The Thirteen Mile Hike

I have been extraordinarily busy this week, what with shadowing tours to prepare for my new job as a guide, a trip out to Ostia yesterday to visit an excavation, and a trip way out to the suburbs Tuesday night to attend a choir rehearsal (more on that later....).  Plus, today I had lunch with an art historian who is in town briefly, who I've met a few times before, and somewhere in there I have to work!

But, I wanted to tell a little story here about how I survived a 13 mile hike around the walls of Rome WITHOUT GOING LOW!!

This is a semi-annual event that the Rome campus of my home university sponsors.  An archaeologist/art historian leads whichever undergraduates (the dean invited us along) are willing on an epic 8 hour, 13 mile walk around the city's Aurelian walls.  The walls more or less correspond to the perimeter of the orange area seen in the map below:

Our walk deviated just a little bit from this.  Rather than walking all the way around the Vatican, we stuck to the original walls which used the Tiber as the barrier for part of the way.

I knew ahead of time that this would be tricky, that so much walking in the hot, hot heat would make maintaining stable blood sugars much more difficult than usual.

So, Nick and I packed up lots of snacks, plenty of glucose tabs, and a juice box.  Funnily enough, it didn't cross my mind to set a temporary basal rate until about 2 hours into our walk.  Weird.

We got to the Lateran at 8:30 am and then walked with the 50 or so other people.  We'd stop every once in awhile for a 5-10 minute lecture about what we were seeing.  It was a really fantastic way to see parts of the city that I had never seen before and also to mentally connect how the different neighborhoods which I had visited before actually interact.

Porta Maggiore, one of our first stops

Throughout this walk, I relied heavily upon my CGM.  Thank goodness for this technology!!  Those of us with lazy pancreases (pancrei?) not only have to worry about too high of blood sugar, but also the fact that our bodies can't stop us from going too low.  A walk of this caliber, without the proper preparations, has disaster written all over it!

Part of the walls on the east side of the city

Basically, I kept a careful eye on my sensor graph, checking it at least every 15 minutes or so.  This way I could see if I was holding steady or trending down.  As you can imagine, there was a lot of trending down.  I knew that even if the exact number showing on my pump wasn't correct that at least my graph would give me a good sense of where I was headed.  Whenever I started to trend down (and my number NEVER showed more than 130 or so), I would eat a snack or throw back a few glucose tablets.

Piazza del Popolo, strangely devoid of too many popoli (joke courtesy of Aleta)

One of the hardest parts of the trip, physically, was the hike up the Janiculum hill.  This picture doesn't quite do the incline justice:

Since I knew it was coming, I drank the juice box about 20 minutes before we hit this hill.  Juice boxes in Italy probably should go by a different name, since the liquid is much more like nectar than juice.  So, I drank about 24 grams of carbohydrates to prepare me for this hill.

And then there are the downhills:

The posse of undergrads along for the hike.

The hills of Rome are much like the ups and downs of my CGM graph that day.  I'd head down, and then treat before a low hit and then I'd go back up.  Just like the hike.  Up and down.  Down and up.

I probably should have been more responsible with actual testing.  I only did so about three times during the hike, mainly because I knew that number would only be a single, brief moment, sure to go down again quickly because of the walk.  

At the end of the exhausting and hot day, I was really pleased with how well Nick and I had planned for the day.  I wasn't so pleased with how my hips and feet were feeling, but that's another story.  At the end of the 13 miles, our leader bought us all a soda for our troubles.  For some reason, I did not take advantage of the moment and drink a full sugar Fanta, opting instead for the Sprite Zero.

After another 30 minutes of travel (after resting, of course), we climbed the hill back up to our apartment.  Because diabetes is what it is, I did go low shortly after getting home, but that was much better than going low while out and about.  I kept a careful eye on things the rest of the night, not correcting before bedtime.  I didn't want any overnight lows sneaking up on me.

And that is the story about how this D-Queen survived a hike around the walls of Rome.  It was a long and tiring day, but such a unique opportunity and way to see the city.  I'm so glad we did it!