Thank you like a hurricane !

Photo by Skylight Photo

Photo by Skylight Photo

Photo by Luc Arseneau

All I could do was to laugh out loud.  Part of it was nerves.  The other part was simply noticing how funny life really is.  I mean, come on, are you kidding me?  A friggin hurricane?!  The more that I looked at the weather forecast, the more that I realized that Dorian was definitely lining up to hit us on Saturday, the day of our Mike’s Bike Shop Cyclebetes XII ride.  All other activities were being cancelled mid-week.  But we didn’t want to cancel just yet.  In denial, I was secretly hoping that we could still pull it off.  After so much work I wasn’t ready to just throw in the towel like that.

Photo by Skylight Photo

Photo by Skylight Photo

In so many ways, I have been in the same situation many, many times before.  Playing the Type 1 game, you plan everything so very carefully and then, out of the blue, Type 1 Diabetes starts playing dirty and all you can do is try to minimize damage.  No warnings.  No mercy.  Like the time that Adele’s blood sugar dropped dangerously low as we were trying to exit the airplane during one of our vacations.  All other passengers had disembarked.  The flight attendant came to see why we were stalling.  Little did she know that we were busy saving our daughter’s life.  And there was also that time when I was shoving juice and gummy bears into Adele’s mouth at the bottom of the ski hill when she was having a severe hypoglycemic insulin reaction, everyone around us oblivious to the fact that we were dealing with a life and death situation.  Living with Type 1 Diabetes is a constant, 24-7, delicate juggling act.  And all that you can do is do what you can do and hope for a good outcome.  It’s a life of constantly being chased by a hurricane.  We’re somewhat used to it.  But, we still feel like it’s slowly killing us.

Photo by Skylight Photo

Insulin isn’t a luxury for someone with Type 1 Diabetes.  It literally keeps them alive.  It is like oxygen to them.  Without insulin, Adele’s blood sugar would continue to rise as her body entered a state called Diabetic Ketoacidosis.  If left untreated, she would eventually slip into a coma and die.  This process would not take years, months or even days.  It would be a matter of hours.  Insulin is that powerful.

 

When Frederick Banting discovered insulin in 1922 he sold the patent for about a dollar.  Banting believed that “Insulin belongs to the world, not to him.”   Thank you Dr. Banting.  Not to put myself in the same category as Nobel Prize winner Frederick Banting, but I do feel the same way about the Mike’s Bike Shop Cyclebetes ride to cure Type 1 Diabetes.  I feel that the ride does not belong to me.  It belongs to all the people living with Type 1 Diabetes.  It belongs to all the sponsors, donors, volunteers and participants.  Without them, it simply wouldn’t exist.  The only thing that is mine is the dream.  Thank you so very much for sharing and supporting this dream.

Photo by Skylight Photo

Photo by Luc Arseneau

It was a rough week leading up to the 12^th edition of our ride this year.  I spent most of Thursday night tossing and turning in bed, unable to sleep, trying to figure out what we should do.  Friday morning, the day before the ride, we made the decision to eliminate all afternoon rides because of the imminent hurricane.  The forecast seemed to indicate that we would be good in the morning as long as all rides were done before noon.  That left us with two groups riding 75 kilometers on the road and one group riding 45 kilometers on the gravel trails.  75 riders had pre-registered and close to 60 showed up to pedal for a cure on Saturday morning.  It was the very best outcome given the circumstances.  All rides started out dry but ended wet which somewhat made the smiles that much brighter. 

Photo by Skylight Photo

Despite hurricane Dorian, we still managed to raise $23,000 for JDRF!  This brings our total raised to close to a quarter of a million dollars since 2007!  Our event is definitely a survivor being one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of its kind in our area.  Thank you.

Photo by Skylight Photo

Thank you to our main sponsor, Mike’s Bike Shop.  Rick Snyder, thank you for stepping up every single year and making this event as great as it has become.  Your generosity and undying support continue to amaze me year after year.  Without you the ride would simply not exist.  All people living with Type 1 Diabetes are forever indebted to you for all that you have done to help find a cure.

