Effort was made to do workouts today but they were done slowly.
Main reason for pushing myself to do work on SkiErg and rowing machine: If I don’t exercise I won’t sleep well.
Because of the desire for the “sleeping pill” effect of aerobic exercise, I burned 200 Calories on the SkiErg at RPE Level 1.
Energy for SkiErg was low, but energy for rowing was lower. After the 200 Calorie SkiErg session my subconscious suggested I take a break before doing any rowing. The break stretched out and extended in the dimension of time….
Realizing that my subconscious was trying to con me out of doing any rowing at all, I dragged myself to the rowing machine and set it up for a 10,000 meter session.
Some incentive to keep rowing was provided by watching a screen recording of a slow 10,000 meters session done February 24, 2018. I allowed myself a 1,200 meter head start before that screen recording began and prodded myself to stay ahead of it. By the finish of my 10K, I was still ahead of the screen recording but my lead had diminished to about 200 meters.
The SkiErg session chart and data.
Finish screen for the 10,000 meter rowing session.
The sleeping pill I labored for today was none of the above.
So as to get a good night’s sleep tonight I spent 65.58 minutes laboring on the ergs.
Labor doesn’t have to be extremely hard to act as a sleep aid, but it has to last a while. Thirty minutes or more seems to be the minimum for exercising aerobically to serve as an effective sleep aid.
Ergs have a magical effect on sleep if they are used for a sufficient time at a moderate aerobic pace.
Each of the two workouts today was done at RPE Level 2.
Perhaps you wonder why today’s blog post title mentions a $16.40 sleeping pill. Do you? The answer is this: if you were to assign a value of $15.00 per hour to the 65 minutes and 35 seconds work on the ergs today then the wages for that time would amount to $16.40.
You might favor different value for an hourly wage of physical labor, but the value of a good night’s sleep is priceless.
Chart and data for the first of today’s two workouts, 200 Calories on the SkiErg.
Because of a “drug trial” no workouts were done today except the most ethereal rowing of all: rowing done exclusively in my mind.
Evening yesterday, I decided to try a drug. It was a drug which had been prescribed in the hope it would help when I had insomnia.
What should be explained is that the sort of insomnia I’ve had is the variety where I have no trouble going to sleep at night the first time. But after waking in the middle of the night to use the bathroom I become wide awake. When that happens my metabolism also increases and I become too warm and wide awake after getting back into bed .
After discussing it with my doctor she prescribed Trazadone. A lot of doctors prescribe it for insomnia though it is not intended as a sleeping aid. It helps a lot of people but a lot of other people report that it doesn’t help or has undesirable side effects that outweigh any help with sleep.
The hope was that Trazadone would add enough element of drowsiness that I would get a full night’s sleep without any skirmishes with insomnia.
Realistically I didn’t know whether the night would have any episode of insomnia. But I decided to try the Trazadone just fro the sake of learning what it was like. I took 1/2 dose before going to bed, as directed with food. Waited an hour for it to take effect. Felt no effect, so went to bed anyway. Fell asleep like I normally do. Woke 90 minutes later which was a bit early to go to the bathroom but went anyway since I was awake. Had a medicinal taste in my mouth and both mouth and eyes felt dry. Went back to bed. Fell asleep again. Woke 90 minutes later but felt like I hadn’t slept though I had no memory of laying awake. My hands and feet felt very cold but my body felt warm. Became wide awake and got up.
Extremely wide awake though “medicated” is one way to describe how I felt. It was almost 2:00 am so I decided to take the other half dose to see if it would help fall back to sleep. Took it with food. The extreme non-sleepy wakefulness persisted. Hands and feet still felt unusually cold, like blood vessels were a bit constricted in extremities.
Instead of helping me to feel drowsy and making it easy to go back to sleep in the middle of the night, I became very, very wide awake!
Took my blood pressure, which is normally okay and it was unusually high, at 141/73. Also, though my heart rate was normal, at 53 when I was sitting to take blood pressure, the heart beat had a somewhat strange feel to it, as though it was sort of “thumping” a bit hard with each beat.
