow soon.

* — Everything in Australia seems attached to a tavern, bar, or pub. I suspect that the Parliament house in Canberra is just a nice chamber attached to a pub.

Living with Diabetes: Sarah has a really great piece on her site about growing up with the “bad kind” of diabetes. At least that’s how people differentiated type 1 and 2 while she was growing up. But really, all diabetes sucks, especially if you try to ignore it.

Software Development: Keith Swenson’s article 26 Hints for Successful Agile Development is full of good advice about how to do software development effectively — even if you’re not really doing Agile development. (via Infoq)

Functional Programming: Here’s a really l-o-n-g article about functional programming. It’s good, but . . . damn!

Risk and Oil Spills: You would think that a company like BP, whose contractors deal with potentially deadly situations on a daily basis, would have a better handle on risk. Even if BP engaged in neutral cost-benefit analysis, as this NY Times article suggests, it should have chosen the option that lowered its risk exposure. Remember: risk is cost of vulnerability times likelihood of vulnerability. In the case of deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, we’re seeing that the cost of an oil spill is astronomical. The probability of failure would have to be completely zero to make it worth choosing a less expensive option.

Time Machines: Stephen Hawking tells you how to build one using wormholes. He also advises against creating paradoxes where you kill yourself.

The Artificial Pancreas: So what’s this “artificial pancreas” that people with type 1 diabetes keep talking about? Let Wired magazine or Aaron Kowalski tell you. It’s not a cure, but (if done correctly) it will hopefully lower a lot of the variability that we see in our blood glucose levels. Basically, it’s an expert system built into a pump plus continuous glucose monitoring combo. It’s also a bundle of assumptions and heuristics. I find it somewhere between amazing and hella scary.

I think part of my problem might be that I’m bored with my training route. I’m very, very accustomed to it. Perhaps it’s time to make a few changes.

Oh, and I feel very close to having my insulin and food worked out for an afternoon ride with happy BG readings beforehand and afterward. :^)

A great day of cycling can’t be beat, but a bad day sucks. Because a bad day of cycling is work. Hard work. Possibly even work in the rain.

No rain today, but I was just not feeling it. I had intended to ride 90 miles, leisurely going over some mountains on a beautiful day.** Long but doable, I thought. After all, a month ago I did an 80-mile loop from my house to the top of Mount Wachusett and back, and that felt really good. But I ended up turning around after 25 miles.

Click for larger

Don’t get me wrong, the ride had its good parts. Hardly anyone was driving up or down the mountain. It didn’t take as long to ascend as last time, when there was snow and ice on the road. And the descent down Notch Road was smooth and fast. (I learned that if you run into a bumblebee while descending at close to 40mph***, you can see it coming and it kinda stings hurts as it thuds off your chest.) And — even though it killed me a little to see it — I smiled when I saw someone had painted “HILL 1/2 WAY ” on the shoulder of the big climb a little before where I turned around to trade the last 65 miles of my ride for 15. And at the Mount Greylock SP visitor center, I saw a fellow rider with a Team Type 1 jersey.

But something about today just didn’t work. Maybe it’s because I started by climbing a mountain. Maybe it’s because the route was either all uphill or all downhill with few flat sections. Maybe I got too warm on the way up. Maybe I should have had more breakfast before heading out. Maybe something mechanical was wrong. (I even stopped on the way up the mountain to adjust my brakes, since I thought I could feel them rubbing the rear tire.)

Maybe it was one of those things. Maybe it was nothing but my overall lack of skills. Maybe it was all in my head. Whatever the reason, I felt like I had an anchor dragging behind my bike. It felt like the energy I was putting into the bike didn’t move it forward as much as it should, and when I was going slowly (which was often) the bike seemed to slow down on its own.

If the bike was misbehaving — and I’m not saying that it was, although it definitely needs a tune-up — it was mostly me. I just had no energy. I ate and drank, but it didn’t seem to matter. I had cracked. In fact, I contemplated walking my bike the last half mile up the 10% stretch back to the car. I’ve never walked a bike since I first got one with multiple gears. Like I said, it was a tough outing; and I consoled myself with a strawberry shake.

