Jordan Laiche

Note: Beta Cell is an audio podcast and includes emotion that is not reflected in text. Transcripts are generated by human transcribers and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting.

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Craig: This is Beta Cell, a show about people living with type 1 diabetes. I'm Craig Stubing.

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Craig: When you're first diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, exercise is scary. The biggest reason, of course, is that you're worried you'll pass out from a low blood sugar in the middle of a run, bike ride or workout. Once you're comfortable carrying a half-dozen bags of fruit snacks in your shorts, you now have more mental capacity for other worries that your blood sugar will make you stop early, that you'll sweat off your pump or CGM, that your blood sugar will go high when you finish, that you'll go low at night, and on and on.

A few years after I started running, despite all these fears before, during, and after my runs, I found that it was actually while I was running that I ended up thinking about diabetes the least. The runner's high were placed carrying about my blood sugar highest. I was living in the joy of running and not worrying about my blood sugars at all. This shift has happened to a lot of people with type 1 diabetes that I've met and Jordan is no different.

Since he was diagnosed with type 1 at 17 years old, he's kept pushing himself more and more. Not because of diabetes, but because he wants to see how far he can go despite diabetes. He's doing things he loves doing and not letting the fears that come with exercising with type 1 get in his way.

Jordan: I had stopped playing hockey and then I started again my senior year after I got diagnosed. My diagnosis actually kind of brought me back into it if I'm honest.

Craig: Into hockey?

Jordan: Yes. I actually played for University of New Mexico. Out here, we have a team at the school. It's not really known about, but it's pretty cool though to be able to say I played at the college level.

Craig: Why do you think your diagnosis brought you back to that?

Jordan: I had thought to myself that I had to motivate myself to get better blood sugars. The only way to do that would be to put myself in a situation where my performance was based off of my numbers. I figured if I went and played hockey competitively, I'd be motivated myself to control my blood sugars better based on the fact that better control would make me a better hockey player and that I couldn't play hockey if I was out of control.

Craig: You almost found sports to get control of diabetes?

Jordan: Yes. That's originally why I went back, but then I found it was a lot harder because with hockey, the adrenaline just makes your sugars go up to like 400 at game time. It was like I was even more out of control then than I was before.

Craig: Pretty new to the disease to start doing something so crazy really as hockey.

Jordan: Because I was 17. Before I turned 18, I was like, "It's my responsibility," so I need to figure stuff out. I think two weeks or three weeks after being diagnosed, my uncle was driving to Florida. I actually hopped in the car with him and just drove and test myself but get away from my comfort zone and just realized he just jumped into doing all the things right away.

You can really worry about it. That was my mentality from the start. It's like, "I'm going to do this." Even cycling. I was in the hospital maybe eight hours before I knew about Team Type 1. Now, Team Novo Nordisk. They were called Team Type 1 at the time. One of my uncles had been following them, heard about them at a race, and sent my dad their website. I think, right away, I had that mentality of like, "Yes, let's do this."

Craig: Within that eight hours, you didn't ever felt like type 1 was going to hold you back?

Jordan: Yes. I never had that moment. It wasn't really until this Bike Beyond trip that I realized how many people are told that they're going to be limited. I was right away like, "This is my goal to get on this team." I had motivation like that same day I was in there. I was like, "Cool, let's get after it."

Craig: Did you ever get pushed back from doctors or family members or anyone like that, that maybe you shouldn't do something so crazy? A little bit of exercise is okay. Go for a walk for 30 minutes, but maybe don't bike across the country?

Jordan: No. I think [chuckles] I'll like to say that part of the reason I think that I can is because I was never told I can't. I think I could do anything. No one's ever told me like, "You can't do something."

Craig: The longer you've had type 1, do you think you do crazier and crazier things because, I don't know, you're just chasing the next biggest thrill?

Jordan: Unfortunately, yes. [chuckles] I have really mixed feelings about the whole Bike Beyond experience, but one thing that it's left me with is this craving for something more. I have a list of things right now that I want to do. That's kind of my next big project. It's just doing these crazy things. One thing I want to do now is ride across the country unsupported in half the time that we did it, so I want to do it in 35 days unsupported because I felt like it was too easy. I really like that point of failure. I want to find that point. It's weird. If I can do it, I feel like it's easy. If I can't do it, if I fail, then I'm motivated to do it.