Photo by Skylight Photo

Thank you to the rest of the organizing committee who give so much time and energy throughout the year.  Thank you so very much Pablo Vergara for all that you do for Cyclebetes.  Your generosity and willingness to help and sacrifice your physical appearance for a cure always amazes me.  Thank you my friend.  Thank you so very much Luc Belliveau for all of your help even in the middle of selling your house.  I really appreciate it Luc.  And thank you to Jessica Melanson, newly hired NB and PEI JDRF engagement coordinator.  The support and contribution that you have provided to our event in such a short time period has been amazing.  Merci beaucoup Jessica.  I always feel humbled working with such an amazing team.  Thank you.

Photo by Skylight Photo

Thank you to all participants and donors.  I am always amazed by your generosity.  And a special thank you to all riders who set fundraising goals above their registration fee and worked tirelessly to reach and even surpass them, especially those with no ties to Type 1 Diabetes.  Thank you.

Photo by Luc Arseneau

Photo by Skylight Photo

Thank you to Don Ricker at Skylight Photo for the amazing event and road ride photos.  Thank you to Luc Arseneau for the awesome gravel ride photos.  The event would simply not be what it is without your contribution.  Thank you.

Photo by Skylight Photo

Thank you to JDRF youth ambassador Vanessa Galluchon for your speech.  Your message reminded us why we were all there and what we were riding for.  Thank you.

Photo by Luc Arseneau

Thank you to all of our sponsors : Sobey’s in Dieppe, MacDonald Buick GMC, Giant bikes / Guy Pellerin of Pellerin Sports, City of Dieppe, Cavok Brewing Co., Cape Bald Packers, Terry Tomlin of Tomlin Sports Marketing, Kevin Noiles of Lambert, Pat Bolduc of Big Ring Sports, Nomad Supply Co.,  Jack Trudel of Trek Bicycles / Bontrager, DNA Swag Inc., Dieppe IGA / Coop, Long and McQuade, Vins Dandurand, Moncton Propane Services and Adrien Lesvesque at Fallstaff Media.  Thank you.

Photo by Skylight Photo

Thank you Tim and Andrew Calvert for staying back and riding with the back end of the first group.  It makes for a very long day when you’re struggling to keep up and it makes all the difference to have someone there with you to pull you along.  Thank you.

Photo by Skylight Photo

Thank you to all of our other dedicated volunteers:  Jeff Currie, Bill Goobie, Martin Pelletier, Charles Cormier, Dany Benoit, Jonny St-Pierre, Tracy Renton, Gerry Allain, Elmer Wade, Pete Cormier, Lorraine LeBlanc, Erica Griffiths, Gilles Gallant, Steve Kikkert, Caroline Belliveau, Tania Morais, Rachel Parkins, Luc Melanson and Michele LeBlanc.  Events like these can’t happen without help from people like you.  Thank you. 

If I have forgotten anyone, I apologize and want to thank you as well.

And last but certainly not least, I would like to dedicate this year’s ride to two riders who have left us this past year.  Larry Spicer had ridden with us in 2014 and 2015.  He was registered to ride again last year, but ended up not being able to ride.  He passed this summer.  Ride in Peace Larry.  Derrick Keith fundraised and rode every single Cyclebetes ride from the beginning, in 2008, until he got sick last year.  Cyclebetes meant a lot to Derrick.  And Derrick meant a lot to Cyclebetes.  Derrick passed last fall.  Ride in peace Derrick.  Your generosity and dedication to our cause continue to inspire me to be and do better.  I am forever grateful to have had the privilege to know you.  Thank you.

Photo by Skylight Photo

We are already starting to plan the 13^th edition of Mike’s Bike Shop Cyclebetes.  Mark the date: Saturday, September 12^th, 2020.  I really hope that you can join us !

All online fundraising pages will still work until the end of the year so you can still donate here...  2019 Mike’s Bike ShopCyclebetes Ride to Cure Type 1 Diabetes.

Photo by Skylight Photo

2019, the year that we raced a hurricane…  Pretty sure we’ll remember this edition for a very long time...

Photo by Skylight Photo

I am forever humbled by your love and support… 

Thank you.