Tomorrow is another day. And since I didn’t go very far today, it might just be tomorrow.

* — This bolsters my (admittedly very biased) assertion that golf is not a sport. At least not any more than billiards or darts. And yet golf is going to be an Olympic sport in 2016, while cricket continues to be excluded. Hmm.

** — I think this ride is jinxed. Two weeks ago, there was a gale/nor’easter that kept me at home. Last week I forgot about a dinner date. And then today. But I declare this: “Taconic Range, I will make you my bitch successfully cross over you.”

*** — I know, I know. The speed limit was only 25. I don’t have a computer/speedometer, so I’m guesstimating. BTW, I’m sure the bee was fine. . . .

You can divide the world of image file formats into different kingdoms based on the their structure. There is some overlap between these categories, but for the most part image formats are (1) tag/record-based, (2) structure-like, (3) marker/stream-based, (4) textual, (5) card-like, (6) raw, or (7) opaque.

TIFF, DNG, and DICOM are examples of tag/record-based formats. A unique tag identifies the entity in the file and its meaning. For example, a particular hexadecimal tag might indicate that this is the “photometric interpretation” record. The datatype of this record either explicitly appears after the tag or appears in a data dictionary that’s known to the application developer. Almost always, these records explicitly tell the length of their data, which makes it easy to skip to the tag location of the next record.

Microsoft was (for a time) very fond of making structure-like formats. In these formats, the file looks a lot like the memory representation of a C/C++ data structure. These formats are easy to describe and easy to read if you have the structure definition; simply fread() the data into a variable and reference the data members by name. The problems should be pretty clear. You need to be using a programming language that supports C structs. And you need to know the layout of the struct. And once you define the layout of the struct, it’s fixed. (Well, not exactly. Microsoft changed the data layout in its BMP family of formats with every release of Windows, and used a “magic” value to tell readers which struct to use.) All told, it’s a very brittle kind of format.

JPEG is the prototypical — but certainly not the only — marker-based format. Markers are special combinations of bytes that, like a tag, tell what the data is that’s coming next in the stream. But, very much like struct-based formats and very unlike tagged formats, the data that follows the marker can be heterogeneous. In JPEG, the data that appears after the SOF (Start of Frame) marker is a record, while the data that follows an RSTn marker is just a stream of compressed bytes. The SOI and EOI (Start/End of image) markers don’t even have any bytes that follow them. In marker-based formats, semantics and syntax are rather carelessly jumbled together.

It’s very difficult to quickly parse marker-based formats, because often markers don’t specify how much data appears before the next marker. These are very much “streams” of bytes that you’re forced to read until you come to the next marker. Consequently the number and appearance of markers is very limited and this limitation ripples through to the data that they contain. JPEG markers all begin with the 0xFF byte followed by another byte, which taken together specify which marker it is. Consequently, the appearance of an 0xFF byte in the data of a marker has to be escaped by a NULL byte so that it’s not mistaken for the next marker.

Textual formats, such as XML, have the benefit of being self-describing and readable by both humans and machines. Their main drawbacks are the inflated size of the data they contain (even when represented in a semi-binary CDATA hunk) and the inability to quickly skip through them with binary I/O routines.

FITS is a fairly prototypical “card-like” format. As the name implies, these are fixed-length records like one might have encountered on a punch card. For example in format with 120-character records, the first n characters are reserved for the “variable name” part of the equation, while the remaining 120-n characters are the textual representation of the value of the record. They are frequently text-only for the descriptive part of the format with a binary payload at the end. These are easy to read, but a pain to parse, since the “right hand side” values often have to be interpreted.

Raw and opaque formats aren’t very easy to describe because they’re so varied. In a “raw” format (and there are dozens or hundreds . . . possibly more) all of the bytes are jumbled together in a payload-only file. A separate file may have a header that describes the data and helps a reader/parser make sense of the payload. Or not. These are almost always completely free of any helpful description within the file.

