As we grow older, I feel like Jeremy has really gone for measuring and collecting data, and I’m going more towards throwing all that stuff away. Jeremy measures his sleep, steps, heart rate, heart rate while sleeping, blood pressure, weight. All the biking parameters – workout, distance, power, recovery. He wants to do even more, glucose monitoring. He gets mad at his AI watch telling him – you are really ready for a workout! or your workout was too hard! or you need a rest day! As if you can’t really feel it yourself? I measure my weight and my blood pressure daily, but other than that, I try to throw it all away. When Paul was coaching my running, I did much more tracking of my running – the speed at which I did all the workouts, how fast I could run a mile, a 400s, whatever. When I was really, really into it, I could dial in my pace on the track to the correct prescribed pace by feel and not look at my watch.
Anyways, for about a year, I shifted the focus of my workouts to weightlifting and cut back on running and it was…ok. I don’t really mind weightlifting, but it doesn’t really feel like a workout to me. I mean I can spend an hour at it, but at the end, I’ve not sweated, I’m not really even that tired (and it turns out, I’m not very good at it (which is fine, but..also slightly discouraging). And then it turned out that I procrastinated on those workouts and my exercise routine was all wonky and out of sorts. So I switched back to running more a few weeks ago and not just running running (plodding along), but slotting in some intervals or sprints which I have not done in a long time and it feels good to me. You have to kind of learn to be not beholden to the number on the watch or the treadmill. I’m so much slower and heavier than I was even 5 years ago, but I’m not really chasing a number, I’m chasing a feeling.