One more Sunday up bright and early, missing most of the final day of the Tour de France to join the shop ride over at our usual Virginia Beach retailer. I arrived on site with enough time to give a Team Type 1 water bottle and set of team cards a good home with Matt-with-two-"t's", the type 1 rider who wore his 2011 Tour de Cure fundraising jersey last Sunday. It's always good to find swag a good home... and then there was also the surprised-and-very-happy look on Matt's face when I delivered the goods. Then again, several of the regulars thought we were heading home Sunday, rather than today -- so the surprise may have been as much that of me showing up, ready to ride, than anything else.

Making it to the ride was a bit of an effort, having spent a restless night after the previous evening's dinner-dance (more like an "everybody-let's-get-drunk-and-stand-around-eating-unhealthy-canapés" event). Since The Other Half doesn't dance, my time on the dance floor was limited to a couple of hustles that can be done solo, limited to times when there were multiple lone females up there, dancing. I'm surprised I was as achey as I was after only two dances. To top it off, my blood pressure was very high Sunday morning, which is not a great thing in advance of strenuous exercise. But I woke to a happy blood glucose level of 99 mg/dl, had promised to deliver the swag, and needed to get in some exercise before our long drive north. Not to mention, it was early enough that we should not have had too much of an issue with the past week's extreme heat.

Once again I had a PowerBar en route to the meet-up point; its 240 calories would be enough to power the ride. I did some rethinking on my water bottles, with the idea of keeping more of my fluid cool for a greater portion of the ride: I had a bottle of solid ice up front, expecting it to melt quickly, and I filled the second bottle with ice cubes before adding water and electrolyte fluid and enclosing it in a CamelBak thermal sleeve, expecting that to be my return hydration. The re-rigging worked well.

Unsurprisingly, I was "tail-end Charlotte" for much of the ride, though I did have a few moments of conversation with some of the other riders. During one of these, I learned that the father of one of the regulars has type 1 diabetes and lives in South Africa.

At the half-way point, about an hour and a quarter after I had consumed the PowerBar (and a half-liter of water to chase it), my blood glucose level was up at 168 mg/dl. This is a much higher number than I like -- but not an excessively surprising one based on the amount of time since I'd eaten and the intensity of the ride. One thing disturbed me about that check was the warmth of my glucometer pouch and its contents, as the weather was already hot enough to have affected a couple of our riders...

Once we started rolling again, the implied wind and the shade of the trees in First Landing Park were a delightful cool-off which lasted the three or four miles back to our entry point; from there, though, it was unshaded sunlight the rest of the way to the shop.

I arrived back measuring a rolling average speed of 14 miles an hour -- considerably faster than my usual "pushing it" pace, a blood glucose level of 112 mg/dl, and the sort of headache that suggests I might actually be a lot lower than what the glucometer reads (a single glucose tab eases it). Meanwhile, even after the slighly-over 1.5 liters of fluid I'd consumed, I was feeling dehydrated enough to gulp down another half-liter of water on the way home. A nice, well-deserved shower later and I was down to 85 mg/dl and feeling it... but brunch was still cooking. By the time food was ready, I was dealing with a killer headache. Not a good recipe for healthy eating -- I devoured at least twice the number of calories I burned on that morning ride.

All that said, this current heat wave has me thinking about keeping those blood glucose test strips both available and safe. While most of our glucometers will operate between 40F and 110F, their test strips tell us not to store them above 85F. That bodes ill for any of us who need to take our glucometers with us on cycling trips, to the beach, or even to an outdoor game of half-court basketball. I wonder if the pharmaceutical companies have considered developing cold- and heat-resistant strips, as well as a greater operating range of temperatures for the glucometers. Let's face it: UPS and FedEx trucks aren't air-conditioned, nor does everyone have air-conditioning in their homes. (And that's not even counting heating and cooling issues in third-world countries.) On a ride like Sunday's, they would have been greatly appreciated.