Peace

Mike

Look back but don't forget to also look within...

I started writing this post in December.  Year end, a time when I was feeling the need to take a moment to look back.  I wasn’t writing it as a “New Year’s resolution list” but am now realizing that ironically I am finishing and publishing it at a time when most people have usually already dropped the resolutions that they had set at the beginning of the year.  I wanted to take the time to identify what I have learned in 2018.  And I wanted to set intentions for 2019.  I prefer “intentions” to “resolutions” even if the word  doesn’t make me as accountable.  And I like being less accountable because no matter what I can’t fail, I can only learn.

Last year was certainly a milestone number year given that I turned 50 in September.  Usually not one to be impressed with birthdays, this one seemed very different.  It’s pretty mind-blowingly incredible when I think about it for a person to manage to stay alive for half a century.  When I was younger, I always assumed that I would grow old, but with every birthday I now realize that is in no way a given even if I do everything right.  Losing my friend Derrick Keith this fall was a bitter reminder of this.  I am grateful to have known you Derrick.  RIP my friend.

I have been seeing a psychologist regularly for a few years now.  At first it was  to deal with Adele’s Diabetes diagnosis.  Then 2 years ago I went to see someone new to help me with my concussion recovery.  The discussion strangely went from hitting my head to my many unresolved issues as a sexual abuse survivor.  My current psychologist was the first that suggested I needed to work on this.  That was one of the gifts that came from hitting my head.  If I had never crashed and suffered such a debilitating injury that literally brought me to my knees I am absolutely certain that I would not have done all the work to help heal my sexual abuse.  It blows me away sometimes how life works.  Whenever I take the time to look back, I always notice things lining up logically for me to learn and grow.  I don’t believe that there is a superior being up there somewhere calling the shots but I do believe that there is some type  of universal intelligence that exists that has our back and will guide and give us everything that we need in order to evolve and flourish. We need to look for it and then figure out what we’re supposed to learn.  And for this reason I am very grateful for my ever so slow post-concussion syndrome progress which has given me plenty of time to think and reflect.  Going through one of the most difficult periods of my life has also caused me to re-emerge on the other end more whole that I have felt in a very long time.

The whole concept of psychotherapy is very simple when you think about it.  It’s really just about telling your story to someone that you can trust and have no emotional attachment to.  Everyone has a story worth telling.  Everyone.  What happens is that whenever we chronicle the traumatic events in our life and hear our own words out loud we learn something.  Explaining the event makes us think about the details and enables us to step back and look at the big picture.  And eventually we start connecting the dots.  And the clarity that ensues is so very freeing.  In my unconscious mind, the details of my sexual abuse were so very convoluted, all mixed up.  Only by going back and getting into these details could I begin to understand how this trauma continued to affect me today.  And by understanding “why” I was deprogramming the fear and shame-based automated responses that I had unconsciously adopted since then.  Only by talking openly about difficult things can we begin to heal.  I couldn’t heal by avoiding the pain anymore.  I just had to step into my shit and work my way “through” it.

2018 was the year that I went public with my sexual abuse story.  As scary as it was, I am very happy and grateful for that.  To now be able to talk about it openly has been so very liberating but there are still a few steps remaining for me to become even more at peace.  My intentions for 2019 are to continue to work towards as much closure as I can get from this whole thing and make things as right as they can be at this point.

Through lots of self-reflection the past few years, I have gotten much better at identifying my feelings.  Like most males, I was taught to mask what was going on inside of me making me pretty much always clueless to what I was feeling.  I’d be in a bad mood and have no idea why.  I’m getting better at connecting with my feelings, definitely not perfect, but better.  I often know and understand where the unpleasant feelings are coming from.  And that’s the first step in freeing myself from their grip.  In 2019 I really want to practice expressing these feelings and letting them flow.  I remember as a kid feeling so much better after a good cry.  Why is it that most adults, especially males, have lost this ability to cry it out?  It’s sad that we don’t feel safe to express our feelings through tears.  We repress the urge so very much that eventually it becomes inaccessible even when we’re in a safe situation and place where it would be totally OK to shed tears.  In 2019 I would like to tap into this again.  In 2019, I would like to be able to cry more.  Some days, when I feel like shit I wish I could just isolate myself somewhere safe, either alone or with someone I can trust and cry it out.  I want to reprogram the automated response of keeping it all in.  I want to be able to let my shit flow through my tears.  Our emotions need to be processed before we can move on.  We need to feel it and pick ourselves up again when we’re ready.  It’s called grief and it’s not just for healing the loss of a person that we cared who has died.  

