Whether it’s sleep tracking, heart monitoring, step-counting or vagus nerve-stimulating, whatever your age, stage or ailment, chances are there’ll be a piece of wearable health tech for you. Most of us now own at least one wearable device, indicating that such gadgets are no longer the sole preserve of biohackers and gym bros.
As a 34-year old woman, a runner and a regular gym-goer, I am, in many ways, an anomaly. To date, my only sojourn into health tech has been a brief dalliance with sleep tracking apps, which only supercharged my preexisting insomnia with its daily tidings of doom. Even when I ran the New York Marathon back in November 2025, I found myself reluctant (perhaps stubbornly so) to invest in a running watch, preferring the familiarity of my iPhone (part of me also baulked at the idea of becoming the “all the gear no idea”, lycra-clad cliché).
Still, I couldn’t deny the fact that fuelling had been my one fatal downfall in New York (let’s just say that tweaking your energy gel intake on the morning of a marathon does not a happy stomach make). Not even the soaring vocals of Cynthia Erivo and Arianda Grande could help me defy gravity in those final miles.
In short, I decided to try a circular sensor fitted onto the back of my arm, inserted using a super-fine needle, which feeds back real-time glucose data to an app, displayed both as a graph and a running “Lingo count”, a numeric value based on size and duration of the glucose spikes detected throughout the course of a day. Each sensor lasts two weeks.
But, I wondered, as someone not living with diabetes, why should I even be tracking my glucose levels? “Glucose is a fuel that powers every human body, providing energy to mind, muscles and more,” explains Pamela Nisevich Bede, marathon runner and global nutritionist at Lingo by Abbott. “Tracking it helps people understand how their body uniquely responds to food, sleep, stress and movement and where small, everyday choices may be pushing them out of balance. The research is clear: keeping glucose levels in a healthy range and steady can help reduce the risk of chronic conditions, including progression from prediabetes to type 2 diabetes,” she continues. “And because glucose is the body’s primary fuel source during endurance exercise, understanding how it behaves is central to both performance and recovery. Over time, this can support more stable energy, better training quality and improved resilience across long training blocks.”
A few weeks later I received my first box of sensors and after a lot of procrastination, an indecent amount of “eek”-ing for a fully grown woman, and one thoroughly anticlimactic (and virtually painless) “click”, my first sensor was in place, fitted snugly on the back of my left arm. Now all I needed to do was commence with my training plan – all 473.9 kilometres of it.
