Today I went cross country skiing for the first time this season! It felt really good to get out, plus it was beautiful: there was fresh snow on all the evergreen trees. :)
We were on the trails for 37 minutes, and we think we skied a little over 2 km (somewhere in the 2-2.5 km range). I was glad that was all we did - my heart was pounding and I was having a bit of a hard time getting enough air in my lungs at the very end. It might not have been far, but it was a good distance to ski for the first time. :)
In terms of glucose, I used an old exercise profile I've had on my pump for a year or two. I started backing the basals off around 5pm and intended to eat dinner by 5:30pm, but didn't actually get supper finished until 6pm, which ended up delaying our ski start a bit to give my glucose more time to sort itself out. We were out skiing a little after 8pm, and my glucose was up a little over 16 mmol/L (I can't remember if it was 16.2 at the start or 16.7). When I started checking my glucose (at around 500 m of skiing or one quarter of the total distance), I was already down a full mmol/L and Dexcom was showing a slight down arrow. This was around the time I realized I had forgotten to turn on my pump's exercise mode.
My glucose continued to drop from there. It was down to around 12 or 13 at the halfway mark (now with two down arrows); I finished the ski at 6.7, still dropping. I had a little regular Gatorade at this time, and my glucose stabilized. Luckily I never went low. But unfortunately I would not have been able to go any farther had I wanted to tonight.
So the next time I go out, I'd like to attempt the same ski, but this time with the exercise mode on to see if that makes a difference. If not I'll fiddle with the numbers I've got in my exercise profile (or build a new one specifically for skiing).
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