Back in the saddle

TL;DR - New regime seems interesting; cycling longer distances is a bugger against the wind, but my app has great safety features for cycling/ running alone in isolated places; those of us at the whim of menstrual cycles have some interesting things to learn about what progesterone seems to (spoiler: metabolic and heart rate changes)…

So I’m back in the exercise mindset and have started using the Fitstar by Fitbit app. So far I’m impressed - the first session in the “Get Strong” program I’ve selected (muscle-building and cardio - exactly what I’m after) was 20 minutes long, with three short breaks programmed in, and it didn’t seem ridiculously taxing and yet I am exactly the right amount of sore today. I need some new stretches for calf muscles - anyone got any good ones that won’t fry a bendy?

I’d already committed to either going dancing last night or, if no-one was going to come with me, a longish bike ride today. Bike ride it was, despite having woken up with fun menstrual cramps. I dithered a little, but eventually set off wearing too many layers and with a brisk tailwind. Obviously that was less fun on the way back (although I’d stripped down one layer, which helped), but, oddly, having given myself permission to stop whenever I needed to, I persisted all the way back.

I also tried out the “Beacon” element of the Strava app, and sent the associated link to a couple of people who were able to watch the little dot of me trail out then home, even being told how much battery life my phone still had! Someone’s put a lot of thought into that…

Way out

Way back

Back home, I showed one of the beacon-watchers (a similarly nerdy scientist) graphs of my heart-rate on the way out and back (distinctly different!), and discovered a weird pattern in my resting heart rate (RHR) courtesy of the Fitbit I wear. Turns out my RHR shifts across the weeks in a distinctive pattern. I did some Googling and found out that heart-rate and baseline body temperature shift across the menstrual cycle, peaking briefly at ovulation, then climbing again through the luteal phase. This could explain why a lot of us are different amounts of hungry and for different types of food across the cycle - our metabolism is shifting in response to these hormonal changes.

I don’t know about you, but this is going to make a difference to how I train across the cycle. I need to put some thought into exactly how - does this mean more strength-building challenges in the first part of the cycle (taking advantage of lower joint laxness and lower injury risk) and more cardio in the second part (taking advantage of running hotter) or the opposite way around (i.e. more cardio when my system’s slower)?

I’d be interested in hearing what anyone has to say about this. (Also whether anyone’s started a pool for when I next injure myself and put myself out of the running for all this… running around.)

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Some links on RHR/ menstrual cycle research, if you’re interested:

Twelve month study by Clue with largeish subject pool

Personal study by one Redditter

Another study from 2000

Confessions #1

I am a MASSIVE nerd. I think we suspected this already, but come on: who else do you know would decide to chart their menstrual cycle in a spreadsheet and then apply an algorithm to give predictions of the better days to exercise over the course of the weeks in order to draw a graph of this.

An uncle-flipping* GRAPH.

I'm monitoring a lot of things on this project; even I feel that this might be getting a little weird. I was monitoring protein intake, but gave that up really quickly because, well, it was a bit dull, to tell the truth, and the answer to my previous conundrum (am I eating too much protein because I can't eat pulses, nuts, eggs, and fish?) appeared to be: "probably not" (there seems to be little but rough consensus on absolute figures and a huge range of what "right" is, and the potential side effects of too much - anywhere from "nothing" to "meh" to "heart disease" to "OMG crumbling bones!"), apart from beef days, which I already knew.

However, the revelation that my waist-to-hip ratio leaves more to be desired than you might think (though this depends on: time of day measured, muscle tension, and which ratio scales of "you're doomed!" you believe) has me thinking that, despite earlier protestations, maybe I should be measuring calorie intake.

I really don't want to.

1. DULL.
2. Admitting that (again, depending which Doom Scale you believe) I'm closer to "overweight" than I'm comfortable with believing.
3. Painful and difficult.
4. Calorie-counting is what people on a diet do, and I'm not on a diet.

Am I?

And if I was, so what?  Hmm...

My mother was always on some diet or other and miserable about it.  She constantly felt uncomfortable about her weight and some days it seemed she felt like her very skin didn't fit right - she didn't even like her hair (until after it started to grow back after the chemo and we begged her to leave it alone and let it curl naturally).  I only have a few photos of her.  Among other things, my memories are of a slightly overweight, slightly-shorter-than-me woman with a wicked sense of humour, a beautiful voice, and a lot of regrets.  Presumably, at some level, I associate calorie-counting dieting with a fundamental lack of liking for yourself.  Oddly enough, at other levels, I also associate it with a fundamental respect for and desire for a healthy amount of agency for yourself.  I guess it depends on who's doing the dieting, how, and why.  Maybe it's fine for everyone but me. (Seriously?!)

I wonder, of course, if me striving to overcome the screwed-up joints (a clear legacy from a man with a double-jointed digit or two and a woman whose joints constantly pained her, sometimes to a crippling degree), to gain muscle definition, and compensate for my low-movement lifestyle is a symptom of a degree of dissatisfaction with who I am.  I don't think so.  It doesn't feel so much like trying to change myself into something else as uncovering a self I've neglected for a while, whipping the dust-sheet off a still-serviceable piece of old furniture**.

