Day 2 / 10th January 2021
I wore my Fitbit again last night to monitor my sleep. Here is the resulting chart:
Compared to the previous night, I didn't wake feeling as refreshed; it seemed like I work at the wrong point in the sleep cycle. I therefore marked the chart with a yellow box.
I woke at a few distinct points in the night and recalled and wrote down dreams, along with the time. These again followed periods of REM sleep according to the chart. The third time I was actually woken by my cat wanting to go out, and fortunately he seemed to do this at just the right moment in my sleep cycle. I apparently achieved over 8 hours sleep for which the Fitbit app awarded me a green star, but again, I don't quite agree with this. I think I would have felt better being woken up by my alarm perhaps at 6:45 instead of 7am as I dozed off again until 8am.
I had fallen asleep swiftly according tot he chat, after reading in bed for half an hour or so. According to the Fitbit, I had over than 1 hour of Deep sleep, more than last night, and again more than 5 hours of light sleep (pretty much the same as last night).
I wondered yesterday if more deep sleep would benefit me, but it appears how I woke up was more important.
I did my usual morning routine of first getting a cup of tea and reading for an hour before going out for a run.
This run was in the opposite direction to yesterday's. It was a reasonable run but I made extra effort at the end to do a sprint finish to see how high my beat would go... higher than yesterday! Yesterday it peaked at 162 bpm, today I got it up to 173 bpm. The average was also higher at 155 bpm compared to yesterday's of 144 bpm.
A little while later I cycled to my sister's house, but the Fitbit failed to acknowledge that activity and log it. There is, on the device, the option to manually start and stop (and pause) an Activity. From the run above it can be seen that the automatic logging starts abruptly, whereas yesterday it started more smoothly. It therefore appears it would be best to manually start and stop the Activity logging.
After my visit I continued on to a shop, and then a continued on to complete a 13 mile route.
I didn't have much energy for today's ride and I mostly plodded along, putting in some effort where I could. This is reflected in the green sections of the graph along with the 98 avg bpm and a peak of 149 bpm, compare this to yesterday's ride of a similar distance with 125 avg bpm and 170 bpm peak. Only the latter third of yesterday's ride showed large portions of "green", although I was still peaking up into the red and 170 bpm.
I feel like my night's sleep could be partly to 'blame' for today's result, but also I ate a large meal before the ride, and therefore this ride is usually of a similar pace.
Since I'm not interested in
"fat-burning" but more about
improving my cardio-fitness, it
appears the kind of run I did
this morning (20 minutes) was
more beneficial in this regard
than the longer ride I did (1
hour). I have come across
research that echoes this. A
counter argument is about effort
and enjoyment; it takes effort
to sprint, but once I'm out on
my bike I'm quite happy plodding
along for an hour, and feel good
after the fresh air.