This shouldn’t be confused with opaque files, such as HDF, CDF, or netCDF. These formats are completely defined by their API, which for all intents and purposes, you have to use to access the data within the file. This allows for a lot of richness in handling the data contents, which can be organized in highly optimized ways. The downside is that you’re limited in how you can interact with your data to mechanisms someone else has defined. And data permanence can suffer, since if the tool chain changes (or goes out of existence) you don’t really have a way to get at your data.

Practically, each format style has it’s pros and cons. But tagged formats (which might incorporate features of the record style) are the most durable and easiest for third-parties to work with.

* — Cue awesome “CSI” + “Law and Order” + “House” mashup daydream. *DOINK DOINK*

My naïve idea was to copy the JPEG-encoded to a temporary file and then read that file using the Independent JPEG Group’s libjpeg library. That’s what I did with JPEG data encapsulated in DICOM. This is far too simple an approach for NITF, resulting in incomplete images. Here’s why:

• NITF breaks most images into multiple tiles.
• Each tile is independently compressed into its own image stream.
• NITF uses “block masking,” which prevents storing unimportant tiles.

The idea makes sense on one level. If you’re going to send an image over a low-bandwidth or low-fidelity channel, you want to limit the amount of data that you send, and you want to avoid an all-or-nothing situation during image transmission or reception. But it’s a total pain in the ass for application developers.

Add to this the fact that JPEG is a marker-based format that isn’t very self-describing, and you have a tricky parsing situation.*

Here’s the basic idea behind getting imagery out of a NITF file if it’s been JPEG compressed. (I assume that you already know how to parse a NITF file — see MIL-STD-188-198A if you don’t — and that you have a JPEG codec that you can use to decode the data.)

1. The first two bytes of the compressed stream should be the standard JPEG SOI marker (0xFF 0xD8). This is your sanity check.
2. The next two bytes should be the APP6 marker (0xFF 0xE6). The payload of this marker contains a bunch of useful information about tile sizes and counts, bit depths, etc. Some of this is redundant with what’s inside the NITF file.
3. The remainder of the NITF file should be a bunch of JPEG codestreams delimited by SOI and EOI (0xFF 0xD9) markers. Each delimited stream is one tile in the image; and it’s a completely standalone JPEG stream. It can be extracted to its own file (if necessary) and decompressed. Tiles are stored across the image horizontally and then down.
4. If there’s no block masking, it suffices to read each tile in turn and store it in the appropriate region in the output image.
5. If the NITF file does use block masking, use the values in the BMRnBNDm attribute of the image subheader to find the locations of the blocks that contain actual image data. The masked out blocks will have 0xFFFFFFFF values. The other values — there’s one for each tile — are 0-based offsets pointing to the SOI marker that starts each tile, relative to the start of the JPEG compressed data.

And that’s it. After coding, you should probably test out your parser on the sample NITF files provided by the NGA.

* – You can divide the world of image file formats into different buckets based on the their structure. There is some overlap between these categories, but for the most part image formats are (1) tag/record-based, (2) structure-like, (3) marker/stream-based, (4) textual, (5) card-like, (6) raw, or (7) opaque. I’m going to write more about this in the next post.

Before the pictures, a little story. Remember that on Friday I wrote that I was going to do 90 mile ride in the Taconic Range today? Turns out, I forgot about an evening obligation, so I decided to delay the ride until next weekend and do a similarly sized ride starting at home but without any mountains.

About two hours into my ride through Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut — before I really even had a chance to get bored — I got a flat. After a year of riding, I was due, but it could have happened in a more convenient place, instead of halfway across the West Thompson Dam. My first thought was a hope that I could just raise my hand like they do in professional races and summon the neutral service vehicle for a quick wheel change. Oh, delusions!

After walking myself back to a place with a shoulder, I made a rookie mistake, breaking the head off the valve of my flat tube as I took it off the wheel. Had I been wiser, I would have also brought an extra tube with me. Like I said: rookie mistakes. Nothing to do after that but pack it in and call Lisa to pick me up. She’s a sweetheart, that girl.

Next week, I’ll be more sensible when I finally do that ride in the mountains.

