More Oura Ring and a Setback

I was feeling pretty fit and feisty these days, was even starting to formulate some formal-ish goals for the summer. Then I tripped on my morning dog walk. I'm not even sure what happened, I was admiring the beautiful scenery and next thing I knew my chin and head were hitting the slick rock. I tripped/twisted my ankle/fell going down a small, rocky drop off on the slick rock. Just wasn't paying good enough attention I guess, maybe Ruby pulled me a bit, I dunno. Mostly superficial bumps and bruises and of course I fell on some cactus so that wasn't fun but unfortunately I twisted my ankle to the point of needing to be on crutches.

Also my posterior tibial tendonitis has been flaring up here and there over the past few weeks as it is wont to do and I think this is the reason why I can't bare weight on the foot at all. I'm not sure how I hike the mile or so uphill on uneven slick rock to get back to the car but now everything is so swollen and seized up that I have to resort to crutches. I have this possibly delusional idea that I'll wake up and be fine tomorrow morning but we'll see. I twisted the other ankle and fell while hiking a few days ago and that recovered no problem and taking a day off seems to be 'working' for the posterior tibial crap show. I did all the PT and exercises and night boot for this 5 years ago and it really never got all that much better. So when it flares up I take a day off and that usually does the trick. I had been doing calf raises for it and some foam rolling but I'm not consistent enough with it. Such a beautiful day today too, I was having big debates about what the day would hold on the way to the dog walk trail, was maybe even going to get my ass up to Dolores for some fat biking but instead here I am, on the stupid computer, finally getting back to the blog.

The Oura ring has been interesting. Good in some ways, frustrating in others. There are days when I wake up and I'm not sure if I'm feeling up for some training and the ring is not sure either. It'll say, 'Listen to your body'. Well, I don't need a damn expensive ring to tell me something so inanely obvious. OTOH, there are days like yesterday where I felt tired and unmotivated but also felt like maybe I was being lazy and I really should get my ass out the door. And the ring showed that my overnight recovery wasn't great and yeah, you probably should take it easy.

The app breaks down the Readiness Score so you can see where your recovery is lacking.

The red flag here is lowest overnight resting heart rate. Apparently this is a big measure of how recovered you are. The chart below shows that it went up from 52 the night before to 54 and apparently this is a large enough jump to be of concern. Previous Day Activity is also in red and this is one of my annoyances with the app, I'll get to that later.

The ring also measures overnight HRV (heart rate variability). You want this number to be high.

My average overnight HRV since I got the ring is 29 and I like to see it up in the 30's at bare minimum so 20 is pretty low for me. So this day, which was yesterday, turned into a rest day of sorts (I still did a half hour of weight lifting) which is a bummer because today is also now a rest day and who knows how many more days.

I was planning on going back to the pool in March because I think by then Omicron will have run its course but maybe I'll go back sooner. Haven't been in the pool since August so it won't be pretty. But it's better than nothing. Our case rates were still pretty high on Friday but they were declining slightly so we're likely on the downturn. Probably is o.k. anyway, I'm probably being over cautious. Or maybe making excuses for not going back to the poo because it won't be pretty. Also I really prefer to be outside and the weather has been so nice, hate to be inside when it's so sunny outside.

The sleep data from the ring is pretty cool but the accuracy is questionable. The Deep Sleep is supposed to be fairly accurate, the REM sleep not so much. The overall amount of sleep, waking and falling asleep times, seem pretty accurate. The newest version of the ring, Gen 3, which is the one I have, was released before a lot of the software for the new and improved features was ready and this includes the sleep algorithms so despite having all the new sensors and gizmos and whatnot, the software is still old school and no word from Oura on when the updates will happen.

I always get dinged for Latency which is the amount of time it takes you to fall asleep. The problem is I do take 20 minutes or so to fall asleep but I don't turn my light off and stop moving until I feel myself drifting off so the ring can't tell I've been in bed. This is a common complaint and a stupid metric.

 Graph of the sleep stages. 

