Meet our T1D Champion, Dan Hood. Dan was diagnosed with T1D 44 years ago. Read Dan’s full story below!

“Diagnosed with type 1 diabetes 41 years ago (as an adult), Dan Hood made one vow to himself: “I understand that T1D is a 24/7 disease, but I am not going to let it define me. I won’t give up on any of my dreams!”

And he’s lived by those words ever since. Dan and his wife, Gisela, are world-class adventurers and have never let Dan’s type 1 slow them down—although it has thrown them a few curveballs along the way.

“I learned the hard way that being prepared with Type 1 means having duplicates of everything—and I do mean everything,” Dan says. Twenty years ago, he was in Haiti, when the only vial of insulin he had fell on a ceramic floor and shattered. A Haitian engineer Dan somehow secured a vial of insulin. That’s when Dan came up with his “duplicates of everything” motto.

Years later, Dan and Gisela traveled to Cape Horn, at the tip of South America, where the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans meet. He thought he’d packed duplicates of all his diabetes supplies. But he hadn’t considered the possibility that his insulin pump would fail when he landed in Lima (on his way to catch a flight to Buenos Aires, where the ship to Cape Horn was waiting). When Dan got to Buenos Aires, he dashed to four or five pharmacies; the last one sold him a glucose meter and test strips. He spent the next three weeks using insulin pens. Now he never leaves home without an extra pump, a meter, and plenty of test strips.

More recently, Dan and Gisela decided to climb Mount Everest—a grueling, 19-day endurance test. While they were in Katmandu, their guide reminded them to take medicine for altitude sickness. Three days in—climbing 3,000 feet a day—Dan’s blood sugar spiked tremendously, and he kept taking more and more insulin. By Day 7—at around 18,000 feet—one of his fellow travelers lent Dan a satellite phone and put him in touch with a doctor from Istanbul, who figured out that the altitude sickness medication was interfering with his blood chemistry and suggested that Dan take only ¼ the original dosage. Problem solved!

Think Mount Everest is Dan’s most strenuous Type 1 travel story? It’s not. A couple years after that trip, Dan and Gisela went to Uganda to see the Silverback gorillas. “Uganda was much more demanding from a climbing perspective,” Dan says. “The climb is vertical. You’re on your hands and knees, grasping at saplings. We climbed for six or seven hours. After all that, we could only be with the gorillas for a total of 45 minutes. But it was worth it!”

Dan and Gisela—each with their own reindeer and sled—have also tracked the Northern Lights 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden. Next up? They’re climbing Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps.

You can be sure of two things: They’ll have a great time, and Dan will have duplicates of everything he needs to manage his diabetes!”