This week did not end as it started, let me tell you that much. Having put my routine in order, it was time for something to be added to make it a bit more challenging. Let’s get started then, shall we?
Monday:
No more biking to work for me. I’ve been taking the bus instead but still getting in a nice longish bike ride early in the morning before leaving for work. I am loving this routine and actually enjoying the fact that I’m now leaving for rides in the dark when the city is quiet and mysterious.
All good for eating and meditation habits and a good day at work too.
Tuesday:
Up even earlier today. Look how empty the streets are. I rode on them for a bit before ducking in to an off road path as the sun started rising.
The first spanner was tossed in the works today. While Sage’s Covid symptoms have nearly disappeared, now Daegan is testing positive and not feeling great. I’m feeling fine. I stay home from work, though, to hopefully keep the infection to myself.
Wednesday:
I feel good but wonder if I shouldn’t be taking a rest day just in case I’m getting sick. As usual I feel lower mood, motivation, and energy level as a result. Or maybe I’m getting sick? Who knows.
I work from home, though, and that means good homemade food and time to rest.
Thursday:
I couldn’t take it. I had to get out for a ride I don’t even care. At 5:35 AM it was my earliest departure yet.
I took my usual route – a 24km loop up north and back but still so quiet. In over an hour out on the road only 19 vehicles passed me. Another big difference: there was much more wildlife. In the video you can see a skunk that crossed my path as I rode through a park. What I didn’t catch was another bigger skunk on the road just a few minutes later. It crossed right in front of my tires and was so startled I could hear its little claws scrabbling on the road next to my tire. I might be much safer from human traffic at this hour but I’m not sure what I’d do if I were to be sprayed by a skunk. (Reading online just now I see that it usually means throwing away everything you’re wearing and washing yourself and your bike may times over with dishwashing liquid and hydrogen peroxide. Yuck!)
About half way through the ride in a fancy suburban neighbourhood I saw a large animal trotting in the cul de sac ahead of me. My brain didn’t know how to process it. There was something cat-like about how it was moving but it was too big to be one. (We have no wild cats that big here). When I stopped it got headed down the road past me as I fumbled for my camera. I was too slow. It took one look back at me from between two houses before continuing to trot out of view. It was one of the largest coyotes I’d ever seen, possibly a coywolf. I wasn’t worried for myself but a “Lost Cat” sign I’d seen on a wall a few hundred metres before suddenly made a whole lot of sense.
Feeling strong, I pushed myself on the way home to not only manage the highest average speed I got on this route, I got a personal record on a segment that included a downhill and a steep climb. (57km/hr on the way down!)
Friday:
Friday when my alarm went off at 4:45 PM I was really sleepy. I struggled to stay awake during meditation and then, when it was done decided to lie back down and go to sleep for another 2.5 hours. No time for a ride before work I just got ready for work and settled in.
My work motivation was at an all time low. I managed to get things done but it was like pulling teeth. Inside my mind I was throwing tantrums for every single task. At the end of the day I was more tired than I started. But then, that’s how it goes on days I don’t ride right?
But by 6PM there were signs it wasn’t just an inactive day. My throat was sore, a headache was coming and I was extremely tired. It was Sage’s night to cook dinner so fortunately I had nothing else to do. I sat on the couch, read and scrolled through TikTok & Bluesky.
By bedtime I was feeling awful. I did read a fantastic article from a 1935 issue of The New Yorker about Typhoid Mary. I knew only bits and pieces and nothing about her later life which turned out to be reasonably good. You might be able to find it here. However, depending on if you’ve read any other New Yorker articles recently you may not see it. My apologies.
When I woke at 12:45 AM I had chills though no fever and a bit of a stuffy nose. I took some nighttime cold medicine and settled in on the couch with my iPad and a copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC TV Series from 1981 I downloaded from the library. Comfort TV is a big part of our family’s treatment plan for any sickness and this is one of the best. I remember seeing an episode of it on PBS when I was about 12 and it completely opened my mind to Douglas Adams and other British comedy. It’s a very fun series and someone has uploaded it to Archive.org so you, too, can watch the whole thing here if you like.
Saturday:
Saturday was a pretty much useless day. I did a bit more reading, enjoying our library’s New Yorker magazine subscription as well as other articles from my news feed. I also did a little too much scrolling.
Data:
This week’s data has some quirks, what with my getting sick part way through and all. So let’s see how this looks:
How was my sleep?
Pre-Covid my sleep seemed reasonably good though it always seemed to take a bike ride to jump start my energy and feel fully awake. Not sure if that’s just how I am or something to do with fighting the virus. In any case – here’s the data:
This one’s tough to interpret because for some reason my watch didn’t count my going to sleep on Friday night until after I woke up and watched TV so it thinks I went to bed at like 2:30. In reality I went to sleep a little after 10 and woke up at 12:45 so probably a couple of hours more. If I count that day I averaged 7 hours 6 minutes with a quality of 63 on average. If I remove Friday and Saturday night’s sleep, it is still 7 hours 7 minutes with a quality of 69.4 on average. So it seems that except for being sick, I’m on the right track.
Stress:
Well this one was a fun one. The week after I talked about how the stress metric isn’t always a great measure of anything but that I could see myself getting sick with Covid on it last time, I have similar data here. Check this out:
Everything looks pretty good until Saturday and then came the high stress. I’m happy to see that it’s ramping back down again today and that lines up with how I feel. During the day today I do see it being more sensitive than usual. Making a simple breakfast or lunch raised my stress level a bit more than usual as did taking a shower. But it’s about half what it was yesterday. We’ll see how I feel tomorrow. if I work I’ll be working from home for sure.
Intensity Minutes:
This week I battled between taking it easy as I might be getting sick and doing some exercise with the hope that it prevented it. And of course once I actually was sick I did as close to nothing as possible. The end result is that I didn’t get anywhere near my goal – and of course I’m not disappointed by that at all. Either it helped stave it off for a while, helped it be less severe or did nothing, I’m where I am and feeling reasonably good.
Summary:
Though I didn’t meet my exercise goals this week I met all my other goals and the intent of this experiment. I exercised as much as I could, made sleep and meditation a priority, ate well, and then, when it was time to scale back, found a comfy couch and book, read tons and watched relaxing TV.
I think I got all of the answers I need from this phase of the project and can end it here. Here’s what I now know (all assuming I’m feeling well):
- Sleep and nutrition are the foundation of everything I do. If I get enough sleep, I have the energy to make good food and the will to avoid snacking too much.
- With good sleep and nutrition, the next foundation to feeling good is exercise. A minimum of 1 hour/day 4-5 days per week is good. That feeds back into ensuring good sleep and good mood.
- As little as I like to admit it, having considered myself someone who is not a morning person, getting up early and getting on the bike right away is the best choice for me.
- Another thing I had trouble admitting and avoided even trying for years was getting out the door and doing things before coffee. 3-4 years ago, I would have 2-3 mugs of coffee before I considered myself ready for anything. This has shown me that not only can I get by on 2 mugs in an entire day, none of them needs to come until after I’ve exercised.
- I always thought I loved the way late nights felt in the city (though work schedules have kept me from being able to actually do this). Having worked night shift as a teenager I loved the otherworldly feeling of 3AM out in the world. Little did I know that same feeling remained everywhere at 5:30 AM as well. And I can access this every day.
So is everything perfect? Have I solved the happiness equation? Not by a long shot. But this entry is long enough. I’ll write another one today to describe the next phase of the project including a few new metrics.
