Jacob Dennis: perseverance through fitness and faith

Being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, no matter what age, is not easy to live with. Jacob Dennis, a diabetic, took his childhood diagnosis and used it as a catapult to make himself better through a cross-country bike race.

The journey to the race was far from easy though, and the now 21-year-old Dennis had to forge through quite a storm to become the resilient person he is today.

Dennis was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes when he was just six years old and has dealt with the life-changing consequences of the glucose-attacking disease his whole life. He reflected on some tell-tale signs of the disease he showed before being formally diagnosed.

“The signs were there for probably a month, month and a half beforehand,” Dennis said. “I craved nothing but candy, and even though I was trained, I’d still wet the bed at night.”

For a kid his age, these issues might not have been signals of an underlying disease, because a lot of the time kids are going to be kids. Because of this, the issues might not have gotten the attention they deserved from parents until it was too late.

However, these symptoms are not uncommon in diabetics, specifically the necessity for glucose to enter the system as a result of lowered insulin levels. The undiagnosed problems continued to happen until eventually, Dennis suffered from ketoacidosis.

Ketoacidosis, according to the Mayo Clinic, occurs when insulin breaks down body fat and creates excess acid in the blood as a result of not having sugar to break down.

It took multiple hospital visits for doctors to figure out what was wrong, even though the symptoms were pretty apparent that he had diabetes.

He said he didn’t know why they took so long to figure it out, but eventually he was officially diagnosed.

Dennis took the diagnosis as a blessing in disguise and was glad that he was diagnosed earlier on in life rather than later. He has been able to live with it and not had to adapt to the devices that are common with diabetes patients.

However, he still had to grow up with the devices and learn to cope with the disadvantages at a very young age.

It was around this time when Dennis also began to partake in youth sports, specifically soccer, and had to learn to deal with his disease as a fledgling athlete.

He also had to understand the issues of being different from a large portion of the population he grew up with and often felt like an outsider looking in.

“The first eight years after I was diagnosed, probably from when I was six to about 14 years old, I barely took care of it,” Dennis said. “I was a kid. It was easy to get into a victim mindset where it's like, 'I don't want to do this. Why do I have this and other people don't?’ It’s tough.”

For a kid his age to develop a mindset like that

Outside of his parents, Dennis did not have many people to talk to about his condition, let alone people who cared and were empathetic about the situation. This started to change for the better when he made some good friends at his elementary and middle school.

He noted that his parents helped initially by letting his friends know, and from that point on, Dennis’ support system grew as his friend circle grew.

One of his closest friends, Wesley Sizer, picked up on a lot of Dennis’ diabetes habits early on in the friendship and made sure that he was taken care of.

“It was a thing of like paying attention to him sometimes,” Sizer said. “The way his blood sugar was would a lot of times affect his mood, and we could well tell when he was low or high because it would show. The best thing we did was treat it as normal and realize that he has to deal with these things.”

Sizer was Dennis’ go-to man in middle school when dealing with diabetes incidents. He recounted multiple occasions when Dennis would go to him to assist in walking to the nurse's office across campus in case Dennis fainted or could not make it there himself.

There were times when Sizer recognized that Dennis’ mental health was improving, and Sizer cited his support systems as a large part of that.

Dennis also appreciated the help from his friends immensely.

However, just as easily as the mental side of dealing with an autoimmune disease can get better, it can just as easily get worse. Around his sophomore year of high school, Dennis was going through a particularly difficult time with a variety of issues including his diabetes.

The added stress, in combination with the loop of being affected by diabetes, prompted Dennis to make a change and leave Canyon del Oro High School in Oro Valley to go live with his mother up in Scottsdale.

He noted that this change was one of the best things he had done for himself.

“I would argue that it's one of the better things that I've done,” Dennis said. “Not because Tucson was horrible, but because of the people I met up in Phoenix. They're some of the best people I've ever met.”

After moving up to the Valley, Dennis took a look at how to get out of the rut he was in and turned his eyes to, in his words, “fitness and faith.”

He expressed that having a spiritual relationship with God helped him immensely. His stepfather, Joel, was the one who really got him into fitness.

“He [Joel] has a story that by the time he was 18, both of his parents were dead,” Dennis said. “I can’t even imagine what that's like, it's horrible. One thing that I do know what that does for you is it makes you have to grow up pretty damn quickly. When he told me that, I was 16, so just hearing a story like that was really inspiring, and made me want to do something difficult.”

Dennis got in the gym after that, and on another whim decided to foray into his first-ever triathlon. After doing this he aimed to take on the more difficult tasks in life.

After graduating high school, he took some time to think before moving up to Flagstaff and NAU in 2022. He saw the move as a way to start fresh, meet new people and really think about what he wanted his life to be like.

The move to NAU led him to plenty of new opportunities, including a charity bike race through his fraternity, Pi Kappa Phi, where he was able to get the chance to ride across the country.

Dennis was intrigued by the opportunity to participate in an event like that, especially considering he had been consistently working out and trailing for various triathlons.

It was a massive chance for him to prove his growth over the past few years, and he took it in stride.

The event was sponsored by Ability Experience, a charitable organization run through the fraternity geared towards supporting people with disabilities by providing various experiences for them.

Every summer, the charity hosts what they call the “Journey of Hope”, which sees 50 participants bike from either Los Angeles or San Francisco all the way to the steps of the Capitol Building in Washington DC, while simultaneously spreading awareness for people with disabilities.

Dennis took this trek in the summer of 2024, and was enamored with the way it made him look at his life differently and find a part of himself that he could not see before.

“You learn a little something about yourself when you’re forced to get up at four in the morning every morning,” Dennis said. “There’s something to that where you find the disciplined part of yourself that you didn’t know you had.”

In order to complete the feat in a timely manner, Dennis and the cohort had to bike for eight or nine hours a day to make it to the nation’s capital. On the longer days, the group would go 200+ miles by way of the interstate and state routes.

At the same time as this being an event for a charity, it was also a grand tour of the United States, and Dennis got to see plenty of the beauty this country has to offer. He saw everything from the red rocks in southern Utah to the sprawling plains of the American Midwest.

Dennis enjoyed the rigor and challenges the ride presented, and noted that everything he went through in his life prior to changing his mentality really helped get him to this point.

For him the bike ride was truly life changing, and his friends were all extremely happy to see Dennis succeed, especially Sizer. Sizer had been with him since day one, and was proud of him for making a step like that after seeing him struggle during the end of his time living in Tucson.

“I was really happy for him because he struggled in high school,” Sizer said. “It's good to hear that he has a drive to get a degree and to have something to make a living and create a good life.”