It’s funny how fast a month has gone – and in reality I feel like a completely different human at this point. I haven’t met every single goal with perfection but I did reasonably well and found a few tweaks to share.
Monday:
Monday I biked to work but left a bit late again. And so I took a meandering route to get me there, adding a few extra kilometres here and there and still arriving in time. Eating and meditation were on point. Work has been busy enough to keep me challenged but not stress me out and the weather this morning was great.
Here’s a bit from that ride:
Tuesday:
I worked from home on Tuesday as I had to get out the door early. My new bike was downtown being checked out and it was time to pick it up. As luck would have it, as I headed out the door it started to rain. Luckily, though, the rain pretty much stopped by the time I got to the shop and there was no rain on the way home. There was a fair bit of grit, especially in the trail construction area, so my nicely cleaned bike was no longer so pretty when I got home. And as luck would have it my bone conduction headphones died just before I got home. I don’t have the purchase documentation but I’ve tried to file a warranty claim. Fingers crossed that I don’t have to buy a new pair.
Eating at home meant lunches and snacks were easier and required no preparation. When I got home I made refried bean burritos for everyone. It was a good night.
I particularly like the feel in this video. This particular bike path has high concrete “Jersey barriers” on the left to keep traffic away, and on the right you could see the regional train (GO Train) passing me by. Later you can see the quiet path I took most of the way home. This passes not far from our old place so I’m very familiar with that route.
Wednesday: Wednesday morning I changed up my approach to riding. While I do like riding to work I often miss relaxing on the bus. I also find that even though I have a shower at work, if I work hard getting there, I’m still sweating for a while after I get out of the shower. So the new approach has been to set the alarm 15 min earlier: 5:00 AM, have a quick snack (banana, toast with honey, something like that), and get out on the bike. On this day I did a ~23 kilometre route through the north. It’s so quiet that on average I am only passed by a car about once every 2 min. I was too sleepy to remember the camera this morning. It’s OK, I took the same route the next morning so you’ll see it.)
Then when I get home I make up a full breakfast (usually eggs, English muffin and kimchi), grab a quick coffee, shower and go to work on the bus. This worked beautifully. I got to read a bit on the way to work and listen to some music.
Food and meditation continue to be reasonably good and my mood is almost always like I’ve had a cup of coffee even when I haven’t had one. This lines up with what I found out a couple of winters ago with an experiment like this: it didn’t matter how much light or how often I went outdoors but when I exercised more, my mood improved.
Thursday: I got out the door even earlier this morning. 5:51 AM – about a half an hour before sunrise. Let me tell you, the city at that hour is so beautiful and traffic was light. Still I noticed a couple of strange things. The first is when waiting at a stoplight, someone in the car (the CLOSED car) behind me was wearing so much cologne that I could smell it outside. The second is that I wasn’t the only person who needed a cup of coffee. This person decided that we drive on the left side here in Canada:
Luckily they were going slow enough and there were so few of us on the road that at least at that point things worked out. I didn’t hear any horns later so I suspect they figured out which side to drive on after turning left here.
The ride itself was beautiful, though. And not only that, I’m noticing that my fitness is improving My average speed is now in the 22-23 km/hr up from 20 at the beginning of the summer. Hills I dreaded are now feeling less overwhelming and not only that I am climbing them faster with a lower heart rate.
Here’s what that day’s ride looked like:
Again food and meditation were not noteworthy. I’m getting the hang of that part, I think.
Friday: Normally I would ride on Friday but Sage is still not feeling great at this point and not sleeping well. Instead of getting up and making noise getting myself out the door I also slept in and so did she. The plan is to take the rest day today instead of Sunday. The extra sleep seems to be helping Sage so it was worth it.
What was fascinating though, was this: While meditation and eating habits were good and I slept longer than usual, my energy level and motivation all day were lower. My mood was fine but not as happy and excited as usual. I was missing my ride. Definitely something to remember if I ever decide I want to take a break for some nonsense reason I make up in order to justify my being a bit lazy.
Friday night we did order out – this time from a different burrito place that we used to order from often. This one adds rice to their mix and it didn’t leave me hungry and sleeping poorly like the other ones we’d tried (which did taste really great). So now we know what works.
Saturday: I woke up ready to go at 4:30 AM which happened to be the time Daegan was getting home from work and Sage who wasn’t sleeping well was also awake. I was a bit sleepy and it was a bit too early to go out on the bike so I decided to make a normal breakfast. After a few bites, everything caught up with me. I was exhausted! I went back to bed for over two hours more sleep.
That left me with only a few minutes to get ready and wake up before Hindi class and then it was time for lunch so it wasn’t until afternoon that I was able to get on my bike. By then it was over 30°C and the sun was hot. I put a bag of gummy bears in my jersey, two bottles of water, one with electrolytes and one without and headed out on a route I’d never tried before. The loop took me about 40 kilometres and kept me busy for two hours. I drank all the water, ate all the snacks but despite that I still set a personal record on one of the toughest hills in our neighbourhood. So even having cooked in the sun for a while, I’m getting stronger and faster.
