Sleep Issues Complicate Things

The HRV Morning Readiness score got a little worse today.

The influence of yesterday’s target heart rate choice of recovery session rowing is unknown, because sleep issues last night probably had a larger negative influence on HRV than anything else.

The big empty space in the graph of last night’s sleeping heart rate is the period during which there was no sleep.  Only about 3 hours 25 minutes of sleep logged.

After writing the above few words, I had to dash off to jury duty.

I assumed it would last all day and prevent any rowing.  But whoever was going to be put on a trial-by-jury decided to plead guilty. So the trial wasn’t necessary and my jury duty only amounted to answering roll call, filling out a form and listening to informational talks. It only lasted half a day, allowing rowing in the afternoon.

Today’s rowing was very similar to yesterday’s, except instead of using a target heart rate as the goal, I aimed for an average pace of steady-state effort at 2:16.0/500 meters.  That average pace was 7/10 of a second faster than yesterday’s average pace, but heart rate today was lower, at 128 BPM average, compared to yesterday’s higher heart rate of 131 at a slower average pace than today.

So today’s recovery 10K should have seemed slightly easier to the body than yesterday’s 10K.  If I can get a lot more than 3 1/2 hours sleep tonight, then perhaps tomorrow’s EliteHRV Morning Readiness Score will improve.

Once the EliteHRV Morning Readiness Score moves back up into the green zone that indicates I’ve recovered, then I will do harder rowing again to push it back to the yellow zone.

For those of you who’d like to row-along with today’s 10K, a screen recording was made and it will be available in about three hours from now on YouTube at this link: Indoor Rowing 10K with target PACE 12112018


Happy rowing to you.