Yes I understand what you are saying.
Replace any basal you missed over on hour.
If you drop a lot, go back to your normal basal when you finish and replace at that amount.
If you don’t drop much, go back to 120% and replace at the 120% amount.
Since you’ve been fighting high BG, take an aggressive post swim bolus. And be ready to follow with carbs later.
i have waited almost 40 min since i cut off my basal. the 0% tb is finished. my bg is 164 (give or take in either direction ) so i am going to walk over to the pool w/ candy bar in hand 
.
please wish me luck. i am nervous about this experiement, but i am certain that this situation will come up again sometime, so its a good experiemnt for me to look back on for future times.
here i go. ugh. eegads.
Don’t worry. Hopefully this will help your BG drop back to normal today!
You’ll do GREAT! But just in case I’m keeping xed fingers for you:-)
so i am home now with a bit of an ego deflation. i was only able to swim comfortably for 1/2 hour. ugh. 
EXPERIMENT #7 :
first off, for those of you that are following this thread of mine (and all other athletes trying to manage their bgs while exercising) yesterday and today was a bit of a high bg mess.
yesterday in the early afternoon my bgs shot up from 74 to 226. i thought that it might have been something i forgot to bolus for or did not bolus enough for, so, i gave myself a correction bolus and waited. nothing. not even a budge towards my target range. so i tried again. nothing. so i gave myself a manual shot, which worked w/in the 1/2 hour. brought me right back into target range and i was able to eat dinner, believing that all was solved.
now at least i knew that my insulin was fresh and working. since i had just the day before rotated and changed my pump, i didnt consider changing it out as besides that afternoon, my bgs with this pump set were great.
overnight, however, i woke up at 5am and my bg was 210. so i changed my pump site and gave myself a correction and went back to sleep. but my sugars wouldnt budge. so, i put myself on a 120% temp basal and hoped that my sugars would come down.
i REALLY wanted to swim today. (i didnt swim all w/end & mondays are generally my favorite swim days). so, at 1pm, my bg was down to 163 and i shut off my pump for 1/2 hour and walked to the pool. i knew that i had a lot of IOB b/c of the elevated temp basal but i figured that loaded up with candy, i would be safe if any lows presented themselves.
2:20pm (pre-swim) bg 160
2:50pm (post-swim) bg 100 (only a half hour later of jumping into the pool)
instead of taking some candy, i decided to give it quits for the day. i felt frustrated and angry and filled with D resentment. when you are not D these are things that you never have to think about.
my swim sucked. i didnt find any relief. but this was a learning experiement, and i should feel happy about that. (but i dont)
i dont know if i will have to do another temp basal of 120% yet. now that my bgs are in target range, i suppose i will have to wait a while and re-test.
i will keep everyone posted. i feel desperate for some cheers and adulations
(eric, IYHO, what are some suggestions you could make to cheer me up and help me out the next time something like this happens???)
Daisy mae, I am sorry you feel low (psychologically, not BG) 
My son and I experiment all the time, and we are familiar with the feeling of seeing a failed experiment or situation: with D it happens all the time! But because we fail so often, we are not bothered by it 
Your high on Sunday afternoon reminds me very much of my son’s situation. When he stops swimming, his basal needs go up sharply about 48 hours later. Essentially, the basal lowering effect of exercises lasts about 36 to 48 hours for him for strenuous exercise. This may be contributing to your high yesterday? [quote=“daisymae, post:325, topic:894”]
2:20pm (pre-swim) bg 160
2:50pm (post-swim) bg 100 (only a half hour later of jumping into the pool)
[/quote]
I know for you that is unusual. But my son is on MDI. This is the effect he gets every practice every 20 minutes. He just takes sugar and goes back out. He goes down about 60-70 units every 20 minutes. So for us this would be very normal. I am guessing this is because you had IOB? I would not worry or let it stop me, btw.
Sorry you felt bad about this event:( Both effects you saw are normal to us, so I think that you would get accustomed to that quickly! Wishing you the best for tomorrow!
I few things come to mind!
First off, everyone has bad days, even the non-D’s. And if our bad days are things we can try to figure out and fix with a bit more insulin or a bit less insulin, or a little extra piece of candy, so much the better for us.
All that trouble bringing down your BG, but look what 30 minutes of swimming did! That’s the wonderful thing about exercise. Don’t lose sight of that! That’s why you do it.
Also, this is just another good example of why you need to reduce your basal before your swim. So it just emphasizes that.
If you are sure you are not sick, a lot of what you are seeing today and from the weekend could be a result of having taken a few days off. You didn’t swim over the weekend, and you took a day off last week too, right?
So when you get back into it, this should fix itself.
Keep an eye on your BG tonight. Run your 120% until you see yourself start to trend down. At night, decide if you want to stay with 120% or go back to normal, based on what you see the next few hours.