I did rush out the door and as usual forgot something. This time it was the GoPro so the video has only a little handheld footage. Still, it was a lovely and peaceful ride. One of the things I like about this route is it takes a road I use a lot for many rides: North Rivermede Road. It leads through an office/industrial park which could be busy if I were going at 9:00 AM or just after work but most of the time is pretty much empty as it is in the first shot in this video:
This ride did take me to a really nice spot along the way. One of the things I’m trying to do with these videos in addition to using them to motivate myself is to also share some of the nice things I see along the way. I had no idea this spot was here.
Dinner was chili which I hadn’t had in some time. It is filling without being overly so or feeling acidic even when I make it spicy.
Sunday: Today I woke up at 5:00 AM again. I had planned to get right out and ride on one of the busiest streets in Toronto: Yonge Street – which divides the city in to west/east ends and goes the length of the city (and far north beyond it also). Fortunately for me after I was all dressed and had everything I meant to bring, I got the notification that heavy rain was coming in just a few minutes. I changed my plans and started breakfast. And pour it did for a while. I had breakfast, read my book and relaxed, determined to wait out the worst of it. And by about 8:30 AM I had managed to do so. I figured with most places closed Sunday mornings and people going to church or sleeping in it was still a reasonably good bet to just take Yonge street anyway. It wouldn’t be as pretty as during sunrise but it would still be a fun downhill recovery ride. I was right. It took me only about 40 minutes to get from almost the northern border of the city to the lake.
No Hindi class today as my teacher had another commitment so fortunately I didn’t have to rush home. I still took the subway home as the weather was looking a bit gloomy and threatening. And so far I’ve spent the time at home relaxing, spending time with family and catching up with social media and this site.
The data:
I like looking at the data after everything so I can compare my perception with what’s measured. I do know that a couple of the rides where I pushed myself made my heart rate variability go down a bit from the effort but other than that I know very little of what’s in the data. Let’s look together:
How was my sleep?
I feel like my sleep has been a little shorter but also reasonably good quality though not as restful as it could be from the extra exercise effort. The short answer is that I feel mostly well rested though a little tired at times. Let’s see what the data says:
My average time went down from 7hrs 27 min to 7 hrs 21 minutes but the quality went from 70.4 to 71.0. Neither is particularly significant though it does align with what I’m feeling.
Stress:
Well let me start by saying that my instinct above to talk about how I felt versus how the numbers looked is probably a good plan. After all, some are starting to say that smart watch data doesn’t really correlate to reality. So for what it’s worth, I’m taking it about the same as a tarot or horoscope reading (aside from more objective things like heart rate during exercise, kilometres, hours slept (though even that is questionable). I suspect there may be some correlation but it just doesn’t read at the resolution we think it does. For example, when I got COVID last time, I started feeling crappy and the stress on my watch started rising. Where normally it might sit at 20/100 when I’m relaxing, within a couple hours it had pegged the meter at 100. It also showed my respiration rate rose dramatically. So there’s some truth to it but maybe in reality like keeping a half full plastic bottle of water outside and using it as a “thermometer”. If it’s solid it’s freezing and if there’s condensation drops on the top it’s hot, if it’s wet on the outside it’s raining.
But all that said, let’s see what this looks like:
This one has gone down a bit also. From 30.6 last week to 28.3 this week. What I do notice is that those mornings I ride and I’m sitting in my office, my heart rate drops to about 58-60 and my stress levels go way down. And I’ve had that happening several days this week. I mean, look at the amount of “rest hours” I have been getting.
Intensity Minutes:
This week I still didn’t hit the target I had for increasing intensity minutes. In fact, last week I got 895 and this week it was 867. I was less active. Other metrics like stress and sleep quality and more importantly perceived mood and even things like how my fitness is coming along makes me think that perhaps 867 is just fine. However, I’m curious to see what happens if I can get this above 1000 again. That won’t happen with just morning rides. I think I need to add a longer weekend ride. Which I probably should anyway as there are not so many days left for long rides in lovely weather.
Summary:
So sleep quality has been going up, and stress has been going down. For fun I fed all the data I’ve been tracking here along with the summary of my cycling and asked to see if there are any conclusions or tweaks. Here are some of the things suggested:
- There’s a strong correlation between longer rides and sleep quality that night. This could be due to cortisol levels increasing as well as core temperature. This checks out. Sometimes after a really long ride I don’t sleep as well and don’t always feel very rested the next day.
- Afternoon rides tend to negatively impact my sleep that night as compared to morning rides. It’s worse if they’re longer or more intense.
- Morning rides actually improve my sleep. This is possibly due to reinforcing my sleep cycle, reducing stress (witness how relaxed I am at the office). They are most beneficial in the 1-2 hour range. The 1-1:30 range showed the best improvement in sleep.
So based on this it is suggesting that I aim for 4-5 of those a week. This aligns with my target before this as well: ride 4-5 times before work in the 20-30 km range and one big ride on the weekend then a rest day afterwards. If I do get stuck doing an afternoon ride, I need to keep them short and not so intense if my sleep quality is to be maintained. This is a shame as there is something I love about a big 5PM ride at top speed, working and sweating like crazy. But hey, this is about experimenting and maximizing enjoyment, not creating unnecessary orthodoxy, isn’t it?
Let’s see how the week ahead looks. Have the best week!
