Welcome to this month’s edition of By The Numbers, where I break down data from my watch and training log to reflect on the past month.
I track a few simple metrics—average sleep, daily steps, and total workouts. I’ve been doing this monthly check in for three years now. This month however, is the first time I haven’t even looked at my watch. I turned off sleep score, HRV, performance conditioning and training status. Basically all those little metrics that annoy rather than help.
My watch is still collecting them in the background. It took lots of deliberation to quit, but I’m happy I did. I peaked twice in the month at my sleep score. Both times I thought I would be rewarded with a score in the 90s, but it was in the 50s… That was the final push I needed to stop caring.
I’ll keep tracking these in background for now. It’ll be nice to reflect on the month while taking it all in. Without further ado, here’s October by the Numbers.
Steps
Total: 303,541
Daily Average: 9792
A slight improvement after declining for a couple months. I’ll take it.
Sleep
Average Sleep Score: 80
Average Duration: 6 hours 54 minutes
There was one particularly bad night of sleep. Lots of tossing and turning, Clem woke me up to let her outside (which she never does). Anyway I wake up, able to sleep in a little later than typical and I was feeling refreshed! I think, this has got to be one of my top sleep scores, let me take a look. 54.. I don’t even know if it gets lower than that.
Other than that, sleep has been okay. As an early rising, the time change is tricky to navigate (insert chance to blame Clementine again). I noticed this morning my HRV has been tanked since then. But, bear with me, HRV tracking is for the birds.
Training`
Total Workouts: 14
I started October with 9 days off in a row! Hannah was traveling for work, and I was locked in on getting some house projects done. All my spare time went into that and I put training on the back burner. My main goal with training now is to move my body and have fun doing it. Keeping the frequency high with short workouts is key to me getting in the rhythm.
Final Thoughts
Thanks for reading this month’s By The Numbers. As always, I hope this inspired you to start a practice like this, and put all that data that you’re collecting to use. It’s been a very helpful tool for analyzing the data and actually doing something with me. It’s clear to me that I’m headed toward an analog watch life, and I’ll be free!
—Justin Miner