I did some work in the garage, turned on TV to check news, played chess and other video games. Did some reading. Was wide awake until well after sunrise. At 7:50 AM, I decided to go to bed and just lay there quietly to find out if I could get any sleep or if I should just give up trying until evening.
I did fall asleep and had very strange dreams. Woke at about noon and got up for the day, feeling rather awful in a medicated way. Had dry, unpleasant tasting mouth and eyes. Actually I didn’t taste my eyes as that previous sentence might lead you to believe. Mouth tasted strange. Eyes felt dry. Mouth felt dry too. Felt thirsty and drank a cup of ice cold distilled water which tasted very good.
My mind felt awake but it also felt like there was a cloudy bunch of sticky cobwebs in my head. Though it was after noon, I decided to make a little coffee. So I made about 16 oz of Starbucks Organic Yukon, which is my current home-brew favorite.
The coffee helped clear the cobwebs but it took all afternoon for me to start feeling normal again.
Before trying the Trazadone last night, I looked for videos about it on YouTube. Found a very comprehensive video about it by a medical student. Also found two videos about it by medical doctors and two videos about it by pharmacists. Watched all of them and they all seemed pretty much okay with its use as a sleep aid.
Found one video about it, which I didn’t watch until today in the aftermath of Trazadone. Its title is where I got the idea from for today’s blog post. It is called “Trazodone is a Trazodon’t (for me)” (and that is a live link to it).
So… though I don’t have the identical reasons as the lady who made the video linked to above, Trazadone is now a TrazaDON’T for me too.
Today’s HRV analysis score is better than yesterday’s, despite having rowed a half marathon yesterday.
If any of you have been reading every word of these blog posts you will know that I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping. I’ve had many middle-of-the-night periods of being wide-awake insomnia.
But more important: if any of you have been reading every word of my blog posts: How do you manage to do that? I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that this blog is exceedingly boring and I totally agree. There’s no plot, etc. Just a daily splattering of bits mostly about what indoor rowing was done. To read every word of these blog posts would be an exceptional, amazing task.
Anyway… with regard to the SLEEP issues, I was somewhat amazed to have had a “perfect” night’s sleep. Deep, restful and only interrupted very briefly once, for a call of nature. Below you can see a chart of last night’s sleep. It’s actually a chart of heart rate and activity levels (movement detected by Apple Watch) during last night’s sleep. But you can see from the chart that there was only one brief interruption between 1 and 2 AM. The recent doses of Valerian to help with sleep did nothing, compared to positive after-effect of rowing the half-marathon.
This was the best night’s sleep in a long time. Do I have to row a half-marathon, to get a good night’s sleep?
Today’s workout consisted of a 30 minute online session, 2K warm down and 126 Calories burned on the SkiErg.
Two days after doing a half marathon, EliteHRV calculated that I had the best Morning Readiness score since starting to use the app!
One fruit of the Dec 15th half marathon is displayed in the screenshot above, which shows the best Morning Readiness reading I’ve had so far since using EliteHRV. It came two days later and I think it is one result of the half marathon effort.
A second fruit was improved sleep. The above chart shows last night’s sleeping heart rate. Though it seemed to me like it was good sleep, you can’t tell much of anything about the quality of sleep from that chart. But – this morning I received a notification and “inquiry” from my sleep logging app about my sleep the prior night, immediately following the half marathon. (see screenshot below)
Its analysis reports that sleep quality for the previous day’s sleep period (the night immediately following the half marathon) was “higher than is typical” and it presented a couple dozen possible reasons, asking me to check off “all that apply” to that improved sleep quality, so as to contribute to its cause-and-effect analysis. The only one I checked was exercise, because the half marathon was the only thing out of the ordinary, since it’s 21,097 meters had been about 5 times my average daily volume so far this season and about double my recent several weeks’ daily volume.
“The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much…” Ecclesiastes 5:12
Since today’s EliteHRV “Morning Readiness” reading said it was okay to train harder today, I decided to do another 10,000+ meters, arranged as a 10 minute warmup, a 6,000 meter piece at a target pace of 2:06/500 meters and a 10 minute warm down.
