How Life and My WHOOP Data Overlap in Preparation of SBT

There are a lot of variables in life, but one thing that’s certain for the past two years is that I have a WHOOP on my wrist. The second certainty is that sometime soon after waking up, I make coffee and check my recovery score.

If you’re a WHOOP user, you know full well about this routine. If you’re not a WHOOP user, you probably have heard people talk about being in the red, the yellow, or green or babble on about their strain scores, which to you don’t make a lick of sense. “I hit an 18.5 today on my ride” may as well be a foreign language. I understand that because I was right there in that camp of scratching my head and wanting to know more.

In short, strain scores go from 0 to 21.0 on a logarithmic scale. So it doesn’t take much work to tick through the single digits and low teens, a 16 is what I’d call a standard easy day, from about 16-18.5 means I rode a bit longer or had a busy day, and anything above 18.5 means it was a proper day of training or I was on my feet being active the entire day.

Recovery scores are based from 0-100 as a percentage. This is a bit simpler to follow, red is 0-33%, yellow is 34-66%, and 67-100% is green. All WHOOP data is heart rate based and the recovery is the most interesting for me personally since it measures heart rate variability (HRV), or the measurement of time between beats. Basically a recovery score measures how fatigued your heart is and therefore extrapolates how rested your entire body is.

So taking a look at the week after Rooted with dates on the bottom of image on the left. Rooted Vermont was August 1. By some miracle, I woke up recovered and in the green on Monday August 2. I chalk that up to passing out at about 8pm and getting a great night of sleep.

Tuesday and Wednesday I had a head cold. Summer colds are especially crappy. I almost never get them, they just feel like they should be a winter malady, but there I am with a sore throat for a couple of days in early August. Yuck. I’m the kind of person who tries to will a cold away so by Friday I was feeling better and into the weekend.

I have been operating on a pretty rapid fire schedule in terms of fitting in training and life the past few months. It feels as though as soon as Unbound happened in early June, it was like life’s hamster wheel was set to cruise control at 75mph. Events were immediately back on board and the summer went full-chaotic trying to fit the summers of 2020 and 2021 into the current three month block. A big piece of culmination was with Rooted and so I enjoyed one final rest weekend Saturday and Sunday August 7-8 before the next busy month ahead.

I response really well to just one day off the bike, so two days off was like an off-season. I kid, but I’m serious. So Monday I was happy to see that I continued in the green, but being only at 78% recovered was a bit of a surprise. I hoped that I’d be in the 90’s and ready to take on the world. I felt good, so went on last hurrah, smasher of a ride.

And then, my cold reared its ugly head again on Tuesday the 10th. I was downing zinc and vitamin C like a fish drinking water and relying on some long nights of sleep. Without that cold, Tuesday I would have expected to be about a 60% recovery score instead of the 41% you see here and Wednesday I’d expect be back in the green.

And with that, we flew to Colorado early Wednesday morning and immediately zipped up to Steamboat. I will point out that Laura and I both had covid tests with results: negative. I forgot just how high Steamboat is; in my mind it’s only at about 4500’ but in reality, it’s well above 6000’ and the race course goes beyond 8000’. Oops, memory fail.

The altitude rule of thumb says to come to altitude either at the last minute or at least two weeks in advance of an event. With Laura racing Leadville on Saturday the 14th and me racing SBT on Sunday the 15th, we gave everything an extra day just because life is a touch more time consuming with Hazel.

My first night of sleep had me waking up to a paltry 40% recovery score on Thursday the 12th. That’s on account of an elevated heart that’s humming along 3-5 beats per minute higher than normal. I’m no physician, but there’s less oxygen at altitude, so it takes more heart beats to more the same amount of oxygen throughout your body. Right? Right. (Or please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong.)

I’m going for a quick spin before Laura heads to Leadville!

Those final three days before my race I was trying to exert myself very little in order to stay fresh and recover as best as possible from this niggling cold, hence strain scores only between 15-16. If things were different — if we weren’t at altitude or if I weren’t trying to get over a cold — I probably would have gone out and given it a bit more stick in at least one of those days to get a strain score above 18. But this is an example of using my WHOOP as a tool to help steer my day. My sleep continued to be as good as possible here, where we’re sleeping at nearly 8000’. But I still wake up in the middle of the night and can feel my heart thumping along at a rhythm that’s far faster than normal, oxygen rich conditions.

The elusive number one race plate.

I went to bed just after 8pm on Saturday in one final attempt to get a decent night of sleep given that the alarm clock was going to squawk to life at 4:15am on Sunday. I’m thrilled with the 7:20 of sleep I did get, but would have loved to have seen green there on Sunday morning. My resting heart rate never settled overnight, which goes back to that altitude rule of thumb; I nearly guarantee if I were here doing the same routine for even just a week, it would settle down and I’d be more primed for strain. So with that arrival 5 days in advance, it’s make the most of the scenario and making the most of a 59% recovery.

So that’s my lead into Steamboat. Not perfect, but perfect is the enemy of good. Oh, and now perfectly smashed after a hard day yesterday my recovery today is 29%. Looks like I have some mighty fine RnR on the horizon as we drive north to Montana and next week’s Last Best Ride.

If you find any of this interesting or thought provoking, send me a question or comment below. There’s no PhD required to sift through your data. It’s actually really easy, fun, and thought provoking stuff to help you be your best.

If you’re interested in trying out WHOOP, you can save the initial $30 just by using this website.