Now we finally reach that time of the month, where we get to compare what happened in May with the result of the effort done in June. It has been a good month, I managed only to have 5 days total with sweet things, and it was always “just” cake for my coffee. Apart from the very last day, where I decided to celebrate the good results in blood work with some extra treats. Stupid is as stupid does, and Forest Gump would have put it. Got to rid myself of that bad habit, did not feel well at ALL after that sugar rush. But here are the numbers.
First up is the most important to me, and it is the Heart Rate Variability. I decided to include the variations on the day on this months overview, because I had a really bad day. I tried 50 mg cannabis oil one night, just for the fun of it. But it stresses the body max and my HRV plummeted down to 38. It obviously hurt my overall average. But I still managed to increase the HRV from 58 in May to 61 in June. I am very happy with that. It is supposed to be very good for a man being 55 years old in general, but even more so given the reason for my focus on the matter.
Next one up is stress. I am already doing pretty good there, so the objective is more to maintain it. Not really much hope of improving on an average stress level at only 25. But none the less I saw a small improvement here as well. From 25 to 23. Pretty interesting to see the side by side comparison and discover there seems to be a pattern. High in the beginning of the month and then it gradually goes down. I wonder if it has something to do with increase focus as I am closing in on the blood test.
Next one up is the sleep metrics. I am always doing my best to get a good sleep, but for some reasons despite being good at everything else, then I have a hard time to get good sleep scores. And it seems it got even worse in June compared to May. I had a drop in average resting heart rate but my average sleep score dropped from 60 to 56. Got to focus a bit more on that in July.
Next one up is heart rate. I had decided to run 5 km each day, every single day during the month, but had to stop because of my left leg ceased up on me. Interesting enough then I had serious trouble pushing my heart rate above 150 and most of the days I was around 140 no matter how hard I pushed myself. I thought running every day would see my fitness level increase, but it was neither how I felt nor how my app displayed it. But as mentioned before, my resting heart rate did drop to 41 for the month. Last 2 days of June the average RHR was as low as 37.
Vo2 Max is another fun thing to follow, and I was pretty happy when I finally managed to lift it to 47, and for a while many months ago I actually thought I could bring it to 48, but it never happened. During my consistent running in May I did not really see any changes to it. It kind of flat lined, but when I took at break and then picked up running again after 2 days, and my watch called it recovery run, I still suddenly saw my Vo2 Max moving upwards. Now I am again thinking that maybe I can reach the 48. I am curious to see if that changes the percentage. Top 10% is still very good. The watch does unfortunately not give any detailed information, but you can see the blue dot moving closer to next level. I did not expect any changes to fitness age, so did not screenshot it, but I came down from 47.5 years to estimated 46 years old, which certainly is worth taking too.
Last but not least, my weight. I am 6.1 or 185 cm for those using that metric, tall, and I am not really focused on my weight at such. I measure it every day on a Garmin Scale that sync to my app automatically, but apart from making sure I do not gain weight, then I am all good as is. I would love to get down to about 80-81 kg but it is not something I am working on, it will happen as a natural thing if it happens. But given cancer can be a hungry beast, it is not irrelevant to keep an eye on sudden changes, if they should happen. Quite amazing, I just realized it is a copy of May.
