According to my Oura ring, my readiness has been declining for days now. Doubtful about the ring’s guess—that I wasn’t getting enough recovery in—I largely ignored its advice to take it easy. But after a crappy run yesterday, and another crappy readiness score, I’m taking today as a rest day.
Mildly amusing. Low peak for the first dog walk, notch for drinking coffee and Jumbletime, then my most active time is 7:00 AM, for the second dog walk.
Before I got a dog, my most active time was 11:00 AM, because that’s when I finally get to my workout.
I’m a little surprised to get a score of 100, considering that I didn’t go for a run. In fact, I got a 2 hour nap in the early afternoon.
It’s true I spent most of the rest of the day walking the dog.
I got a 100 on my Ours ring activity score twice in the past week, and it’s standing at 100 for today so far. Go me!
Badge from my Oura ring today. Photo of me from my HEMA class last night (a guard position called Tag).
My activity score of 100 due purely to walking the dog. Well, and sleeping better since getting a dog.
I forgot to bring my phone on one of my walks, so those steps only got counted twice and not three times!!! I am bereft.
I get scores in the upper 90s pretty often, but scores of 100 less so. Today I kept my “inactive time” nice and low, which I think is what made the difference.
My Oura ring prepared an annual summary of the data it has gathered. One interesting bit shows the dramatic change in my activity since getting Ashley
This shows my activity levels across the day, averaging the whole year together:
The white area shows when I was engaging in “hard” activity—basically running, high-intensity interval training, and (if I was really going at it) lifting weights. I did quite a bit of those things for most of the year, and the Oura ring is interested to observe that it was largely between about 10:00 AM and noon.
That graph averages the whole year together. This graph shows the same thing, but just for the month of November (we got Ashley on November 2nd):
I had only a modest amount of hard activity, mostly early in the morning and then again at mid-day. (I assume those are bits where Ashley wanted to run and I tried to keep up with her, something that I quit doing after tripping, falling, and splitting the skin across my knee.) Basically, I replaced nearly all my hard activity with lots and lots more medium activity.
Just as an aside: My 4:00 PM cocktail hour really shows up on these graphs, with modest spikes in activity that I think have gotten larger now that I get the dog out for pre- and post- cocktail hour walks.
One other tidbit that changed with the dog has been my “restorative time,” periods of low activity where the heart rate falls quite a bit. You can see the difference between the first ten months of the year and the last two here:
I used to get at least some most days, but since I got the dog my restorative time has really dropped off. I think that’s partially just because my periods of low activity are shorter (because pretty soon I have to take the dog out again), and maybe also because, since I have less hard activity, I don’t feel the same impulse to really slow down when I get a chance to do so.
One of the first things my Oura ring helped me figure out when I got it 4 years ago, was that if I eat a meal in the 4 hours before bedtime it interferes with my sleep. The effect was dramatic enough that Jackie and I switched to eating just two meals a day: breakfast an hour or two after we get up, and then our main meal of the day around 2:00 PM. Since that change, I’ve slept much better.
Sometimes though… life intervenes. Yesterday was one of those days. My local Esperanto group had its annual Zamenfest, and I brought pizza and cookies to the meeting, and ate a lot of both. (In fact, I not only ate several of the ginger sparkles I bought, I also ate some green star-shaped sugar cookies and some peanut butter cookies brought by other members of the group. It was a real cookie fest, as well as a Zamenfest.)
Unsurprisingly, I saw a repeat of the various issues that showed up 4 years ago, as can be seeing from looking at my Readiness metrics from my Oura ring:
The “Recovery index” basically means that my heart rate remained elevated until shortly before I woke up. That’s on top of the fact that it only got down to 53, which is rather high for me. My body temperature was 1.1℉ above baseline, which is probably just that my body was very active digesting food, rather than being a fever due to an infection or something.
A single day of this is no problem. Today I’ll eat on my usual schedule, and I expect I’ll sleep very well tonight. But I thought it was an interesting example of the sort of thing that the Oura ring is good at alerting the user to.
I didn’t get a picture of yesterday’s cookies, but here’s some from a prior year’s batch:
