For endurance athletes, carbohydrate fueling is about making sure your organs and muscles have enough glucose to keep you moving.
When it comes to glucose management, no one is more aware of this than athletes with type 1 diabetes.
On an Nduranz podcast episode, we talked to Dr. Simon Helleputte about the science of fueling with T1D. But we also talked with Riccardo Raso — a semi-pro triathlete with T1D. He's also one of the most strategic and methodical athletes we’ve encountered (which is saying a lot in the world of triathlon!). He walked us through exactly how he manages fueling and glycogen as a T1D endurance athlete.
We’ve broken it down in a 5-part series:
- The T1D Athlete Mindset (This Article)
- Carb Loading with T1D
- Triathlon Fuel & Hydration Plan
- Glucose Monitoring during Training and Races
- Fuel Adjustments Based on Glucose Levels
Before we dive into the strategy and numbers, it’s worth understanding the person behind the plan. So, in part 1, we’ll dive into Riccardo’s background — and the mindset T1D has helped him build.
An Unexpected T1D Diagnosis
I developed type 1 diabetes completely unexpectedly: there was no family history and no inadequate lifestyle factors. It followed a very strong and prolonged febrile illness, almost as if the system had abruptly short-circuited.
In hindsight, while the diagnosis was obviously disruptive, that moment also forced a radical rethinking of my trajectory and of how I approached discipline, planning, and responsibility. For certain aspects of who I am today, that disruption may not have been entirely negative.
The Core Lesson: Predictability Beats Aggression
The most important lesson I’ve learned is that performance comes from predictability, not aggression — and triathlon is the sport that taught me to respect that principle in the most concrete way.
What I love about triathlon is that it’s almost impossible to improvise your way through it. It is three sports in one, plus everything around them (fueling, hydration, heat management, aerodynamics, pacing strategy, metabolic testing, open-water skills, stride economy, travel and routine control…).
There are simply too many moving parts to “wing it” without paying a price. For someone like me — meticulous, precise, and detail-oriented — triathlon is a constant reminder to be accurate where it matters, and to reduce avoidable errors.
Adding T1D to the Equation
T1D adds another layer: it introduces extra variables and extra constraints. It’s not just about having a good nutrition plan; it’s about having a plan that remains stable when a lot of “planets” need to align at once:
- Training load
- Taper
- Glycogen targets
- GI tolerance
- Insulin timing
- Starting glucose
- Stress hormones
- Temperature
And the simple reality of executing all of this under pressure.
That is why I treat fueling as a control system rather than a calorie target: carbs are the input, insulin is the steering, CGM trend is the feedback loop, and the gut is the hard constraint.
When those parts are aligned, performance becomes repeatable.
Failure as Data
T1D also reshaped how I think about mistakes. In a sport like this — just as in life — failure happens to everyone. But every failure becomes data.
The more I build a modular plan across every controllable front, the less I need to improvise — or, if I do, it’s only controlled improvisation, inside clear guardrails.
Many people see failure as purely negative; I almost always see it as an opportunity to refine the system and grow.
Racing Like a Non-Diabetic Athlete – And Turning T1D into an Ally
Ultimately, I’m trying to race as close as possible to a non-diabetic athlete in terms of rhythm and execution — not because T1D disappears, but because, when it is managed correctly, there is no inherent reason why performance should be fundamentally limited compared to non-diabetic athletes under comparable conditions.
When the plan is predictable enough, I spend less mental bandwidth “managing diabetes” and more bandwidth racing.
T1D can even become an ally because controlling blood glucose with precision in some contexts can work in my favor: stable glycemia generally reflects stable substrate availability and helps avoid both hypoglycemia-related performance loss and unnecessary hyperglycemic swings.
In that sense, if I can reduce the “bandwidth noise” of T1D, glucose control becomes a lever I can actively use — a level of metabolic awareness and precision that many non-diabetic athletes try to approximate through pacing, fueling structure, and trial-and-error, but without access to the same continuous feedback loop.
The Big Picture
Perfection doesn’t exist, but your “weak points” only stay weak if you decide they’re unmanageable.
Once you choose to face them, measure them, and manage the variables, you can stop fighting what you can’t change and start turning what used to be negative into something that actively builds your best version of yourself.
Up next: Riccardo gets into the practical strategies and numbers of carb loading with T1D.