Craig: You want the challenge?

Jordan: Yes. I feel like saying I ride across the country, I almost have an asterisk next to it. Coming as a cyclist before, it was easier for me. It wasn't hard, right? We hit the Mallens and I'm having fun. There wasn't a suffering.

Craig: You like the suffering?

Jordan: Yes.

Craig: You're just a masochist.

Jordan: [chuckles] When it comes to bike riding, I am. I think that's what I crave now is more challenges like that. I love to do some crazy hiking challenges. I like to do a lot more physical challenges and mental challenges. I can tell you my future list. I can cover a few things on there. I started going to a ninja gym like American Ninja Warrior and I competed and just got destroyed. It was awesome.

Now, I'm motivated to actually be competitive at that, so I want to keep working towards that. I want to do the Navy SEAL PT test at optimal standards, but I want to do that because it's like we're not allowed to go into the navy, right? That's something that I've been told I can't do. I just want to complete that, just say I can do it and say that I'm still physically able to do the standards even though we're not allowed to serve.

Craig: It's the type 1 that's stopping you from doing it, not yourself.

Jordan: Right. Yes, I really want to just prove that. Someone told me I should do the Barkley Marathons. It's 100-mile hike through Tennessee.

Craig: Often times, there's no finishers.

Jordan: Yes. There's only 18 people that have finished. I'd like to do that and be the first type 1 finisher. I'll probably do a marathon in the next couple of years. There's just a lot on my list.

Craig: When you were in college, how was being on a collegiate team with type 1? What kind of feedback or relationship did you have with your coaches and your trainers? Were they concerned?

Jordan: Not really. Not even everyone on the team knew I had type 1. I didn't bring it up.

Craig: Intentionally?

Jordan: Not really. I told the coach. I was like, "Yo," like if I'm ever just leaving an exercise to drink a juice box, that's why.

Craig: Did it ever become an issue while you were playing? Did you ever go low and have to leave a game or anything like that?

Jordan: No. Like I said, the adrenaline makes you so high. There's very few times I went low. I always had a Gatorade on the ice because, actually, it's really hard to manage during a game. Because at that level, I never knew how much playing time I was going to get, like how much I was going to be in the game.

I also didn't know the skill level or the intensity of the game of the opponent we were playing always. One week could be a really hard game. You get a lot of playing time. My adrenaline could go up. All the playing time could bounce that out. Another game, I could have no adrenaline because we would whoop it up on them. There's just a lot of difference, but it never really got in the way.

Craig: Did you ever feel like going high from the adrenaline impacted your performance?

Jordan: Definitely. There are times I remember my vision getting blurry because I was in the 400s and I was like, "Shit, I can't see out here." At the same time, it's going so fast that everything is like a blur anyway. That doesn't really affect you too much. Hockey is a really fast-based game, so you're only really looking at big shapes most of the time. You're not looking at details, right? Like if someone is coming at you, you're not really looking at the threading on their jersey. You just see the body coming at you and you know like, "Hey, I should probably move or I'm going to get hit."

Craig: How much time do you think when you're not on the ice you were thinking about the game and how much were you thinking about your blood sugar?

Jordan: Earlier, I mentioned the reason that I first wanted to go into hockey was to get my blood sugars better. The reason I kept playing was because when I got on the ice, I forgot about it. That's what I love about cycling and about hockey because that when I get on that zone, then nothing else matters. When I step on the ice for a game, nothing matters like, "Do I have homework tonight?" That doesn't matter. Your personal relationships, they don't matter. You leave all that behind. For me, I left diabetes behind too. I said like, "I'm out here to play hockey and that's it." That mental clarity is just like my therapy.

Craig: The irony almost is that the time when your blood sugars would fluctuate the most and you would be at the most at risk is when you're doing something like long-distance biking, playing a sport, something like that. It's like when in theory, you think that you should be paying the most attention to it is the only time that you can really forget about it.