Surrendering to 2019 ! (Photo credit Don Ricker

)

I also changed my diet in 2018.  I set an intention to cut carbs and over a year later I am still eating this way about 80 to 90 % of the time.  I wouldn’t call it a Keto diet since I still eat enough carbs to keep me out of ketosis.  I guess it would be closer to Paleo but I still eat yogurt and cheese (the Paleo diet doesn’t include any dairy at all).  I have pretty much cut pasta, rice, bread and starches.  I’ll “cheat” occasionally and will feel crappy when I do but most of the time I follow it religiously.  This dietary change was to help with my post-concussion syndrome recovery as well as being a role model for Adele (I truly believe that all Type 1s should be prescribed a low-carb diet to help control blood sugar in combination with insulin therapy which can’t be avoided with Type 1).  I lost 7 – 8 lbs and have kept it off.  I am leaner than I was when I raced bikes even if I am not even close to being as fit.  My intention for 2019 is to continue exploring this way of eating in order to continue to heal my brain and inspire Adele.

Did you make any resolutions (or intentions) for 2019?  Have you managed to keep them now that we are 2 months into the year?

Peace
Mike

Undercurrent feels

I have spent most of my life hovering above my emotions, relentlessly trying to just not go there whenever anything distressing came up.  When “how I think things should be” and “how things actually are” align, this approach to living is somewhat manageable.  It’s a survival mechanism that I learned from society telling me to “think positively” and to always “look at the bright side” which I interpreted as “if it’s unpleasant or uncomfortable, it’s bad and should be avoided”.  So I learned to stuff my shit back in and ignore it.  For so long, I believed that depression was something that a person could think their way out of, something that could be prevented as long as you had the strength and self-discipline to just never go there.  But ignoring it doesn’t make it go away or fix it.  The underlying anxiety festers and we eventually become exhausted constantly trying to keep it contained, depression being our breaking point.  

Jim Carrey explained being depressed as needing a deep rest from playing the “roles” that a person is playing.  For me, especially since the concussion, depression tends to show up when my brain gets tired; tired from life stress as well as from the “roles” that I have been playing - sexual abuse survivor, Type 1 Diabetes parent and a person living with post-concussion syndrome.  For me personally, depression has a physical feel to it.  It’s not just hopelessness and dark unbearable thoughts; it’s more like my brain becomes incapable of processing my physical surroundings including all sights and sounds properly.  It feels like complete disconnection, an out-of-body experience, a dream-like state where I don’t feel like I’m part of the living dimension of this physical world anymore.  For me, depression feels like I’m half-dead, literally unable to touch life anymore.  Many people simplify depression way too much.  When it hits, I can’t just snap out of it.  I can’t just exercise my way out of it.  Listening to music, moving my body, getting out in nature may all help but they are not a cure all for me.  All I can do is hold on tight and wait out the storm.

In all of my schooling, I was taught how to “do” but never how to “be”.  I was taught how to do the external labor but not the internal work.  I had always been looking for magical solutions or hacks to fix my problems without reflecting on their cause.  For me, I could easily put the blame on the physical trauma of hitting my head which certainly plays a very large role in affecting how my injured brain works right now causing my physical symptoms.  Depression is a very common aftereffect of concussions.  But I am also certain that in my case it also stems from a whole lot of unresolved emotional trauma as well.