Live to swim another day!
yes, i am trying to look at the glass as 1/2 full. its the perfectionist in me that wants perfect results. looking back, i regret not having taken some candy and getting back into the pool for at least another 1/2 hour. so i am basically still feeling 1/2 empty. its a visceral disappointment. and i am indulging in a little too much self-pity.
my husband is trying to cheer me up by congratulating me on going out there and giving it a try (in the face of adversity) another challenge. and, as you said : live to swim another day. i cannot go tomorrow, but you best believe that wednesday i will do a good 2 hour swim. (so i am fueling up)
and, btw, i am holding off on the 120% tb until i see what post dinner brings me. my pre-dinner bg was 106. (but that is also 2.5 hours post swim) maybe i will get lucky and not need it anymore due to swimming myself out of the insulin resistance. i hope. if not, i will just raise the tb to 120%. no biggy.
thanks to you and michel, i am feeling better. what is a “normal” day in the life of a D? (perhaps that should be a thread of its own 
)
Any exercise is helpful. Walk when you can, take the stairs instead of the elevator, park as far as you can from the store’s door.
tomorrow i will be going into the city by subway, so i will briskly walk from my home to the train, climb down the steps to the track, walk back upstairs at my station stop, and walk briskly to the doctor. then i will do it all in reverse. beats sitting at home like a couch potato 
thx for everything. i swear, i dont know where i’d be without this site. it is beyond a life-saver. it is supportive, educational, challenging, faith-giving, hopeful. if you’d have told me last year that i would be able to swim for 2 hours at a time, i would have told you that you were crazy. the quality of my life has been increasingly improved. my goal: no limits. i just need to remain teachable.
That’s THIS SITE!!!
awesome
tomorrow will be experiment #7 and i have some preemptive questions. i have been on a TB of 120% and it is covering my bgs just right. (pre-dinner bg of 105) i am wondering about turning off my basal for the 2 hours pre-swim. should i, IYHO, turn it all the way off to 0%, or should i just put it down to 20% b/c of my increased need for the extra boost of insulin i have been needing?
i am up to the challenge. i will bring candy with me, and i will eat it if needed. i want to have a really good swim tomorrow. i am pumped up and psyched.
just want to know your thoughts about this. its all new territory for me.
looking fwd to hearing back from you !!!
I know you are comfortable starting a little bit higher, and you drop quite a bit with just a little IOB - so maybe being on the safer side would mean cutting it down to 0%, and swimming hard for two hours.
Maybe the best thing would be to wait until tomorrow and see how you are doing after breakfast, and see if you are leveling off like you want, or climbing rapidly.
If it looks like you are going to spike a lot in two hours, take a little of that missed basal up front, and then cut it off. If it looks like you will climb a lot, take 20-40% of an hour’s worth of basal, take it two hours before you swim, and then turn it off to 0% for two hours. What that does is keep you from spiking quite as high, but still lets the basal insulin flush out for two hours. Does that make sense?
So for example, if you are still at 120% basal in the morning, I think you would be at 0.75 units per hour. Let’s say you want to swim at 1:00pm. At 11:00am, you would take 0.15-0.30 units, and then turn it off to 0% for two hours and hit the pool at 1:00pm. Make sense?
i think i understand. so basically i would have a little bit of IOB during my swim, but only from a bolus—nothing to do with insulin from my basal rate.
i usually swim at around 1:45 until around 4pm (for a nice long swim; at least for me it seems long). so, at 11:30ish, i cut my basal down to 0% for 2 hours. i test on the hour, then wait another 30 minutes, test, then another 15 minutes, test again…basically to track my BGs direction and rate of climb. then i test before i stick a toe into the pool and every 1/2 hour after that.
(basically this is the way that you have taught me to do it, if i am understanding correctly)
post swim, i test right away, and depending on both the length of time of my swim (when i am detached from my pump) and how high or how low my bg is, i give myself a manual bolus to keep from spiking; my “replacement” bolus for all of the time that i have had no basal on board.
does this make sense to you? am i understanding correctly?
i just re-read your post and i am a bit confused. i know that you have majored in rocket science and nuclear physics, but i am just a humble D who wants to learn how to swim w/out sinking .
Ok, let me start with just a basic background of what we want to accomplish.
You know basal trickles out very slowly on a pump. For your basal during the 9:00 pm hour, you get some of it at 9pm, and a little bit more each few minutes. You also get some at 9:55 pm!
So the little bits you got at 9:00pm would run out earlier than the little bits you got at 9:55pm, right?
You want your basal and any insulin in your body to be almost zero when you swim. But if you just cut to 0%, you might go a little higher than you want (maybe you are sick, or just need more basal right now).
So you will still cut to 0%, but you will take a small bit of that insulin two hours before (at the same time you turn your basal off to 0%).
This keeps you from spiking as high, but still allows the insulin to flush out for two hours before swimming.
So…IF you are still spiking and feel like your insulin needs are higher on Wednesday, suppose you want to swim at 1:45pm
At 11:45am, you take a little insulin (0.15 - 0.30 units) and cut basal off, 0% for two hours. Then swim at 1:45pm.
The little bit of insulin you took is mostly gone by 1:45pm. You still have 2 hours of 0% basal. But the little bit of insulin you took hopefully keeps you from spiking as high.
Does that make sense? If not, lemme know, and I can try to explain better!
ok, so that makes complete sense now. thx. i will plan to try this tomorrow based upon how my overnight bgs are and my morning before and after bfast goes. if i still need to be on the increased basal of 120%, i will follow this suggestion. if i no longer need the TB, and i am back down to 100% basal, i will simply follow your previous suggestion of turning off my pump for the 2 hours before i swim.
also, on another note, that explains to me why taking a manual shot of insulin will have a more immediate effect than giving my self insulin through my pump. if i need to do a serious correction, the shot works very quickly compared to the bolus through the pump. am i right in understanding you this way? i know that this is not on point at the moment, but you bring up an important issue for me.
The bolus from a pump is different than basal. Basal trickles out, but a bolus is all at once. An injection from a syringe takes a few seconds, while a pump bolus may take a few minutes. So a syringe injection doesn’t save you too much time, maybe a minute or two.
A bigger factor might be a deeper injection from the syringe and a fresh location, one that hasn’t had insulin being spit into it for several days!
gotcha.