I’m actually really excited to start looking at some of the details. What does a week with COVID look like versus my usual active week for numbers. I got a peek today when I walked to the station to catch the bus to work. Normally if I ride the bus to work and just walk from home to the station and from the stop to my office and a little around the campus, I get maybe 7,000 steps in. When I was sick and at my least active I got hardly any – sometimes only a few hundred just to carry me from bed to couch to fridge to washroom and various permutations of that. My Garmin takes habits into account and sets your step targets based on recent habits, increasing them just a little to give you a push. Well, today I hit my step target before I even arrived at the station. Five minutes after leaving the campus this afternoon I got the notification that I’d hit double my target which was set at 2,500 for the day. As far as my Garmin was concerned, I was crushing it. And actually, given how I felt for the previous 10 days or so, I kind of think I am.
But let’s look at the actual gory details starting with data:
Data:
I’m excited to look at this as I don’t really know how it compares. Let’s start in the usual place, sleep – something that was almost my favourite thing to do last week.
Sleep:
Oof – there are some bad days there. That first one, the 25th isn’t quite as bad as it looks. That night I went to bed at 9:00 and slept until 1-2 AM then was up until almost 5:30. It must not have been that restful, though, as usually what happens when I do something like that is the watch just registers a big wake-up. But this time it just assumed I didn’t go to sleep until 5:00 AM.
As you can see, the overall average for the week isn’t that bad. Surprisingly it’s actually 5 minutes longer than the previous week when I was healthy. But the quality average went from 63 down to 53.6. My averages were getting up above 70 so while I might’ve been sleeping a lot, my body was busy fighting a virus and that takes a toll. It’s as bad as those nights you have recurring dreams of work. You might have had your eyes closed but you didn’t get much rest. I did try to have a few naps here and there and doubtless that helped a bit as did the fact that I did nothing taxing.
Still there was stress, as you can imagine:
Stress:
Stress is measured by heart rate variability and that is a measure of how taxed your parasympathetic nervous system is. If you’re in great shape and healthy, the tiny spaces between heartbeats vary in longer lengths (microseconds). If you’re not in good shape, stressed, excited, or sick, your heartbeat becomes much more regular. Surprisingly, for reasons I don’t understand, that’s not a good sign. So let’s see how busy my body was while I was sitting and reading, watching TV and napping:
This one surprised me at first. It looks about the same at first glance with average numbers in the 30s-40s. But the average did go up. When I was healthy and at my most active it was in the low to mid 30s. Now the average is up to 39.9. But here’s something to keep in mind. The week I did 1066 “intensity minutes” – my most active week, I had an average stress of 33.7. Activity also increases stress during and just afterwards. Pushing myself on a bike puts my body under stress. However, a week of lying in bed with COVID seems to have put it under almost 30% more stress. (Yes, yes, this is all taken with a grain of salt given the measurement tools I’m using. It’s more about the big trends than small ones and this one seems pretty big.
Intensity Minutes:
This one also surprised me because I did no actual exercise. Still, on two days I registered as “active” for a total of 22 minutes. One of those days I did ride the elevator downstairs and walk just outside the door but other than that no “exercise”. To me that’s a measurement of the activity threshold. In other words, what got my heart rate up enough to count as “exercise”. Likely it was something like making a sandwich. (For comparison, today’s total which was just me going to work was 45 minutes)
So here’s the data all in one place:
Media Consumption:
This was a huge change from previous weeks or even years. I set my systems to limit me to 20 min on TikTok and the same for Bluesky and did less than that. I still need to set up a method for giving you actual stats. But what I can tell you is I didn’t always hit my software limits but when I did, I stopped. I never hit them on BlueSky, only TikTok.
At first I barely had the brain to read anything. Mostly I took Daegan’s advice from when he was feeling his worst, play Balantro, a poker-inspired solitaire game on the iPad. I played this for hours.
Interestingly enough, I found that it was exciting to play when I felt bad and was a bear of little brain. When I felt more with it, I was no longer interested. It went from being un-put-downable, to completely boring in just a few days.
When I got more energy and felt a little restless but still wasn’t up for reading, I moved on to Hexxit 2, a flavour of Minecraft. Why? Because it’s a huge open world game I could “travel” in. I could feel like I was going places and doing things without moving more than my fingers.
Eventually I did get myself to the point where I could read and started having a really good time. I read a bunch from the New Yorker, essays and articles mostly. We’re lucky in that our library has a subscription so I can just download issues and read them cover to cover. Some is too political for me right now but there is still a ton of good stuff to be found.
One of my favourite reads of the week was 11 Women, 9 Dogs, Not Much Drama (and No Guys). It’s about a group of women in Texas whose retirement plan was to share land and live in tiny houses. It reminded me of a more fancy version of where Sage’s mom lived when she was still alive. As I approach retirement age (still another 10-20 years away if you ask me – or my bank account for that matter!) I am curious about alternative options for living that don’t leave us broke, lonely, or both. Aside from my gender (and its location!) making this a no-go, I do like the idea.
You can read about it at the New York Times. (The link is free so no paywall). You can also watch a video about them here:
I also spent a fair bit of time reading books. I finally finished The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang. I chose this book from the simple fact I know next to zero about Laos. I was reminded of it when I saw that the US recently placed a travel ban on them. It was a really interesting book and I learned a ton not just about the country but about history. It was a good read.
Another book I read has to do with a weird habit of mine. I’m a big fan of Stephen King’s “The Stand” – the story of a huge pandemic flu that kills off most of the human population leaving those that are left on two sides of a struggle of good and evil. I like it because of the characters. Somehow it feels “cozy” to me which is really strange but there you go. I’ve read it 3-4 times now. The second and third time I read it I was sick with a respiratory illness. The last time I read it was March 2020. No, I have no explanation.
This time, I didn’t read it again. Instead, when I got sick I asked Sage to pick up a book I had heard about a week before: The End of the World as we Know it: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene. It’s a huge book, almost the size of The Stand itself, but this one filled with short stories by many authors all taking place in the world. So far with a few exceptions I will not name because it’s crummy to post that kind of thing online for authors to find when it’s just my own opinion, it’s been amazing. I’ve really been enjoying it. Now I want more of this sort of thing – more stories from worlds I loved visiting in fiction!
And not only that I read at least two other books. Yes, social media limits do have an effect even when including silly card games and imaginary travel across fantasy worlds in how I spend my time.
Summary:
This was a totally sedentary week – so sedentary that an elevator ride and a walk outside the lobby counted as my “exercise” for the week.
My mood has been reasonably good though coming out of COVID I’m finding that my sleep isn’t great – I wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble getting back to sleep for 1-2 hours. Sage had similar issues as well at this stage. That and my personal thermostat changed. I feel much warmer than before. I need the air conditioning higher (as does Sage) and this morning a coworker saw me walking in to work in short sleeves and remarked that it was too cold to be dressed this way (it was 15°) but I felt great and in fact was a bit overheated when I got to my desk. That latter symptom cleared entirely by lunchtime.
By the end of the day I find myself feeling close to normal. I don’t want to get on the bike just yet but when I got to the station on the way home from work I thought to myself that I could totally go anywhere in the city, just bound down the stairs to the train and go! This from where I was on Saturday when I woke up from a nap feeling miserable because while I had just napped for 3 hours, I was too tired to want to get out of bed but not tired enough to get back to sleep.
The plan now for the rest of the week is to try going to work again tomorrow. Then on Thursday I’ll have a bit of excitement. I’ll get on my bike for a few min to see how that feels. Look out world!
