First Snowshoe of 2026!

Today, my partner and I went for our first snowshoe of the season! We went out to Kamview and ended up doing about 2kms (basically the Roadway Ramble there and back by snowshoe) in about 50 minutes (that's a good thing to note: we were able to do roughly a km every 25 minutes). That was more than enough for me for today - my hips were getting sore (that often happens to me yearly as I get used to snowshoeing again), plus I was having glucose issues; it ended up good that we went back to the chalet because I would have gone really low if we had stayed out any longer (plus I was still pretty full and didn't want to eat anything more).

In terms of glucose strategy, I couldn't remember what I tried last year, so I went with 75% basals (I set up a new pump profile for snowshoeing to accommodate this) and tried doing 75% of the bolus with my meal. I looked at the old strategies I had noted for myself here, plus went looking at what Getting Pumped by Michael Riddell recommended, and ended up with that strategy to try. I haven't been super active over the last few months, so I knew that would complicate things for myself, too (your body reacts differently to insulin and exercise depending on how active you are). I ate a meal, swapped to the snowshoe 75% basal profile, and put my pump into exercise mode at 12:25pm, and we started the snowshoe at 2:33pm (approximately 2 hours later). My glucose started out at 13.6 mmol/L, and was already down to 12.6 mmol/L after about 400 m of snowshoeing. After the full 2 km, it was down to 6 mmol/L and dropping. By the time we got our snowshoes off and were into the chalet, it was still dropping (was down to about 5.2 mmol/L). This was the point where I had a bit of pop, plus a hot chocolate (note to self: don't forget to bring a Gatorade!!! That would have been helpful on the trail when my glucose started dropping but I wasn't hungry!!!)

We're going to try going out again next weekend, attempting the same route. So based off what was happening, I'm thinking I need to do a smaller carb bolus with my meal two hours before exercise. The way everything dropped so quickly, and the fact that this was still within the roughly 4 hour window where a bolus is active (actually at the peak of where a bolus is active), I think that was the problem; I'm going to try a 65% bolus next time. I'm going to leave the basal pattern I set up for now - I think those would have come into play more if we had been out longer.

I also want to note that I couldn't come up with a good way to reduce the carb ratio in my new Snowshoe profile, so I did the reduction manually (I basically was doing all this right before eating at 12:25pm). If I can figure out a good way to reduce them in the profile I will (and I'll make a note of how I did it here on this blog). If not, I'll continue doing it manually (basically letting the pump make the calculations, but multiplying the recommended bolus by, in this case, 0.75 and putting that number in instead).