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Inspirational Lives
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By John McIntosh
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Diabetes Focus Second Quarter 2006
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50-Mile Miracle
Ultra-distance runner Missy Foy
has type 1 diabetes
Clearly, she’s one tough cookie. We have her story—and
her cookie recipe too!
There are Olympic athletes and then there are Olympic
ultra-athletes. Meet Missy Foy. In 2000, she was the first person with
diabetes to qualify for the U.S. Olympic marathon trials. She competes
in marathons (26.2 mile), and 50-mile and 100-kilometer (62.5 mile) ultramarathons.
By 2005, she was ranked ninth in the country among ultramarathoners,
after winning the Umstead (NC) Endurance Run 50 miler in 7:15:06 . She
broke the course record by about 20 minutes.
“My coach claims I
have two speeds,” says Missy. “Stop
and go.”
At a little over 5' 6" and around 110 pounds, 41-year-old Missy is
hitting her stride in an endurance sport that few of us can fathom—and
she does it while taking her diabetes for a ride, too. Diagnosed with type
1 diabetes 10 years ago, she not only overcomes her obstacles; she runs
around, over and through them. Now, at the top of an elite field of athletes,
she’s poised to write even more history as the 2006 running season
unfolds.
Off Track?
Missy was diagnosed not long after she
had started to run competitively: “In
fact, the week I was diagnosed I was supposed to go to the Half Marathon
National Championships,” she says.
What happened after that? “I
was told by a number of people that I was going to have to give up running
professionally. Someone who worked with diabetic athletes said, ‘Qualifying
for Olympic trials is not an easy task, and when you have a chronic illness
like diabetes, I think it’s not possible. If it were possible,
it would have already been done.’
This was just the beginning
of the challenges Missy would have to overcome in order to become a competitive
athlete with diabetes. “At the
time I was trying to line up sponsorships and I had a major sponsor tell
me, ‘Our mission right now doesn’t currently involve sponsoring
disabled athletes.’ Can you believe it?”
The nay-saying people
and institutions soon found out that they couldn’t
stop Missy. She learned about how to be an athlete on insulin, picked
up another sponsor and then had the good fortune to meet Norm Ogilvy,
a track coach at Duke University who also happened to be the brother-in-law
of renowned marathoner Joan Benoit Samuelson. “He thought that
I had some talent and suggested that he could coach me a little if I
was interested, so I said, ‘Well, okay,’” she recalls. “After
a couple of years Norm got busy as head coach at Duke, so he referred
me to a coach named Jim Husk and it turned out to be a perfect match.”
As Missy became stronger and faster, she and Jim—with just a fair
amount of help from her husband Bob Foy, an anesthetist at Duke University
Medical Center—micromanaged every step she took. “Usually I
get in about ninety to a hundred miles a week,” Missy says. “Most
days I do doubles, where I run in the morning and in the afternoon. On
Saturday and Sunday it’ll usually be one run per day. Tuesdays and
Thursdays are called ‘workout days,’ where instead of just
going out and running, I get on a track, which I abhor. But my coach says
the track doesn’t lie.” Jim usually schedules her training
in three-week cycles; at the end of the third week Missy usually does two-and-a-half
to four hours of running—23 to 36 miles.
Running With Insulin
“For my daily diabetes management,
I use an insulin pump in addition to Lantus,” Missy says. “Around
4:30 in the morning I have the pump give me an extra unit of Humalog so
that if I sleep late, I wake up with a normal blood sugar.
I also use the
pump so that I don’t have to worry about pulling
out needles to give myself a shot during workouts. The pump will give
me as little as a tenth of a unit, that kind of thing. I look at the
pump as an addition to my regimen. It gives me an extra choice on how
to do things. My coach and I do a lot of checking as far as how my blood
sugar responds to different paces, different distances, different times
of day, so that during a race I’m not having to check. We’ve
already figured out what I need.
“We try to think of everything.
I disconnect from my pump whenever I race. At the level that I’m
racing, every little advantage counts. As an example, I missed making
a world team by two seconds in a marathon. So I don’t have time
to check my blood sugar while I’m running,
to fool with an insulin pump, to have anything extra on my body that’s
going to annoy me. I give myself a shot of regular insulin—regular
seems to last just about the right amount of time—just before a race.
Also, I have these special chocolate chip cookies [see recipe], and I’ll
usually eat two or three of those. I’m already fairly insulin-resistant
in the morning and so it doesn’t take a whole lot of loading up on
carbohydrates for me. And my coach tells me all the time that I have the
biggest tank of gas of anybody he knows. Ever since about a year after
I was diagnosed, I’d say my A1Cs have ranged from somewhere between
5.8 and 6.3.”
Speed Bumps
Along the road, Missy has had a few setbacks: “I
twisted my ankle ten weeks before Olympic trials,” she notes. “But
when I went to sports medicine doctors, they told me that, for the most
part, running on it was not going to make it worse. They designed an inflatable
pressure bandage for me. I still got 100-mile weeks in. Two weeks before
trials it finally felt back to 100 percent.
“I went to the Olympic
trials, but the night before I was told that I wasn’t going to
be allowed to run because I was taking insulin. What had happened was
they had decided in the weeks before that they were putting insulin on
the ‘controlled substance’ list and I had
not filled out the appropriate paperwork. Nobody ever told me this. And
so that night the race staff called in a physician to come in and do a
physical and rewrite all my prescriptions in his name and fill out the
paperwork and fax it to the U.S. Olympic Committee so that I could run
the next day.”
Big—Then Bigger—Dreams
While Missy, a
medical research associate at the Durham VA Medical Center, trains for
the 2006 race schedule, she is also finishing her doctoral dissertation
at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro;
teaching; and making speaking engagements and visits to children’s
diabetes camps. “Children with diabetes and their parents are told
so many things that are so wrong,” she says. “They need to
know that they are capable of doing anything regardless of having diabetes.
So whenever I go to the kids’ diabetes camps, I want all of them
to know that you can still move forward and dream big. Dream big, then
dream bigger!”
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