Interesting Bit of Data from the Road

Our summer 2020 road trip is humming along. We’re approaching two months just as we’re approaching the very end of this particular adventure.

The undertaking of this trip was expedited by two factors: first, Hazel. That is, introducing our daughter to her family on the west coast. All of Laura’s family is in Seattle so meeting grandparents, a great-grandfather, aunts, uncles, cousins, and dear friends was a priority. And two, covid-19. Specifically, we’re not keen to get onto an airplane so these two things in conjunction expedited our purchase of a van. Laura and I have talked for ages about the possible adventures we could take in a mobile-vehicular-home, but the chances of that becoming a reality are far smaller without a global pandemic.

The odd thing about a pandemic is that… well, frankly, everything is odd about a pandemic. Among other things, we’re doing seemingly everything in our power to not get sick. We could stay holed up at home and not do anything; that’s one way to limit risk, but that would be impossible when trying to introduce Hazel to her west coast family, as already discussed. So we’re taking precautions — we’re seeing people outside, we’re limiting touch, we don’t share things that could transfer covid, we’re bathing in hand-sanitizer all throughout the day, et cetera.

What’s my point?

I’ve been using WHOOP for a few months now. I’m continually impressed by how well it recognizes how I feel. Not just, “Gosh, I slept well. I feel like a million bucks!” Instead, it’s a deeper understanding of how I feel. For example, when I’m run down from work/life/family, or my legs are shot from a hard day of riding, or the days when I really do feel like a million bucks. I’m especially impressed on days when my body subjectively feel tired, my WHOOP objectively tells me I’m good to go, so I try out some hard efforts and the body is in fact up to the task. It’s really quite cool.

Every day you’re given a recovery score from 0-100%. A score in the red is 0-33%, yellow is 34-66%, and green is 67-100%. I often score one day in the red, a couple yellow, and the rest green. Here’s a typical week in my life as seen from a snapshot in early July:

Into the Red

There we were driving across the country and about two weeks into the trip I started to feel… off. I don’t get sick often in the first place, so that was odd. I was frequently feeling uncomfortably hot and sweaty. My internal thermostat runs high, so hot and sweaty is basically what I call “summer”. This, however, was much hotter and more uncomfortable than normal. Other weird symptoms: I had achy joints, especially my neck, wrists, and hands. And the strangest part to me was that my resting heart rate crept up and up and up. Normally it’s anywhere in the range of 38-42bpm. During this stretch of feeling crummy, which ultimately lasted three weeks, it got up to 60bpm. That’s a massive detour from the norm. Here in early August you can see where things start to go sour:

You can take a peek at my HRV, heart rate variability, which is dropping down from typically being in the triple digits to the mid-double digits. Similarly my respiratory rate is on the rise. These are all bits of data that the WHOOP collects during sleep to produce one’s recovery store. Conveniently it’s been shown that the WHOOP is a mighty darn accurate data collection device. Moreover, there’s the investigation as to the correlation between increased respiratory rate as a precursor to covid, so all of these signs were alarming.

Over this three week period I felt very run down, atypically lethargic, although overall I felt passably okay. On a few occasions I felt downright chipper, which you can see in the August 3-9 week and the August 10-16 week with the single days that shoot up into the green. All throughout, I continued to ride, to travel, to stay active, so it’s not as though I was completely cracked and laying in bed every day. I was just distinctively not myself.

Symptoms

My symptoms were never entirely covid’esque. I never registered a high temperature or fever, it was always in the 98.6°F arena. I never lost my sense of taste or smell and I never had any cough, sneeze, or flu like symptoms. My overall subjective feeling and the physiological metrics were all going in the direction of “not good” and of the utmost importance, I didn’t want to be traveling the country, seeing friends and family making them sick!

So very early on into this dive of feeling like rubbish, I had my first covid test. I’ve never had my brain tickled, but if you’ve had the test you know the experience. It showed me the inadequacies of the test. I realize it’s costly to test a billion people all the time, but I felt like I jumped through a hundred hoops and it took a couple hours, and then I waited ages for results to thankfully discover that I’m covid negative. That test was back around August 3 if I remember correctly.

Some amazing bike rides ensued over this period, including this exploration into the Cascades. As time passed and one week became two became three, I talked to some doctor friends and decided that I should be tested again. In addition to another poke at my brain I also asked for a Lyme test (achy joints are a symptom of Lyme Disease and based on everything I’ve heard about Lyme, I do NOT want Lyme) and a CBC to look for anything abnormal.

Let’s Summarize

Got the results back. Covid negative (again) and Lyme negative (phew). I talked to three doctor friends, showed them my CBC results, and they all thought that my blood results showed some signs of my body fighting a virus.

You can see my recovery from being in the dumps here. Resting heart rate drops, HRV rises, respiratory rate drops, quality of sleep increases. All great news objectively as I felt much better anecdotally too.

The whole dang point

I’m happy to report that I feel great now. I’m really impressed how well the WHOOP is a powerful tool to show me numbers that echo how I feel. As I mentioned before, I don’t get sick often at all. I’m the last person you’ll ever meet who’s going to walk into a doctor’s office and frantically point at my WHOOP saying “Look, I’m sick. SEESEE SEE SEE SEEEEEEE?!” It was just nice that when I’m well and when I’m not well, it shows me the tangible numbers that help me steer training, life, recovery, and overall energy expenditure.

If you’re in the cycling world, I’m sure you’ve seen WHOOP all over the place recently. From podcasts to the Tour de France, WHOOP is making impressive inroads. If you’re interested in getting your hands on a WHOOP, follow this link to get your WHOOP for free.