Finding normal

Back home again. And very nice to be so.

Now that I am back home I am busily trying to get back into routine. I was only away for a handful of days, but it doesn't take much to throw things out of wack in terms of training, coaching, work etc. I think by the end of tomorrow I will be back on an even keel, but today has felt a bit wonky. I hate that feeling so looking forward to things settling down.

On the training side of things, my journey into the world of HRV has been interesting so far. At the moment all I have really done is start to establish a baseline for HRV, trying to get an idea of what good looks like. I am pretty sure that when I started measuring HRV I was fairly tired, so that probably skewed those first few baseline measurements, although the baseline will normalise with time (that is what a baseline does). Still even with that skewed starting point the information has been interesting so far.

At the moment my HRV measurements have indicated that my fatigue levels have been okay, although I did get a less than ideal measurement after a bad night's sleep, which was interesting. The material I have read says to not get too bothered about an individual low reading, but rather that trends are what to watch for, therefore, I haven't given the single low reading too much more thought. What I am interested to see is what the HRV readings are like now that I am home and getting back into the routine of training. I am pushing pretty hard in my training at the moment and I am keen to see how that level of fatigue corresponds to with respect to HRV (I can probably guess) and to also see what level of training is sustainable.

Training hard is an important part of improving as an athlete, but so is training smart and I am hoping that learning about HRV might help me get improve on that front.