My main beef with the ring is the way it tracks Activity. It gives you a daily goal, which is good, previously I'd shoot for 10,000 steps a day in addition to whatever other training I do and this seemed very random and often not realistic if I'd had a long, strenuous bike ride where steps aren't counted. My beef is that it gives you your goal in calories which is the most useless metric ever on the face of the earth. Even more confusing is that it will tell you throughout the day how many miles you have to walk to reach your calorie goal and often I'll have 30 calories left to reach my goal and it will tell me I have to walk 1.3 miles. To burn 30 calories. But it will give me credit for the 30 calories once I've walked what seems like a reasonable amount, it doesn't REALLY make me walk the 1.3 miles. To add to the confusion it will tell me how many steps I've taken and it will take into account my biking and other exercise but not in a necessarily consistent or logical way. I've tried to figure out the equivalence between steps and calories and I promise you it's not consistent. The big problem though is that the amount of activity is assigns me per day is way too low, it must be based on my body weight/height or something because the maximum amount never changes and it goes down to a ridiculously low amount on rest days. If I exceed it too much for too many days in a row I get dinged on my Readiness Score for not taking enough easy days. So I take my Readiness Scores with huge grains of salt and go mostly by overnight Heart Rate and HRV metrics. Which leads the ring to leave me daily passive/aggressive messages of you really need to sit on your ass today. I think this thing is designed for more sedentary people or something, which is fine but there should be some way to work around it. Maybe there's a setting somewhere and I need to dig a little deeper. Fun with technology.

In the meantime Ruby is helping me with my unintended rest day.

Oura Ring - First Impressions - and Booster Update

I woke up this morning to 3 degrees/feels like -7 (Fahrenheit) and all animals were alive and seemingly o.k. We ended up having only a dusting of snow but thankfully a ton of rain but not so thankfully it had frozen before turning to snow so conditions yesterday were a bit treacherous. Lily, one of my mama cows, decided to play head butt games with the other mama just as the sun was going down and the temperature really dropping last night and she ended up walking around lifting one foot because of the cold snow on her feet, just like the dogs do. Except unlike the dogs I had no idea what to do for her. Eventually she went in her dry loafing shed but was soon back out in the snow again. Worrying but she's big and has a mind of her own. She seemed fine before I went to bed and she seems fine today. Angus cows are so very hardy. As are the chickens who weathered everything o.k. 

I was bracing for a poor reaction to my booster shot. I had bad, long term dizziness/fatigue/brain fog from the first two shots. Even though it's Moderna so just a half dose for the booster, Jonny had a worse reaction to his booster than he did to his original doses. Just one extra day, but still, I certainly wasn't expecting it to go well for me. So far, it's been something of a nothing burger. No fatigue, dizziness, or brain fog. I didn't even have a day of feverish symptoms. My temperature went up to 99 degrees at its worst and this wasn't enough to give me any sort of noticeable symptoms other than being a bit warmer than usual which was fine with this cold snap.

My Oura Ring, Gen. 3, arrived November 18th so I have a couple few weeks of data now. Overall initial impression is that I'm really pleased with it. It picked up on my vaccine symptoms right away and suggested I turn on 'Rest Mode' if I'm feeling under the weather. The triggers were an elevated overnight resting heart rate, decrease in heart rate variability (HRV) and a 2 degree increase in average body temperature. It also showed an elevated respiration rate though I'm not terribly familiar with that metric and it's significance. HRV in particular was super low (high is better) and is what you'd expect if you were ill so I was pleased the ring had picked that up. Physically I felt fine and if I'd been left to my own devices probably would have tried to start training again which is why I suspect I had such a poor reaction the first go around because getting back to training was exactly what I did. This time around I decided to treat the booster like a race that would require both tapering and recovery. So I've had four days so far of mostly rest with just walking. I had the shot on a Tuesday and Wednesday morning's walk felt a bit difficult and slow, felt like my heart rate was too easily elevated. But Thursday felt fine. Yesterday I couldn't walk much more than a mile because conditions were treacherous, ie icy sidewalks with a mix of pavement and ice which is often the worse combination. Today things should melt off and hopefully I can go a bit farther.

