Friday, 30 January 2015

Mr Grumpy Pants

A little tired today. I may also be guilty of having bouts of being grumpy too.

It is a bit of a case of family induced tiredness, with the son not sleeping great last night.

Speaking of sleep, one of the features of the Garmin 920XT that I was particularly sure would be useful when I got it was the sleep monitoring. Since the 920XT combines all the activity tracking features of their Vivo range of devices into a GPS watch, it comes with a sleep tracking mode. This is fairly standard fare for activity trackers, but until recently I was unconvinced it really had any value.

In brief the activity tracker just records your movements during the night. Different devices do different things with that data, some using it to rate the quality of your night's sleep. Garmin doesn't go that way, it just presents the data and lets you decided if you slept well or not. Now that I have a bit of a database of sleeps under my belt I can now tell pretty quickly if the sleep I had was a good one or not. Often this just confirms what you are feeling yourself, ie 'Man I am tired, and look I slept poorly' or the other way around. It can occasionally be surprising too. I have found nights where I felt I slept really well, actually contained a lot of movement, and sometimes it shows that I probably slept better than I thought, but perhaps for not long enough. Generally though, I have found that when on nights where I have moved the least, my sleep has been the best.

With that in mind, this is my sleep from last night.


In case you are wondering, yes that is a lot of movement, particularly in the middle fo the night. In contrast a good night sleep looks more like this:


Still a surprising amount of movement, but nowhere near as much and for not as long. When I first started keeping an eye on this I was surprised at just how much movement I had, even on nights where I felt like I slept like a log.

Whilst the tiredness is not awesome, it hasn't been to much of a hassle today, since the training load has been a light one. Really just a bit of a roll over of the arms at the pool. I went down and did it with the squad, since that is easier motivationally, but I just got myself out early. As a result I was at work really, really early for once.

No training in the morning and so that should give me a great opportunity to catch up on sleep.

After waking up tomorrow I will be taking the drive down to Busselton for the Busselton Olympic Distance on Sunday. Whilst taking this race seriously, I find that I just don't get as nervous before Olympic Distance races, not that they aren't hard, they are just easier to be relaxed about I think. Less planning, less things to go wrong. Speaking of things going wrong though, I just heard today that the race is unlikely to be wetsuit legal. Certainly based on today's water temps it won't be. Funny because I always just associated Busselton with a wetsuit, but I guess it is Summer, and the swim is in a Marina, so effectively a closed body of water. Glad I found out today though, would have been a major pain to get down there without a swimskin. Definitely take both wetsuit and swimskin just in case though.

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