2024 marks me living with Type 1 Diabetes for 25 years. I wanted to set myself a challenge to mark the occasion and what harder challenge is there than to run 26.2 miles for someone that hates running whilst raising money for an incredible charity!

The last 25 years haven’t been easy and I often don’t talk about the harsh realities of living with type 1 diabetes. Most people probably just see me check my sugars and inject then when my sugars are low sit and eat fruit pastels. However, this is just the surface to what I do on a daily basis to try and manage this condition.

The truth is managing the condition is 24/7, from working out carb to insulin ratios to eating the right amount of hypo treatment and times to inject. There are over 42 things that can affect your blood sugars so trying to keep them in range isn’t an easy task! Anything from exercise, illness, weather, sunburn, alcohol, dehydration, hormones, anxiety and stress are just some of the things!

On average I make 180 extra decisions a day compared to someone without diabetes and inject on average 2,200 times per year. Some days I smash all the calculations and everything goes right and I end up 90-100% in range other days it is a battle that I never win! Diabetes is a condition where you can eat and do the same thing 2 days in a row and end up with completely different results!

Living with type 1 is emotionally, mentally and physically exhausting from all the calculations, the nights where my phone has woken me up 5 times in the night as my sugars are out of range, a bad hypo that has seen me on the floor feeling nausea but still having to force myself to eat or the times where actually I can’t carry out my plans as my sugars aren’t where they need to be in order to be able to drive or exercise!

Charities like Diabetes UK campaign and carry out research for new technology to try and make living with diabetes slightly easier and minimize the long-term complications (and hopefully one day in my lifetime they will find a cure)!

Not only is training for a marathon going to be hard, but throwing T1D into the mix and trying to manage my blood sugars along the way is going to be a challenge!

No matter how big or small the donation is, it will be greatly received by myself and Diabetes UK!