The only noticeable symptoms were the standard dull pain/ache at the injection site, and this was very minimal, and swollen lymph nodes under my armpit. It was a bit sore for a day or so but the swelling was huge, like the size of an avocado. Yesterday the swelling went down to about half an avocado and remains at 1/4-1/2 an avocado today but no soreness to speak of. I was hoping to ease back to training with light weight lifting but I'm not sure about this with the swelling. On the other hand, Professor Google says this swelling could last for weeks or months and I can't take that long off. So today I'm introducing some mobility stuff and in the next few days I'll introduce super light weights and longer sessions. Hopefully the movement will help the nodes drain. I also remember when I got my Kangoo Jump Boots and was taking classes that used them, the instructor said the jumping was good for lymph node drainage. I thought this sounded hokey but I'm going to bust them out and give it a try. We'll put this bit of wives tale/hokery to the test.

Today my biomarkers are improved, I turned off Rest Mode and Oura has assigned me some reasonable amount of activity for today. But HRV is still low at 22 and I'd like to see it more in the 30s. Just for laughs I checked HRV with my Garmin and it was 100 which is the highest and worst possible score on Garmin's scale (Garmin uses a scale where a higher score is worse). So today still needs to be easy. I'm going to continue to use the Oura ring to monitor and guide recovery so hopefully I won't end up in that bad fatigue/dizzy place.

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A couple more days have gone by, today is Tuesday or one week post injection, and still no ill effects from the booster. The swelling in my lymph node has gone down considerably and can best be described as some puffiness. I can see my armpit again and neither the lymph node nor injection site are sore or tender to the touch. No dizziness, fatigue, brain fog. So happy with this.

On Sunday the 'Readiness' on my Oura app said this:

Which seems a bit passive aggressive. Why not just tell me, 'You've had enough rest lady, get off the couch and move your lazy ass!'. The sun was shining so I went up to Boggy Draw for some snowshoeing. Word on the street was that there was a foot of fresh powder and when I got up there, conditions did not disappoint.

I was out for around 2 miles and 1 1/4 hours. I kept my heart rate nice and low, around 110 bpm, kept the pace nice and slow and stopped for photos and moments of whimsy. It felt so good to be back outside and moving through the world again. I'd been walking every day for the past 5 days but hadn't done much else. This was just the right amount of activity because I had an excellent night's sleep and woke up to this 'Readiness' score on Monday morning:

I was planning on no running for another week but the sun was shining and it was perfect running weather yesterday, Monday, so I hit the trails. I kept my heart rate to an average of 118 bpm so I was super slow and my Garmin watch wasn't pleased with this pace. I went for around 50 minutes, 2.75 miles, SO slow. But I felt great afterwards, exactly what I was hoping for. I'm hoping that if I keep my heart rate nice and low for the next week or so that I won't trigger a vaccine reaction. 

This morning the Oura ring suggested that my recovery was going well but since I'd done 'a lot' yesterday maybe I could take it easy today if I wanted. So wishy washy. These daily messages make me laugh whether they're supposed to or not. Anyway, today will be getting back to weight lifting. I did about 10 minutes of light weights yesterday and some of it was fine, some a little twinge-y. My injection side arm apparently wasn't back to 100%. We'll see how it goes today. 

Why I Oura

I had my first COVID test last Thursday. I was 70 percent sure I didn't have it but I'd had a bad bout of dizziness on Tuesday that included me toppling over sideways with crazy vertigo when I bent down to tie my shoes in the morning. I also had terrible HRV numbers per my Garmin which indicated something was up and I hadn't been training that hard. By Thursday the dizziness was barely there but my HRV number was up at 100 on Garmin's scale of 0 to 100 with 100 being the worst (typically the higher the HRV number the better but Garmin does things in reverse). Anyway, dizziness was one of the long term side effects I'd had from the vaccine and while I didn't have any other of the side effects I'd previously experienced (fatigue, brain fog, irritability) it was possible I had a nearly asymptomatic case and I wanted to rule it out. And if I had it I obviously wanted to know. COVID is running rampant in my county as well as in Colorado in general, we were 5th worse state in the country the other night. By Friday the dizziness was gone and HRV was at 53, or 'moderate stress', and I was 90 percent sure it wasn't COVID. I got my results that night and confirmed I was negative. 