Since the concussion, my brain is very sensitive to any type of shaking or jarring.  I remember the awareness campaign that came out a few years ago warning people about shaken baby syndrome.  It may not be good to shake anyone but babies are much more susceptible given their delicate immature brains.  My brain feels like a baby brain now.  In late August, after the stress of going back to work after my summer vacation a few weeks before our Cyclebetes ride to cure Type 1 Diabetes I fell while mountain biking.  I don’t even feel like it deserves to be called a crash.  I basically tripped when I caught my foot on a stump on the side of the trail.  I was not going fast and I wasn’t even close to hitting my head as I landed on my knee and hip.  Before the concussion I would have laughed as I landed rather softly in the brush on the side of the trail.  But even that very small jarring caused havoc on my delicate “baby” brain.  I picked myself up and rode back home even if my ride had only just started.  As the light headedness and dizzy feelings resurfaced so did a bit of nausea as I lay flat on my back in my living room a few hours after I fell trying to remain calm.  The next day I felt like shit with symptoms almost back at a level comparable to the worse I had felt in the fall of 2016.  And with these physical brain symptoms came a tsunami scale wave of depression.  I wasn’t suicidal but I wouldn’t have minded dying right then and there.  I was instantly taken back to that very dark period two years ago when I was living in a constant daze barely making it through each day.  I was completely overwhelmed thinking that I couldn’t go through that again.  There was nothing to do except rest, wait and hope that it gets better.  And in a few days it did get better, but that underlying fear and those feelings are and will always be there to a certain extent.

I am terrified of hitting my head again.  It’s on my mind constantly.  I am always hyper vigilant when I’m around other people trying to predict what they’re going to do or where they’re going to go next so that we don’t accidently bump into each other.  It’s what I was thinking about sitting in a restaurant a few weeks ago as the waiter walked by with a tray full of food and beverages.  It’s what I was thinking about at a concert last weekend as the half-drunk people behind us were trying to get out of their seats to go get another drink.  It’s on my mind walking the dog outside on the icy roads.  And it’s in my thoughts whenever I am in a moving car as well as every single time I get on my bike.  A little fear is good to keep us safe, but what I am feeling is way beyond that.  It’s not even rational at this point but I need to acknowledge that it’s there.  On the good days I can befriend it and comfort the feelings.  Other days all I can do is hold on to the guard rail of the rocking ship that is my thought process in that moment and concentrate on not getting thrown overboard.  

Growing up, so much importance was put on the business side of life.  That information was useful in keeping me alive, but it didn’t teach me how to build a happy life.  Maybe “build” isn’t the right word here given that life, the human animal experience of our existence, isn’t something that we can build or make happen using will.  Life unfolds effortlessly on its own.  All we need is to be present for it and to let it flow which has nothing to do with business knowledge.  It has to do with emotional intelligence.  I was never really taught this growing up.  I was taught how to work hard to provide a house for me and my family to live in but I was never really taught how to make that house a home.  Like life, a home is not a thing and it can’t be created by doing.  Like happiness, home is a feeling. 

Google tells me that men die from suicide 3 times more often than women.  Could this be because men usually tend to live their lives like they would run a business?  Like me, they tend to be taught to become problem solvers, logical thinkers instead of feelers.  Business intelligence and approaching life exclusively from a logical thinking perspective will never make you happy.  Only emotional intelligence can do this since it comes from where happiness lives, the heart and the soul.  Google also tells me that nearly 4,000 people die each year in Canada from suicide.  That’s sadly about 10 people every single day.  I don’t believe suicide to be a decision that a person makes.  Depression has already killed them, finishing the job with the death of the physical body is just a formality.  It’s just making the outside the same as the inside.  We often ask how someone could actually go ahead with the act of ending their own life, but they’re already dead so there’s no fear anymore.  There’s nothing more to lose. 

To be alive is to feel.  Only when we open up to this truth and begin to embrace it will we be in a position to try to fix the widespread mental health crisis that we are currently facing.  Mental illness has nothing to do with weakness or lack of strength.  True strength is about vulnerability.  It’s about honest self-reflection.  It’s about leaning into all emotions truthfully.  It’s about allowing ourselves to feel it all.  And it’s also about realizing that there is actually a certain peace that comes from embracing what we judge to be negative in our life.  

#SickNotWeak   #BeHereNow

Peace

Mike