Fiona Wylde (seen along with professional dancer Christina Martin to her right) participate in a ... [+]
What’s SUP?
SUP stands for stand up paddleboarding and is a sport that, unlike American football, is exactly what its name implies. It consists of you standing up on a board in the water and using a large paddle to propel you forward. It’s a growing sport and has different variations, including racing and surfing versions.
At 22 years young, Fiona Wylde is already a superstar in the sport. From 2016 to 2018, she was the U.S.’s highest-ranked stand up paddle athlete for three years straight. In 2017, Wylde became the Association of Paddle Professional’s (APP’s) Overall World Champion, having finished second in the world in both racing and surfing that year. And, oh, by the way, she has Type 1 diabetes.
Yes, Wylde has reached the pinnacle of a sport that includes doing this:
Fiona Wylde tackles the waves while warming up for this year's Red Bull Heavy Water Event in San ... [+]
Athlete meet big wave. For most of us, our board, paddle, body, and dignity would have been separated by the wave long before this picture could have been taken. But that’s not the case with Wylde.
The picture above was from one of Wylde’s warm-up runs for the Red Bull Heavy Water event in San Francisco, CA, last month. The event, which is one of the stops on the 2019 APP World Tour circuit, involved a 12 kilometer or 7.5 mile course through the very choppy San Francisco Bay waters under the Golden Gate Bridge and to Ocean Beach, where waves hit the shore. Here is how the “under the Golden Gate Bridge” part of the race looked like:
Here is the approach the Golden Gate Bridge during the Red Bull Heavy Water competition in San ... [+]
Next, after the Golden Gate Bridge, the course took the competitors through even choppier waves:
(Photo: Brian Bielmann/Red Bull Content Pool)
Then, there’s this part, for which the word “choppy” can no longer apply:
Here a participant, not Wylde, battles a wave near Ocean Beach in the Red Bull Heavy Water event. ... [+]
No, these waves have gone beyond chopping, having progressed to perhaps slicing or maybe blendering or even turn-you-upside-downing. As you can see, this event combined different aspects of racing and surfing, making it what Wylde called “one of the most challenging events around.”
Not all events have both the racing and surfing parts. In fact, many focus on one or the other. As Wylde described, “in racing, you can be in an extended full out sprint across an ocean, lake, or river. Stand up paddle surfing is more like traditional surfing but with a paddle.” Both stand up paddle racing and surfing at their highest levels require world class endurance, balance, and strength. To excel at one is enough of an achievement. To excel at both racing and surfing is very Wylde, so to speak.
What’s even more Wylde is the fact that she’s had to also overcome Type 1 diabetes, which is a very tough competitor that’s typically there for life, as there is no cure. Just as racing and surfing are quite different, so are Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. In Type 1 diabetes, which used to be called more often juvenile diabetes or insulin-dependent diabetes, your pancreas cannot produce enough insulin, the hormone that helps sugar get from your bloodstream into your cells. Your cells need sugar to survive and function. Thus, no insulin, no life.
Normally, cells in your pancreas called beta islet cells produce insulin. However, Type 1 diabetes is an auto-immune disease, meaning that your immune system gets a bit confused and attacks and destroys your own beta islet cells. Your beta islet cells may fight the good fight for a while to continue producing insulin but eventually in Type 1 diabetes, they succumb. This is very different from Type 2 diabetes in which your pancreas may produce enough insulin but the cells in your body don’t respond as well to the hormone.
Depending on when the autoimmune process may have started and how resilient your beta islet cells may be, it can take while to notice the symptoms of Type 1 diabetes. Wylde didn’t notice anything was amiss until her senior year in high school. She was already a top stand up paddle racer and surfer, taking the last three years of high school online to allow her to travel around the world for competitions.
“All went well for the first four months,” Wylde explained. “But during a 12.5 mile race, I went from second to sixth. I also noticed that I was losing a bunch of weight, but thought it was because I was training harder.”
As is often the case with chronic conditions, Wylde went a while before a clear diagnosis emerged. “I took three different trips to the doctor,” she recalled. “The day I graduated from high school, I went to doctor’s office and came back with a Type 1 diabetes diagnosis.” Not exactly the best graduation present.
When you get such a life-altering diagnosis, it can be easy to want to give up rather than continue to SUP competitively as Wylde had since age 10. However, as Wylde relayed, “I didn’t let it stop me. I kept going and flew to Europe to go race. My dad came with me to help me.” The next year she won the world title. So much for Type 1 diabetes getting in the way with what she wanted to do.
This video from her YouTube channel shows her in action, doing what she has wanted to do:
This doesn’t mean that type 1 diabetes hasn’t changed her life. She wears a Dexcom device to continuously monitor her blood sugar (glucose) levels. This helps her determine when to use an InPen insulin injector pen to give herself the appropriate amount of insulin. The pen has an accompanying app on her smartphone that can help track her injections.
Controlling ones blood sugar in such a manner can be challenging even in the relatively controlled setting of a 9-to-5 office job, assuming that the office isn’t regularly flooded with water and you don’t move to and from the water cooler on a board with a paddle. Competing as Wylde does throws in a lot more variables. As she indicated, “adrenaline raises blood sugar.” She also travels quite a lot for competitions, which makes it more difficult to keep track of everything, including what she eats.
Then, there’s the mental adjustment that she’s had to make. “It has been a big mental adjustment,” she said. “It’s made me appreciate the value of having a healthy working body. As a result, I have done a better job of taking care of yourself. For example, I have learned what to eat before races.”
She added that Type 1 diabetes has “made me much more aware of everything that needs to be done and prepare more for things. When I travel, I need to make sure that I have all the devices and medical supplies and the food. I realized that I can’t just wing it anymore. I can’t take that risk.”
Here Fiona Wylde walks up shore with her equipment during a preparation in San Francisco. (Photo: ... [+]
Her life got even more complicated a year later when she was diagnosed with celiac disease. This meant that she has to be even more careful about what she eats and avoid foods containing gluten. But as with her diabetes diagnosis, she has taken this additional diagnosis in stride, or rather in paddle.
Of course, athletics has also helped Wylde deal with her diagnoses. After all, as she related, “exercise is the billion dollar drug. Being active and healthy makes feel so much better. When I have exercised, the amount of insulin I have needed is reduced.”
There are also the mental health benefits. “It clears my mind,” she said. “When I am out there on the water, I am paying attention to the water. The water is never still. You have to pay attention to the conditions and the people around you. You have to find the biggest current line and the biggest eddy.”
Additionally, sports can provide a community, which certainly helps deal with different challenges. “The stand up paddleboarding community is so positive and fun to hang out with. It’s where I have made my best friends.”
Thus, if you ask Wylde what’s up, the answer is SUP and a lot. She just finished second among the women at the Red Bull Heavy Water event. She is currently sitting number two in stand up surfing and “would like to win a stand up surfing world title.” Oh, and she is also going to Oregon State University where she is studying geography and geospatial sciences. This is fitting since she has already managed to navigate her way through the challenges of both Type 1 diabetes and being a world champion “water woman.”
#News | https://sciencespies.com/news/fiona-wylde-how-this-world-champion-athlete-overcomes-type-1-diabetes/
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