The cause of the dizziness was likely due to dehydration. Monday night I experimented with going in the sauna then having a hot shower right before bed to see if it would help improve my deep sleep. I'd started tracking my sleep a few weeks ago with my Garmin watch and was consistently getting poor numbers for deep sleep. Garmin suggested a hot bath before bed and the sauna seemed a good substitute since water is precious here in the high desert. I normally tolerate the sauna but I also normally use it after my workouts and before dinner. I drink a bunch of water and eat right afterwards. But I didn't want to drink too much right before bed so I had some water but probably not enough. Still it seemed like an extreme response that lasted all day and I'd had a similar instance of vertigo on Sat. or Sun. when I'd bent over to get clothes out of the dryer. With COVID ruled out, I'm assuming it's a dehydration/electrolyte issue. This is a tricky issue to solve and one I'm constantly working on. Drinking too much water dilutes electrolytes and makes me bloated. Drinking too little and I'm dizzy. So I've upped the water a bit and taking electrolytes when I remember. I had an ancient bottle of Endurolytes from years ago when I passed out in the Chipotle and there's no expiration date on it so I'm assuming it's o.k. It seems to have helped, it's now a week later and I feel o.k. I salt my food plenty but this can dilute potassium so I've been hitting up the avocados and looking for other good sources.

As far as the sleep tracking goes, I'm not sure how accurate my Garmin watch is, especially for tracking deep sleep. The watch is made more for triathlon training and the steps/sleep/etc. stuff was added as an afterthought. But the process of tracking has made me interested in my sleep so I finally broke down and bought and Oura ring. Usually when I want something frivolous like this I'll wait several months and see if I still want it. It's now been several years and I'm still interested in sleep and also having a hopefully more accurate device to measure HRV. Sometimes the way I'm feeling agrees with Garmin's HRV measurement and sometimes it's way off. The Oura ring also tracks body temperature and that combined with HRV can give a good early warning about coming down with something, COVID or otherwise. It's also a good way to guide my training which I'm going to be shifting back to more of a health focus and less of a race/performance focus. I may be done with racing, we'll see. I found the tapering/recovery time for these past two races to be very annoying and disruptive. 

I ordered the Oura ring on October 9th and unwittingly entered into something of a controversy. I was told a 'sizing kit' would be shipped on October 18th. They send a bunch of plastic rings of various sizes so you can wear them and see how they fit throughout the day. Then on October 18th they said it would be October 26th because of global supply chain shortages blah blah blah. THEN on October 26th they said they were upgrading me to their soon to be released Generation 3 ring and giving me a free lifetime Oura 'membership'. I thought well, o.k., fine, and didn't think much of it. I figured all the delays were because they had been intending to release this new ring all along and for some reason didn't want to just say that. 

The reason I'd chosen the Oura ring over the Whoop strap, another popular tracking device, is that the Oura ring didn't have any kind of fee to access your data. The Whoop strap is free but it's $30 a month or something to be able to use the app to get your data. And I really really hate this whole subscription business. I preferred the one time fee for the ring. As it turns out, Oura has switched to a subscription model as well, charging $6 a month to access your data on top of a hefty price tag for the ring itself. Anybody with an old ring can upgrade to the new one within a couple few weeks and have a free lifetime subscription. Also anybody like me who'd ordered a ring before they'd announced the launch of the new ring was grandfathered in to the free lifetime subscription. Lucky for me but not so much for their loyal customers who maybe bought a ring just 6 months ago and aren't ready to shell out the $$$ for a new one so soon. But if they don't upgrade right away, they lose the option of the free subscription. Also sucks for new customers because these subscription fees are predatory. Much anger and boycotting of this company on the interwebs. And I kind of feel like a scab but yeah, I'm not cancelling my order. Though I do hate that the world seems to be moving towards theses types of fees. 'You'll own nothing and like it'. Yeah. No.I don't care about this stuff that badly.

But it'll be interesting to see the results of the Oura ring, especially as compared to the Garmin. I have some ideas for sleep improvement, will be interesting to see if they have any effect. My ring ships Nov. 15th. In theory. Can't wait to see what other drama might happen with this company in the meantime. Or if I'm even ever going to receive a ring. In the meantime no more before bed sauna sessions and I'll be hitting up the avocados.