Jordan: Yes. You have to practice into that because you have to be prepared for it if you're going to forget about it. With cycling and hockey, if I'm out of practice or whatever, I learn, what are my blood sugars going to do? That way, I just have my plan in place. As long as it's calculated right and I don't think about it, the end result is fine.

Craig: How much of your training do you think was not necessarily physical training for all these things you do, but really just training your body and train your mind to know how to manage your blood sugars without having to really think about it?

Jordan: 100%. I would say 100%. A common thing people say to the Bike Beyond team is that they could never do it. They're like, "I can't ride a bike one mile. How did you arrive 4,000?" It's all mental. It's 100% mental. If you think you can do it like you didn't do it, you just get on a bike and you paddle and you paddle and you paddle and then you're done. That's all it is.

You think it'd be a physical challenge, but it's really not. We weren't racing. You just got on a bike and you rode. I think a lot of people think that it is this big physical challenge. If you're given all day to ride 70 miles, you could do it. It's going to be hard at first. Once you get past that mental block, you can do it.

Craig: You perform how you train and that's mental as well as physical.

Jordan: Yes. I had a hard time during the first week of Bike Beyond because my training was actually more intense here. One, because I was at a higher elevation, but two, I was pushing myself a lot harder, going a lot faster, trying to get in shape. The first week, we're doing these easy rides through cities. We're stopping a lot that I was actually really high because I was doing my same maintenance that I had practice with, but I wasn't working as hard. You have to learn it and plan it, but sometimes the situations aren't the same.

Craig: You're in a pump? I think you said--

Jordan: Yes.

Craig: Are you on a CGM as well?

Jordan: No. I'm the only rider that didn't wear a CGM during the summer on the Bike Beyond team.

Craig: Have you ever heard of CGM?

Jordan: Yes. I wore the Dexcom G4 for about a month, two months, didn't like it.

Craig: Can I ask what you didn't like about it?

Jordan: [chuckles] Yes. I've had this conversation a lot because most people who have a Dexcom, they love it. I really, really just have this grudge against CGMs and CGM technology because I found that having the numbers, it's not good mentally. It made me think about it too much. I was too into it. I think that having the numbers and constantly looking at them actually made diabetes too much of my life that I wasn't comfortable with.

I stopped paying attention to how my body felt. I think that since I got off of it, like the value of how much I pay attention to my body has just increased exponentially like I'm way more aware of how I'm feeling and where I'm at just based off really weird symptoms and intuitions that I have.

Craig: What was it like on Bike Beyond being the only person without a CGM? Did everyone think you were crazy?

Jordan: Everyone just wanted to know why I hated Dexcom so much. One thing that was really cool is after a few weeks of riding, I realized that it was an opportunity if everyone was riding it on a Dexcom and everyone had pumps or whatever, everyone had the best technology, then what do I say to those kids, those people who are watching it who can't afford it? I realized that it was an opportunity for me to share this message that there's no excuses, right?

That's my big thing. Type 1 diabetes is not an excuse. It should not limit you in any way. If we all say, "Yes. We rode across the country and we all had CGMs," what if someone who doesn't have a CGM say, "They can use that as an excuse," right? I found myself a couple of weeks into the ride going like, "Now, anyone who doesn't have access to this technology doesn't have a reason to not follow their dreams as well," right? I did this whole ride without one. You don't have to have the best technology to live your life.

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Craig: Beta Cell is produced, recorded, and edited by me, Craig Stubing. Our theme music is by Purple Glitter. If you love listening to Beta Cell and are curious how you can get even more of it to listen to, you can find just that by joining the Beta Cell Fan Club. After you join, you'll get tons of bonus clips, outtakes, extra never-before-heard content, as well as access to our fan club-only show Out of Range After Dark. Visit betacellpodcast.com for more info.

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Craig: I'm Craig Stubing and this is Beta Cell.

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Craig: This episode of Out of Range is brought to you by Companion Medical, the makers of the InPen smart insulin pen. I haven't used the InPen myself, so I call on my friend Ella to get her opinion.

Ella: I love how InPen keeps track of my insulin doses. It logs what time I take my insulin, how many units I take, and then also keeps track of how much insulin I have left on board. It's really made my diabetes management so much easier.

Craig: For more info, visit companionmedical.com.

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