Running Through Sweetness
Lies sell and truth goes begging. Runners accept the premise we're "masters" on turning 40 and "golden agers" on turning 60 when there is little we have mastered or is gold: We have just got old.

I began shooting insulin as a string of cloudless days sent Michigan cartwheeling into summer: moony nights, sunsets bleeding purple into dawn, grapes in orchards popping ... a Northern growth season making up for its eyeblink length with colors so vibrant they made me ache.

The world was coming alive at the same time I was fading. So it seemed.

See, within a month of my mother's death I learned she had left me her diabetes. Fine. Mom had dealt with it like a champion, headed her area diabetes association and founded a fund-raising 5K road race.

Based on her example I took classes, learned diabetes means "running through" and mellitus "sweetness." Life is sweet; I run many miles through it every week.

Diabetes mellitus inverts that order, with sweetness (blood sugar) running through you. Your pancreas doesn't make enough insulin to process glucose properly. The result is you pee out energy.

Diet and exercise can help. So can drugs that stimulate the pancreas. With the more-common, less-severe Type 2 diabetes, these steps suffice. They did for me ... for awhile.

When things changed this spring -- my mind felt muddy, energy lagged and I couldn't read agate print any longer -- I treated symptoms the way hardcore runners deal with pain: if you don't acknowledge it, you grant it no power over you.

This attitude can work for you ... to a point. Then it works against you. I remember one sleepless night when, parched, I drank glass after glass of orange juice till I realized, "This stuff has a lot of sugar," drew blood and my levels were out the ceiling.

This triggered a long spring of doctor visits, blood-test harpoonings and hiked prescriptions with the same result: my B.S. would dip temporarily, then climb.

My Mom, a Type 1 diabetic, had shot up insulin the last 30 years of her life. If I was headed that way, fine. The hell was not knowing what to do.

I trained all spring: 50-, 60-, 70-plus-mile weeks, and lost 15 pounds. Yet my race times were a minute a mile slower than six months earlier. Tufts blowing down from cottonwoods seemed like bubbles in a world that was underwater. The more I flailed, the more the resistance I met was slack.

Insulin as savior? I had to screw on my head straight first. The nurse said inject in a two-inch circle around my belly button, so needle tracks would make me look like a target. Being able to laugh marked like a solid start.

The Flyby 5K, set for the solstice, also seemed zany enough to lift me. Gerald R. Ford International Airport officials planned to mark the Grand Rapids facility's 40th anniversary -- and aviation's 100th birthday -- with a first-ever road race on its 3,200 acres. Who among us has not been transfigured by the legacy of the Wright Brothers? Or transfixed watching people-filled phalluses gliding gracefully through the sky?

The day before the race never really ended: it merely segued into another cloudless morning where, with insulin coursing through me, I felt clear too.

I joined the caravan of cars passing through a series of gates, taking orders from pointing flagmen, parking symmetrically on a massive concrete rectangle. From the sky, we must have appeared like ants exiting our vehicles, chrome and glass gleaming, to converge on tents and take tentative warm-up strides in the midst of nowhere.

Planes took off and landed all around. Porta-pots were plentiful, but impatient types had no bushes or trees to hide in. As 800 runners massed for takeoff, a bomber jet plane screamed by us low, shotgun in a sky so vast it threatened to suck us in.

The speed-gifted rode its wake. The rest of us toiled beneath the sun, looping 'round a taxiway toward a tunnel dug (thus the course's only "hill") underneath a runway. "Woo!" cried many as we entered it, appreciative of the echoing, shade and race leaders, having hairpinned through a fire station far ahead of us, coming back.

We escaped the tunnel and climbed through light again toward the station. There, monster tankers crammed with chemicals that douse jet fires, glowered over us: at my pace, no such hosing would be required.

We entered the tunnel headed back, for a last time wooing. I imagined a near-death experience: at the end of the darkness, light, the embrace of loved ones, journey over.

Instead we climbed again into sun, higher now than ever, toward a straightaway between spectators, cheering the women and children passing me, then a fishhook to the finish.

D*** diabetes! D*** getting old! D***, did I have fun!

Clocks don't lie. You can run a slow time and have the time of your life, however.

I was out there with people who love running just like me: young and old, fast, slow. Having made the best of our gifts and handicaps, we rewarded ourselves with bananas, water, laughs, swapping lies and stories. We marveled at aircraft and runway plows on exhibit, tried to sail whimsical paper airplanes into a car window and win prizes.

Actual planes took off, bound for who knows where. The sun neared its apex and it could have been we were masters, stardust, golden.

It could have been we were drunk on light. MR