Posts by Don Muchow – T1Determined

On June 10, 2018, with the help of my wife and crew chief Leslie Nolen, I completed a 339-mile run across Iowa. I’m asked: “Why Iowa?” The answers vary from facetious to strategic: Because it’s there. Because no one had ever run Relay Iowa (the longest relay in the world) solo. Because it’s training for…

The first reaction I get when I tell people I’ve done runs over 100 miles is, “Wow. I could never do that.” The truth is, I’m nobody special. Most of us are capable of epic things, but the devil is in the details.

Epic adventures test the limits of human endurance — especially when you figure type 1 diabetes into the mix. Regardless of the size of the challenge, what matters more than anything is what you do when things go wrong. Because they will.

UPDATE: In November 2018, I switched from my almost-new Medtronic 670g to the Tandem t:slim X2 and Dexcom package, at my own expense. * * * * * * * * * My original Medtronic 670G review: Back in March 2018, after the announcement that Animas would be shutting its doors, I had to make…

This isn’t a what-do-do article. It’s more of a what-I-wish-someone-had-told-me article that I’d write to my newly-diagnosed self in the past. As such, it’s not intended as medical advice. Now that that’s out of the way, here’s what I’d tell me:

Since I completed the 223-mile Capital to Coast Relay solo run, I’ve been asked more than once: “How do you do it?” The answer is: run 1 mile 223 times in a row.  The secret lies not in the distance, but in what you learn from each monotonous mile.

I’ve been a type 1 diabetic since May of 1972, and was told by my elementary school teachers that I didn’t have to go to gym class. I followed that “sage advice” until 2004, when I began to have complications. Since then, I’ve been making up for lost time. In the last 12 months I’ve age-grouped…

I’ve been meaning for a while to write about my experiences as an ultra endurance athlete regarding the peculiar interaction of physical stress and Type 1 diabetes. Usually you’d expect to be insulin-sensitive after a long endurance workout, right? But the physical stress of ultra running is weird. It has a completely different, polar opposite…