Living with T1D
What managing T1D as a professional athlete actually looks like
By Ellen Jones · 5 min read
It doesn't switch off for training
When I was diagnosed at 19, the hardest thing to accept wasn't the diagnosis itself — it was realising there's no version of the day where diabetes isn't part of it. Training doesn't get a pass. Matchdays don't get a pass. It's there before a session, during it, and after it, whether I've planned for it or not.
What changed over time wasn't the condition — it was how much attention I had to pay to patterns. A hard double-session day behaves differently to a light recovery day. Travel days behave differently to home days. None of that was obvious to me in the first few months.
The unglamorous part: checking, adjusting, checking again
A lot of the day-to-day isn't dramatic. It's checking my glucose before I get changed for training, again at the halfway point of a session if it's a long one, and again afterwards. It's carrying supplies in my kit bag as automatically as I'd carry boots. None of it is exciting, and that's kind of the point — the goal is for it to become routine, not something I have to think hard about every single time.
Some days it goes exactly to plan. Some days it doesn't, and I've had to adapt mid-session more times than I can count. That's normal. It doesn't mean something's gone wrong — it means the plan needed adjusting, which is different.
What I'd tell someone just diagnosed
You don't need to have it figured out straight away. I didn't. What helped most was being honest with my coaches and medical staff early, rather than trying to manage it quietly on my own — that's what let me keep training properly while I was still learning my own patterns.
This is written from my own experience, not as medical advice — for anything specific to your own management, that's what your diabetes team is for. What I can offer is what it's actually like to live with it while playing at a high level, day to day.
It gets easier, not because diabetes gets smaller, but because you get better at noticing what your own body is telling you.
Want support built around your own situation?
Everything here is general — a coaching session with Ellen is where it gets personal to your training, your diagnosis and your goals.