For XC standout Kris Freeman, Type 1 diabetes is just one more challenge

By Published On: November 12th, 2003Comments Off on For XC standout Kris Freeman, Type 1 diabetes is just one more challenge

For XC standout Kris Freeman, Type 1 diabetes is just one more challengeWhen Kris Freeman was electric, the cameras were unplugged. It was during the 15km at the 2003 Nordic World Championships in Val di Fiemme, Italy, and the film crews shut off the cameras as soon as the top-ranked skiers crossed the finish line. When word came in that some unknown American was in medal contention entering the last kilometer, the cameramen scrambled back to their posts and managed to film the last 20 seconds of what has been, so far, the race of Freeman’s life. He finished fourth, the best American cross-country result in decades.

Freeman had a lot of people scrambling that day. His finish meant he was expected on the stage at the award ceremony that night, and getting to the ceremony was a scramble in itself. “Awards were something we left out of our planning,” recalls head coach Trond Nystad. “It was a whole new experience for us.”

If there’s one person who doesn’t seem to be scrambling, it’s Freeman himself. For all his speed and intensity, he approaches his career with measured, methodical discipline. Kris Freeman, 23, leaves nothing to chance.

After worlds, Predictable parallels were drawn between Freeman and another skier from rural New Hampshire: Bode Miller. From the little Freeman knows of his alpine counterpart, he admits it’s a fair comparison in that both are carving out a space for Americans at the top of European snowsports, and neither was raised with a lot of money around. “I just got the new Reliable Racing catalogue in the mail,” he says. “I used to look through that when I was kid, just drooling, and then I’d go back and get on my old Kneissel skis from the 1980s.”

This year, Freeman is on the cover of that catalog.

When he was growing up in Andover, New Hampshire, the sport wasn’t simply handed to Freeman. He feels certain that the relative deprivation of the bleak New Hampshire hills stoked his competitive fire. “If you’re a little kid and you get all the best equipment just because your parents have the money,” says Freeman, “and you get to ski every day just because that’s what your parents do, I don’t think it’s the same as when you have to fight for the right to go skiing, and fight for the right to compete on the best equipment.”

What Freeman did have was a high-school running coach – Scott Clark at the Sant Bani School – who set Freeman on a serious summer and fall training regimen. Meanwhile Freeman worked on skiing (and, for awhile, ski jumping) on his own time. “It wasn’t a ski academy,” Freeman says, “but it gave me the freedom I needed to train on my own.” He didn’t have a full-time coach, but was able to glean some knowledge from Miles Minson and Bard Elden at the development camps he attended. “I had horrible technique that I’d learned just by watching the best Americans,” says Freeman. “My hips were back, my arms swinging long, the kick coming late with no body weight on it.”

After high school, Freeman spent a year at the University of Vermont, where he had a skiing scholarship. He won three Carnivals (UVM, Dartmouth and Middlebury) but college was just a quick stopover before making the 2002 Olympic team – where he was part of the historic fourth-place finish for the American 4×10 relay team.

Since then, following Freeman’s career has been like watching “The Matrix”; breakthroughs keep coming. He easily won the 30k at the inaugural Under-23 World Championships in 2003. “The whole year was focused around that,” he remembers. “I won the U-23’s, and it was like ‘Okay, now what?'” A week later he was at Val di Fiemme, where he skied with the efficient, hard-charging technique that coaches have called “picture-perfect” to take the fourth the cameras almost missed. He fielded twice as many interviews as the race winner, and retired champion Bjorn Daehlie – the sport’s Michael Jordan – went out of his way to congratulate the American team. Sports Illustrated even called.

Eight months later, Freeman sits in a park city coffee shop reflecting on the ups and downs of the past few years. Like every single thing he’s swallowed since he was diagnosed with diabetes in August 2000, he can say exactly how many grams of carbohydrates there are in the cappuccino sitting before him.

Learning of his illness was devastating. Freeman was in Park City, Utah, training hard for the Olympics, when the U.S. Ski Team ran a routine blood test and discovered that Freeman’s glucose levels were abnormally high. Figuring they’d made a mistake, the team physiologists disregarded the test. But when it came up elevated again a month later, they sent Freeman, then 19, to a doctor.

“So I went down to Salt Lake, thinking ‘This is such a waste of my time,'” recalls Freeman, known for being protective of his training routine. “It took the guy five minutes to diagnose me as a type 1 diabetic. That’s about all I heard on that particular visit.” The disease has a hereditary component, but it didn’t run in the Freeman family. “It was a complete shock,” he recalls. “I had just won my first national title – was the first junior to do it since Bill Koch – and then I have a doctor tell me that maybe I won’t race anymore.”

At first, Freeman had trouble accepting what the disease would mean to him. “Most people who get diagnosed with diabetes have spent two weeks in the hospital, and they’re relieved to get the diagnosis,” he explains, grimacing as he thinks of the physical effects of sugary blood. “For me, it was like, ‘Fine, leave me alone.’ “

Despite being depressed and “somewhat in denial” about the disease, he started reading up on it with characteristic tenacity, and it wasn’t long before he saw his way back into the sport. “I did a lot of reading and a lot of research, and I found some encouraging things. I saw things like the diabetic marathon record, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s pretty pathetic. I’m diabetic, and I could break that right now.'” So he kept training. “The Olympics were my dream,” says Freeman. “I wanted to be at 2002. I was focused more than I should have on that event. I was going to get there, and I didn’t care how.”

