'The healthiest sick person they know'

A member of the PaulTracy.com cycling team out of Las Vegas, Balch will make his first appearance in today's El Tour de Tucson 109-mile race.

"He's tenacious, he's fearless and is an unbelievable competitor," said team captain Louie Amelburu. "There are so many adjectives you can use to describe him."

That tenacity helped Balch beat cancer and continue to ride competitively despite a recent diagnosis of type 1 diabetes.

The 46-year-old insurance salesman from Las Vegas has competed in more than 700 races in his life, including Ironman Canada and the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii.

"My friends call me the healthiest sick person they know," Balch said. "I don't consider myself a cancer victim — that was almost 20 years ago — and diabetes is not a major life change for me. It's just a new huge part of my routine."

Balch began racing bikes more than 20 years ago. At the suggestion of his wife, Laura, he got a bike so they could ride together.

While purchasing the bike, he found a flyer for a duathlon: a running, biking, running competition. It was the beginning of a lifelong passion with multi-sport races and competitions.

"The irony is that I got the bike so we could ride together," Balch said. "I remind her that this was (her) idea."

It was while he was training for one of these multisport races that he was originally diagnosed with testicular cancer in the summer of 1989. The cancer had not spread to other parts of his body, but it did require surgery.

He said it was a wake-up call to how precious life can be.

"I was in Provo, Utah, for a race and I thought this could be my last race," Balch said. Three weeks after his final surgery he was back to training.

His mother-in-law, Sharen Norton, was stunned when she saw him running for the first time after surgery.

"I was driving and saw him running," she said. "He wasn't going real fast but he was still running. I stopped the car and said, 'What are you doing?' I thought it was way too early to be doing that, but there he was."

Balch's diagnosis with type 1 diabetes came in April 2007. He spent a night in the hospital and was back on his bike two days later. By the end of the week he was racing again.

Amelburu said it's just not Balch's style to let things like cancer and diabetes slow him down.

"When I found out he had diabetes, I thought, 'This guy is an unbelievable animal,' " Amelburu said. "What he did in the year and a half before (his diagnosis) shouldn't have happened because of what was happening with his body."

Balch said he is still learning to adjust and that this has forced him to become very aware of how he is feeling; he makes sure he eats every 30 minutes. He is also aided by an insulin pump; however, he said it's something he won't need this weekend due to the relatively early nature of the diagnosis.

"I need to find out what the new normal is for me," Balch said. "But there's nothing about this condition that says I can't exercise."