Or I'm protesting too much.

Anyway, for the moment I'm not going to count calories, if for no other reason than that my heart just sinks at the notion, and right now - trying to take something positive from the fact that I'm bleeding too heavily to exercise (like the discovery that I've already got to the point where I miss actually exercising when I can't, and distraction in the form of the creation of a menstrual exercise algorithm, for goodness' sake!) - I can do with all the motivation I can get.  I am, however, going to cut down even further on refined sugar***, and see where that gets me... :)

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* Not swearing is pretty hard, but I'm going to give it a go for this blog, in case certain folk**** are actually reading this.  Hello!

** I'm not that posh - it was just a mental image

*** Oddly, that does sound rather like a diet... {facepalm}

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**** Putative delicate readers who, for some reason, I'm happy to allow to read talk of my menses... curious...

No Man’s Land

Some of will not want to read this. Some of you may well be relieved to see someone else saying this out loud...

Like, I suspect, a fairly large number of people out there putting together and maintaining an exercise regime, I am an adult person with an active pair of ovaries and a uterus and - along with work and other time commitments, current state of health, sleep deprivation and Stuff, I need to factor this state of affairs into my exercise planning.

For example, about a week or so before menstruating, my already floppy joints become even floppier, and more prone to damage. I need to take this into account when, e.g. doing press-ups or weights - I’m liable to injure myself. I’m also going to have to put extra effort into lifting, which may affect my perception of my strength and progress. With the mood-shifts that can come - while these can be combated by exercise, the bad ones can make actually going and doing exercise a harder ask.

I tend to change weight/ shape around this time, with water retention adding to my woes.  Which means that checking to see if I’d lost weight/ the burden of spare Fay on my belly last week was pretty much doomed!  In addition, the urge to stuff carbohydrates (especially sweet, short-chain ones) in my maw is rarely higher than at this time of my cycle. My blood pressure is often higher than normal, and migraines pounce, rounding out already foul and pathetic moods with their very own nauseating magic.

All this can pretty much be accounted for and worked around:

• Don’t give in to your inner grump and overdo the weights.
• Do nudge yourself firmly to a sensible timetable of exercise, no matter how much doleful poetry (seriously, it was dreadful) you compose on your phone on the way to the gym.
• Do stop eating when you’re actually full.  Keep leaning to the high-fibre, lower-refined-sugar snacks.
• Drink even more water.
• Don’t berate yourself - you’re more likely to give up on yourself and sulk in front of the TV with your own personal barrel of fudge.
  Mmmh. Fudge.

I’m annoyed today, but trying to see the bright side of it.  I was due to do the Long Walk Back Home Goal today but luckily I’d already decided to do that on Saturday and do the gym tonight, as usual.

Then last night happened. Pain so intense it was like being continually punched.  It was liked being a teenager again. (Whenever I say this, it’s pretty much short for: A Bad Thing™, by the way.)  It was also, inconveniently, at 4:30am. And yes, I already had a hot water bottle. And yes, I used pretty much every pain management technique I’ve got. And yes, I got up, walked around, drank some water, tried to distract myself, then gave up and took some paracetamol. I found getting up an almighty arseache this morning, and reluctantly decided that, all things considered, I’d be doing myself more harm than good doing Proper Exercise today. Nine hours later, while sad I won’t be doing it, I haven’t changed my mind.

For those of you who may be thinking: wuss - you may well be right. And here’s a thing: I don’t care*. A massive part of this whole project is about trusting my body and the signals I receive from it, learning again how to interpret them properly.  I did quite a lot of exercise yesterday morning, having already started this new phase of the cycle, so I’m not backing away from exercise without trying it.  I’m just not going to stagger to the gym, bleeding heavily and sleep deprived. A mistake in judgement doing too little on one day of the month will do, I reckon, less damage than doing too much.

Remember: I’ve been here before, I’ve exercise-munted and crippled myself more than once.  (*I’m sufficiently self-aware to realise that this is me arguing against one of my own inner daemons; this is, after all, part of what writing this journal is for.  This one is convinced I’ll never be good enough at anything, and tells me that telling me this at every opportunity is for my own good. It’s a dick.)  I’m pretty sure I should pay attention when an organ a similar size to my heart starts shredding itself.  Back in the bad old days of the Massive Tumour™, I would move as little as humanly possible for the first three days of my menstrual cycle. Even now I’m occasionally nervous about hurting myself at such a time.

If I’m still not fit to do it tomorrow, this may become the first session I’ve cancelled since committing to the timetable.  I’m choosing to see this as a learning point rather than failure, as I’ve been at this for less than a month, and I reckon it’s going to take a few of them to establish patterns (as well as achieve some of those pesky goals!).

I am, after all, a scientist at heart as well as a poet...