Four of the five runners who will participate in an upcoming marathon relay on Mercedes Marathon weekend are shown at Railroad Park in Birmingham, Ala. Left to right are Mason Cross, Rachael Tolbert, Drew White and Peter Reis. (The Birmingham News / Beverly Taylor) BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — On Sunday, these five runners will look like a regular relay team for the Mercedes Marathon, one more part of the herd pounding down the road, arms swinging, faces lighted with sweat.
But they are different.
Each of the five — from 13-year-old Peter Reis to 52-year-old Mason Cross — has diabetes. Their fingertips have the tiny spots that come from sticking a sharp lancet through the skin six to eight times a day, to squeeze out a drop of blood to measure blood glucose.
Reis and Cross — along with Rachael Tolbert, 34, Lori McAuley, 28, and Drew White, 14 — are running for Insulindependence, a nonprofit created to help diabetics set personal fitness goals, explore their capabilities and learn how to manage their illness through hands-on experience from others.
“Being part of a community is the most important thing you can do when you live with diabetes, because you become very isolated,” said McAuley of Birmingham’s Southside, a social worker in neonatal intensive care at Children’s of Alabama. She will run the first 10K leg.
“I understand there’s no cure yet,” she said, “but being with other people who have diabetes can be like a spiritual cure.”
The second leg, the first of three 5Ks, will be Tolbert, an Alabaster automotive equipment operations manager.
“When you first get diabetes, you hear, ‘You can’t do this,’ ‘You can’t do that,'” said Tolbert. “The good thing about this group was that finally, I was with people that understood.”
Tolbert got her first Type I diabetes symptoms early last May, just a month after a routine physical.
“I was doing tornado work in Pleasant Grove, helping a family clear their home site with the Helena United Methodist Church,” she said. “My vision got blurry and I was extremely thirsty. I didn’t feel good.”
‘I started to say goodbye’
While McAuley and Tolbert both got Type I diabetes as adults, the third relay runner, 14-year-old White of Mountain Brook, was diagnosed at age 4. He had to go to Children’s hospital for a week, and he was deeply frightened by mention of the disease.
“I remember I started to say goodbye to all of the furniture at home before I left for the hospital,” said White, who also plays football and lacrosse at school. “I thought I was going to die.”
Eighth-grader White will hand off to seventh-grader Reis, a triathlete and lacrosse player who lives in Mountain Brook.
Reis was diagnosed in first grade. Now, he checks his own blood sugars during the day, and his mother checks one more time while he sleeps, about 1 a.m. every night.
Reis will hand off to Cross for the final leg — a 17K surge to the finish.
At age 30, Cross began to lose a lot of weight, dropping from 170 to 148 in about two weeks. He also had unquenchable thirst and fatigue.
“Man, you look horrible,” said Cross’ father, a family practice doctor. “Go to the lab and get some blood work.”
His blood sugar was nearly 600.
Cross quickly learned to control his diabetes, and then kept running, because the sport gave him such a sense of reward.
“I am not one of those freaks of nature,” said the Mountain Brook commercial printing broker. “But the running culture is positive, uplifting. They seem to be really happy people.”
After learning about Insulindependence last August, Cross is now trying to promote the group, “because it tells people with the disease that even if you have it, you can live a normal life.”
Cross and the rest of Team Insulindependence are looking for other diabetics who want to expand the boundaries of their active lives.
“I want diabetics to realize they’re not alone,” said Tolbert. “You can do anything you want; you just have to manage it.”
Nationwide, Insulindependence has Glucomotive running and walking groups, Triabetes training groups for triathlons, and an “A1sea” group for surfing, diving and sailing. That last group is a play on words for the A1C test, a common diabetes blood sugar measurement.
To learn more, see www.insulindependence.org. McAuley is on the website as the Gulf Region Glucomotive captain.
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