Here are some pictures from the past couple days:

Lunch of palak paneer and chicken korma

What?!

How did we do SWAGging lunch? Uh . . . coulda been better.

Reading all y’all’s blogs

A movable feast

Stopping by the cemetery in Burrillville, Rhode Island

Lots of Joslins in this part of Rhode Island and Connecticut

I thought at first this might be the guy we PWDs owe a debt of gratitude, but he seems to be an uncle of some distance.

Waiting for the cavalry in Thompson, CT

I barely worked hard enough to muss my hair

I have a bike. I like love to ride it all over.*

Is that exercise? I guess that depends on whether you think it’s “exercise” to do the thing that you love.

On one level, the answer is undeniable: Yes. I have to carve out time from my daily schedule to do it. Sometimes I have to convince myself to get going, especially when I’ve had a tough day and I want to veg out. And it burns a lot of calories, which was part of my initial motivation. According to the computerized bean-counters at MapMyRide.com, I’ve burned more than 130,000 Calories over the last 10 months by running, bicycling, and swimming,** which helps explain why I lost about 25 pounds over the same period.

I don’t think about it as exercise, though. In fact, what I do after work feels more like training. I “train” on weekdays so that I can ride longer distances with more ease on the weekends. I wear myself out repeatedly riding up long hills so that I can feel badass when it comes time to ride up an actual mountain. I go out in the winter and in the rain to put the miles in the bank, so that they’re there when I need to draw on them in the fourth or fifth hour of a ride. While I’m out training I have mental image of my idealized self. “I’m climbing like Andy Schleck. I’m grinding away on the flats like Fabian Cancellara. I’m spinning easily like all those other people in the peloton, waiting for the breakaway to wear itself out.”***

Whatever I call it, cycling is something that I love and that I think about way too much while I’m at work. I live for the long ride on the weekend. This Sunday, I hope to do the 90-mile ride that I was going to do last weekend before the jet stream shifted and changed my plans: Up and over Mt. Greylock in western Mass. before heading into the Taconic Range that divides New York from New England.

View Larger Map

As with all things diabetes, it’s not as easy as just putting in the miles and showing up. There’s day-to-day planning that has to happen, too. I find it easiest to ride in the morning before the day’s first bolus: Just lower the basal about 50% an hour or two before starting and eat frequently along the way, testing every hour or so. I put Clif bars, bananas and string cheese in my jersey pockets and fill up my bottles with Gatorade. And on the weekends that’s what I do.

But weekdays I ride after work, so it’s more challenging. I hate seeing the high numbers, but I build up a bit of a blood sugar cushion by snacking without bolusing along with lowering my basal. And I drink Gatorade throughout my hour-long workout. I’ll keep tweaking everything until I get it right — until my BG levels don’t drop 50-100 mg/dL in an hour — and then I’ll lock it in until diabetes decides to change how my rules work (again).

Thanks to diabetes, I always carry three things with me when I ride****. (1) A tube of glucose tablets, which I occasionally need to use. (2) My phone, which I fortunately have not had to use except to snap the occasional picture. And (3) about $15 dollars in small bills in case I need to stop for an emergency snack or to bribe someone.

But to paraphrase Lance Armstrong, it’s not about the diabetes. I love to ride, and diabetes can come along if it promises to keep up. When I actually get on the bike to ride, that’s the time when I feel like I’m beyond diabetes. I put my pump in the pocket of my Team Type 1 jersey to represent for my PWDs and because I’m so damn proud and inspired by what that professional team does; but cycling connects me to a time before I had diabetes, and it’s my way of being as free from it as possible.

* — I’ve also been known to run, walk, hike, and backpack. And, yes, I’ve even started to enjoy swimming — though, I still suck at it.

** — Seriously, I’m not thinking about competing in a triathlon. I’m not.

*** — I have no delusions about my abilities, though. I’m just a guy with diabetes on a bike, after all.

**** — That’s in addition to the Boy Scout stuff that always stays with the bike: fix-it tools, patch kit, tire levers, etc.