Introducing IFL Warrior… Ollie Dobson

My name is Ollie Dobson, I am 28 years old living in Lancaster, England and I have been diagnosed with diabetes since the age of 12.

I have entered "The Lakesman half", a long distance triathlon involving a 1.2 mile swim, a 56 mile bike ride and a 13 mile run starting and finishing in Keswick on the 19th of June. This is something that I began training for last year. It is well out of my comfort zone having not done much cardio/endurance based training before and not having much swimming experience. One thing for sure is that endurance training gives you a lot of thinking time and one thing that has kept coming to mind is how privleged I am as a type 1 diabetic to have always had the support and medication I need to survive and live a healthy life, so much so that I didn't need to think twice about entering such a challenging event. This is why I have decided to turn the challenge into a fundraising event to help those who through no fault of their own have type one diabetes but not the means to live a full and healthy life.

The event: https://thelakesman.com/the-half

I am hoping to raise £1000. (The Grassrootz platform used by Insulin for Life Global is an Australian based fundraising platform. The page is set up in Australian dollars which is currently around 0.57 pounds Stirling)

What is Type 1 Diabetes
Type 1 Diabetes is a serious condition where your blood glucose (sugar) level will get too high because your body can't make a hormone called insulin. We all need insulin to live. It does an essential job. It allows the glucose in our blood to enter our cells and fuel our bodies, so for a type 1 diabetic not producing insulin, we have to inject it (up to 10 times a day). Injecting insulin is a balancing act between the right amount of insulin to the right amount of glucose, along with many other factors that need consideration to try and get a good sugar level and avoid a multitude of other health problems. The cause is unclear but it has nothing to do with diet or lifestyle, unlike type 2 diabetes which can be.

For more information on type 1 diabetes see here.

Without insulin a type 1 diabetic will not live much longer than a week.

• 50% of people who need insulin in disadvantaged regions cannot afford or access it
• The cost of insulin can be as much as 150% or more of a family's income
• Governments in many countries do not provide or subsidise insulin for people with diabetes

For this reason, Insulin for Life Global (IFL) contributes to the international efforts to try to improve the availability of insulin to the 50% of people in developing countries who cannot afford or access insulin and diabetes supplies. Around the world, people are discarding perfectly good, unexpired, unopened and unused insulin in immense quantities. There are several reasons for this; changing insulin brands, change of therapy and surplus insulin after gestational diabetes. IFL Global focuses its efforts on raising awareness to help solve these two problems: avoidable death and usable waste. A simple solution with life-changing results. IFL Global also fundraises to support transport costs; the biggest barrier to keeping this operation going.

You can participate in my fundraising efforts by donating via this fundraising page: insulinforlife.grassrootz.com/oliver-dobson-the-lakesman-half.