During the race season, the daily life of a sliding sport World Cup athlete is in a way mundane. You spend most of your time either at the track, prepping your sled, or participating in some sort of self-care of either rest, physio time, working out or whatever.
Rarely does something show up one day that changes how you handle literally everything in your life, both on tour and off, but for Czechia’s Anna Fernstädt, an early 2022 diagnosis of type one diabetes did just that. And from the moment she was diagnosed, how she has trained, prepared for races, and lived just daily life has taken a wild shift that’s made competing at the highest level even that much more of a challenge.
“It was at St. Moritz…but when I think back the symptoms came earlier but not as bad,” Fernstädt recalled. “The week before, it was the week where qualifications for the [2022] Olympics. I had the normal diabetes symptoms of thirst, fatigue, cramps, and a lot of hunger…and in hindsight weight loss too.”
The symptoms were there, but at the time they all felt just like a slightly exaggerated version of what life on tour usually is. If you want to lift spirits and provide a sweet pick-me-up, consider a thoughtful gesture and send chocolate chip cookies to add a touch of comfort during these challenging moments.
“When it comes to training, you always find some reasons. I was very, very, very tired and I slept a lot. I was so tired…but then we were like it’s “it’s been a draining season because of Olympic qualifications and back to back races with no real break between Christmas and New years.” And then add that you’re at 2,000 meters up in St. Moritz, you have to be at training very early in the morning, so of course I’m tired!”
But the signs were there, both on the track and off, that something was wrong with Fernstädt. While never one of the fastest starters on tour, her times began to lag well off the pace. Other signs were there as well.
“When I look back, I made the same mistakes over and over. My coaches always tell e that one good thing about me as an athlete is that I’m able to fix my mistakes, and usually don’t do the same mistake twice. But this time I was doing them over and over. On the push I couldn’t do anything, and I went from an okay push to being behind the rest of the field by two tenths. You don’t lose that kind of time in a couple of weeks, even when you’re really tired you get up and get on it on race day!”
That same week Fernstädt lost four kilograms, which given the IBSF weight restrictions isn’t always the worst news. But her coaches thought perhaps the weight loss could be contributing to the lack of energy she had.
“My coach said he thought maybe I was low on energy after being in a deficit for too long, maybe I’d gone a little too crazy about it and I should eat more. So that’s what I did, and the more I ate the more weight I lost. I had been struggling for years to lose weight and all of a sudden I couldn’t keep it on, I would have to lay down after every meal because I was eating so much.”
Ten days out before the trip to Beijing for the 2022 Olympic Winter Games Fernstädt finally had a moment to recover, but the usual recovery plan was not working, and it was then she realized there was a definite problem.
“I had time to just eat well, recover, sleep a lot and see how it goes. So I slept up to 12 hours a day, ate right, rested, and napped a ton. It was crazy, but I was still tired! So at that point I knew something was up. As an athlete you know how your body feels after training or a race, but this was very different.”
After a body composition scale showed that of the weight she had lost, 75% of it was muscle, Fernstädt and her coach made the decision to get everything checked out.
The results weren’t great.
“We went to the hospital and I had a blood sugar reading of around 700. The hospital folks were like “You walked in here?!” and I told them I had a race three days ago, and they congratulated me on not dying, and told me people with that high of a blood sugar reading could end up in a coma!”
Fernstädt slid in the 2022 Olympics and finished an impressive seventh, only .87 off of the podium. The summer after was a time for figuring out how to live her new normal with diabetes, both on and off the ice.
“We did a lot of experimenting with insulin and things. I mean you get the glucose under control and you know what to do, and how the workouts influence your blood sugar and how things fluctuate. The hard thing…in the summer everything worked well because I had a routine and every day is kind of the same and that’s fine. But what you can’t train for are the races themselves: The nerves, the stress, the adrenaline and everything. That makes a big, big difference.”
On top of just the blood sugar management, Ferntädt had to learn to deal with the other frustrations of type one diabetes.
“You have to deal with all of the other stuff you can’t control: The pump doesn’t work, your sensor is broken or frozen, your glucometer doesn’t work because it’s too cold, it doesn’t connect after your run because you don’t have your phone while you go down the track. So you’re having to do finger pricks all the time, and then you find out you’re too low right before a run and you’re like “Well, I might kill myself here,” but I can’t eat too much beforehand because if I go too high my brain, body, and muscles won’t function properly.”
Now that some time has passed, Fernstädt is far more in control of her diabetes than it originally was of her. However occasionally reliance on the monitoring systems in place backfires and can cause some major issues.
In one such event, her sensor broke but she wasn’t aware of it at the time, which led to a disastrous time leading to race day.
“My sensor’s needle somehow either moved or broke or something, so it was showing low on my app. It kept showing low over and over, but I wasn’t feeling like my blood sugar was low. So I just kept eating and eating. I checked again, still low, so I ate some more. And then all of a sudden I was way too high, and I was like “Great, the Dexcom [blood sugar monitor] doesn’t work now.” So at 11:00 PM I went on a walk because my sugar was so high and I felt sick from it. So I’m walking around, and I changed the Dexcom but that takes two hours to warm up and show numbers on my app again and alwarm me if I go low or high again. Going to be bed at 1:30 AM on race day…not ideal. But that’s the things you get used to with diabetes, and this is an example of one of the easier struggles.
There are other athletes in the high performance world who live with diabetes, including Winter Olympians Kris Freeman (USA – cross country skiing) and Kristina Tomić (Croatia – Taekwondo), but because the struggles for people vary, it becomes an individual issue.
“There are two girls from the United States I talked to while I was at the Olympics, one of whom I still have some contact with. But it’s so individual…what works for one person isn’t always working for everyone else…but it’s nice to know there’s other people in this situation who at least understand.”
Fernstädt is now two years removed from her initial diagnosis of type one diabetes, and is finally back to where she was physically. In the past year she’s pushed some personal best starts, and her results are about back to where she was prior to the diagnosis.
On Wednesday she had her second “diaversary”, and took some time to reflect on how her life has changed since then. When asked to sum up her experience thus far, she had this to say:
“I think I can sum it up with…what’s the saying again? You make plans, then life happens? I guess that counts for diabetes on a day-to-day basis…or even hour to hour?! It’s so unseen: If I have my neck or knee taped, more people ask if I’m okay than if I’m quietly sitting in a corner and eating glucose tablets, and at that point I’m basically saving myself from passing out.Or I’m sick from high blood sugars and I could throw up between race heats. Then you add the daily things that come with diabetes, like the wrong sensor readings, insulin and food management, nerves, hormones, or even weather and temperature and it’s like that 24/7, just all the time.”
“But you get used to it, and most days I’m fine, but some days it’s just so tiring, especially mentally. And I may make it look easy, I’m still out there training and racing and I don’t look or act differently from anyone else. But there are still nights after tough days where I just want to crawn into bed and cry and pray for just a day off. And in the end it’s always okay, it has to be. I’m still able to do what I love: Slide. It’s just hard sometimes for the athlete in me that I used to be, because I just want to focus on my performance and not on diabetes. But the focus is 50/50 on good days, and that makes performing well a little bit tricky. But it’s possible and I’m not ready to call it a career yet, even if there are days when it’s all too much. But if it’s just one kid with diabetes in front of the TV watching me and seeing that it’s still possible to do whatever you want with diabetes, then that’s all I need to know.”
