Friday Thoughts 98

Greetings! Welcome to this week’s edition of Friday Thoughts, where I share what’s been on my mind and in my feed throughout the week. Enjoy!

Climbing out the of hole

I teased last week that I finally had a couple good nights of sleep. The trend, luckily has continued. Starting Labor Day Weekend I had a two week sickness. It manifested with a dull headache, periodic nausea and heavily interrupted sleep. When I started feeling better I got sick again, not surprising a couple weeks into the school year. That meant another stretch of poor sleep. My sleep scores dropped, and my HRV—which was already tanked from my mountainous ultra in early August—fell to levels I didn’t think possible.

I started coming back to life at the end of last week. I’ve been strict with caffeine, how much water and food I’m consuming at night and getting into bed consistently early. It’s been paying off with raising sleep scores—and more importantly, feeling well-rested in the morning.

My HRV, however, is still tanked, and dipping lower. I’m thinking (maybe hoping) that this is just part of the process. My overnight readings are getting higher, but still dropping very low, creating the lower-than-normal average. I took a week off from training, and started back lightly last weekend, and this helped. I got better rest and was able to sleep soundly through the night.

So while my training status is still strained, and has been for 5 or 6 weeks, I’m feeling hopeful that I’m getting back to normal training and fueling. While I was sick my eating habits were poor and I lost weight, not in a good way. I’ve been neglecting my lifting—as I typically do towards the end of each summer. It’s time to build my strength up, and get my lungs ready for a fast 5k in the end of October.

Ironically, it’s been stressful seeing my watch tell me I’m too stressed out to properly recovery and that I need to focus more and rest and recovery. At the same time, it has been beneficial. The first sickness I has was weird, and I felt very off, but couldn’t pin point what it was. Seeing the data after the first week or so confirmed my body was stressed. I’ve shown people the graph and they’ve suggested I just take the watch off, or that it’s broken. It isn’t though—it was actually confirming how I felt. And if I trust it when it tells me what I agree with, I should probably consider what it’s saying to it when it’s telling me something I don’t want to hear.

The main thing to get out of this is that these watches and the data are tools to help us better listen to our bodies. The ability to know when to push it, when to back off and chill—it’s all part of the process of living healthy and active lifestyle. I won’t follow the watch blindly, but I’ll continue to use it as a tool.

Normal

Starts dropping

Keeps getting lower when you think it’s flattening out

Hoping that eventually these rising sleep scores will pull the HRV up

See you in the gym!

—Justin Miner