Hi.  Um.  Hi.

So, I invested in CGM last week.  For those of you not in the "know" it's Continuous Glucose Monitoring.  Nifty little device that tracks blood glucose...well...continuously.  It consists of a little probe that gets jammed down into the subQ layer of your skin.  (Well, my skin, anyway.)  It pulls interstitial fluid up into a sensor, where glucose readings are taken every 5 minutes and beamed over to my insulin pump via a little transmitter thing.  Pretty neat.  This is a great idea, regardless of expense.  The thing I can't get by is how to keep the damned thing stuck to me whilst running.  I tried the stuff that came in the box with the transmitter.  That lasted about 4 miles.  I like to call it "Seven and a half miles per hour tape."  After that, I stepped up to something called Tegaderm.  Better.  It lasted quite a bit longer.  Just...not...quite...long...enough. 

I ran my 2nd 20 mile run yesterday.  About 11 miles in, I notice that the Tegaderm has pulled loose, and my sensor has pulled out slightly.  Also, I'm bleeding like a stuck pig.  Nice...still 9 miles from home and we have a catastrophic failure.  Luckily, my trusty support staff was right there with me.  Andrea has been biking along side of me for almost all of my long runs.  She carries water, Gatoraid, snacks, my blood glucose checker(which also has about a 75% fail rate due to temperature limitations).  She carried an extra Tegaderm patch, too.  Might have saved it, except I discovered that I needed to train her on the stuff before letting her apply it in the heat of battle.  She kinda screwed it up and it stayed down for a mile or so.

Anyways, while standing in the street feeling sorry for myself because my CGM was sucking, I did realize something.  My legs were still fresh as daisies at 11 miles.  My sugar was in a decent place when I lost contact with my sensor.  F-it.  I ran on.  Finished pretty strong.  Aside from some pretty grueling nausea later that night, I have to say it was a good run.  My hip was a little less than thrilled with me over night, but I just have some low-grade muscle soreness this morning.  Win.

Now I'm into the taper phase, thank Christ.  a little less than 3 weeks until marathon day.  I'm pretty stoked.  I'm trying not to think about how I'm going to run another 20 miler, then add another 6.2 miles.  One mile at a time, I suppose.

This week: 5 6 5 4 12

I feel successful already.