Striving for the Olympics didn’t bring Freeman out of his depression, but doing so well there did; on top of contributing to the relay result, Freeman was 15th in the pursuit. “I proved that I could still do it,” he says. “And that I could compete to be the best American skier there ever was.” Meanwhile, Freeman continued to educate himself about the science of the disease. Today, he can tell you about the glycemic index, mitochondria and brand-new insulin formulas. “It’s unreal,” says coach Nystad. “He’s such an expert.” (So much so that doctors who were approached for this article referred the writer back to Freeman himself.)

“If you don’t control your diabetes, it’s going to hurt your body,” says Freeman, “and my body is my life. On some level I immediately knew that, so I wasn’t going to mess with it. I did what the doctor told me to do.” That was insulin therapy, constant blood glucose tests and becoming obsessive-compulsive about the chemical properties of food and drink. “I’ve had to change the way I eat, the way I look at food,” Freeman says. “Food is not something I do for pleasure. Food is not something I do because it feels good. It’s something I do for fuel, and I put the best thing in that will fuel my body.”

At 3 p.m., Kris has to excuse himself. it’s time to hit the gym. It’s late-September, and he’s been in Park City since mid-summer, training hard with his teammates twice a day. There was also an on-snow camp in New Zealand, and some speaking engagements for diabetic groups. Freeman is a spokesman for Eli Lilly and a hero to diabetics everywhere, but he’s understandably happy to switch the conversation away from his disease to his skiing: “The goal is that when the race starts, I’m not a diabetic; I’m just a racer, and I’m going to win.”

“He’s got all th
e skills,” says Nystad. “He’s talented, he has that work ethic, he’s intelligent and methodical. He’s professional. He doesn’t leave anything to chance.” Nystad, a Norwegian by birth, says that Freeman also has something that is rare in American culture: “He’s realized that rest is as important as training. He makes the hard choice not to ski every day. He’s confident enough to take time off. Traditionally that hasn’t been valued in the United States. The ‘no-pain-no-gain’ attitude is more common.”

This last spring and summer, Freeman returned from the European competition season and spent three months at his parents’ home in New Hampshire. He does this every year, to recalibrate his goals and enjoy the climate that “feels like home” to him. (He says the high desert of Utah is a little too hot and dry.) Asked if the three months in the White Mountains gave him a chance for his accomplishments to sink in, he gives a there-is-no-spoon response worthy of Neo. “There wasn’t anything to sink in,” Freeman says. “I knew how I’d done.”

Maybe it’s a function of living with a disease that requires constant vigilance or simply a forward-looking attitude, but Freeman isn’t interested in dwelling on the terrain he’s put behind him. “The next goal,” he says, “is to win a medal in 2006.”

What Kris Freeman deals with every day

What is type 1 diabetes? Kris Freeman’s pancreas doesn’t produce insulin, so any carbohydrates he eats build up as sugar in his bloodstream – a condition that would ultimately be fatal if Freeman didn’t artificially manage his system.

To monitor himself, Freeman drips his blood on a strip of paper that he then runs through a handheld computer that measures his glucose level. He then does some math to figure out exactly how far off the scale his last meal put him. He might do this five or six times before a 9 a.m. race start.

If his glucose is low, he’ll eat or drink the exact amount of carbohydrates he needs to bring it up (a few grams make a big difference). If his glucose is high (commonly the case), he’ll break out his needle and inject insulin that he gets from Eli Lilly, his chief sponsor.

If he miscalculates, and overdoses by just a few small units, he can send his blood-sugar so low that he’ll pass out — an eventuality his coaches have been trained to confront. On the way to passing out, he’ll feel dizzy, fatigued, numb and sweaty – a state Freeman says he’d never confuse with post-race exhaustion.

He injects the stuff into a pinched roll of fat in his abdomen, which, with four percent body-fat, can be difficult. “I’ve built up some scar tissue,” he says. “So now I have to do soft work on my own stomach to break up the crunchy tissue in there.” He might inject five or six times a day, and if he goes too deep with the needle, into his abdominal muscles, the pain is excruciating.

Among the factors to which Freeman must give extra consideration are altitude (glucose absorption rises with altitude), nervousness (adrenaline releases the body’s sugar stores), partying (a routine diet and sleep schedule is ideal) and illness (when sick, his insulin sensitivity can decrease five-fold).

Going into a race, Freeman leaves room for error by running his sugar high, since he’ll be burning it and he won’t be able to stop to adjust it. Coaches around the course have sugary drinks in case he goes low. But all in all, Freeman insists that his diabetes is not a disadvantage in this sport. “When I’m in a race, I’m not at a disadvantage,” he says. “Before the race it’s a pain. After the race it’s a pain. But during the race, if I do all the lead-up correctly, there’s no difference between me and the next guy.”

Kris Freeman’s racing resume

>5th, 4x10km relay
Winter Olympics, Salt Lake City, 2002 (second leg)
>1st, 30km CL
U.S. Cross-Country Championships, Rumford, Maine, 2003
>1st, 10km CL
U.S. Cross-Country Championships, Rumford, Maine, 2003
>1st, 30km CL
Under-23 World Championships, Bormio, Italy, 2003
>4th, 15km
Nordic World Championships, Val di Fiemme, Italy, 2003

Kris Freeman’s bloodstream

0.25 — Percentage of Americans with Type 1 diabetes, the more severe form of the disease, which forces Freeman to inject insulin up to six times a day.

220 — Milligrams of glucose per 100cc that ski team physiologists found in Freeman’s blood during a routine blood test in August 2000. The normal range for a typical, non-diabetic person is 70-120.

180 — Blood glucose level that Freeman says is ideal at the start; it’s a little high, because he doesn’t have time to stop during races.

46 — The lowest Freeman’s ever scored, as the result of an accidental combination of too much insulin and too little food: “I was in the shower, and I was looking at the wall, and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a cool wall … wait a minute.’ “

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About the Author: Pete Rugh