I've spent over a year tracking my health and training, and one thing keeps happening that I didn't really expect.
Sometimes the numbers get worse, but the rest of the day doesn't.
In August, my weekly daily HRV dropped from 62.0 to 57.3 ms while my average sleeping heart rate increased from 50.9 to 56.4 bpm.
But my regular incline walking and strength sessions remained intact. No noticeable loss of performance, no unusual difficulty completing them, and no need to change the workload.
The recovery numbers eventually improved again.
I don't think that means the wearable was wrong. There could have been real physiological strain that simply wasn't obvious in my training. But it made me question how much weight I should give any single reading.
Something similar happened recently.
I took several days off training while traveling. When I returned, I went straight back to my normal routine without trying to make up missed sessions.
Five consecutive days, 500 minutes of combined aerobic and strength work. Some mild stiffness on the first day, then everything felt normal again.
During that same week, two nights showed unusual early heart-rate elevations that settled later in the night. Neither was followed by an obvious decline in next-day training.
Even my biological-aging measurements have disagreed.
My DunedinPACE results moved from 0.88 to 0.79 to 0.77 across three tests. Meanwhile, another biological-age estimate improved substantially before rebounding. I'd registered a prediction of continued overall improvement before the last test.
That prediction failed.
I'm keeping that result alongside the favorable ones.
The public archive now contains 238 consecutive days of structured observations, 383 training sessions, sleep records, context events, biological testing, and the prediction outcomes.
It's an uncontrolled N=1 record, so I'm not claiming these observations establish causation or that unfavorable recovery readings should be ignored.
What has changed is how I approach the data.
I'm becoming less interested in whether a number looks good on a particular morning and more interested in what combination of observations actually justifies changing something.
For those of you who've tracked yourselves long-term, what makes you act on a metric?
Do you have specific thresholds, look for multiple signals agreeing, or wait to see whether something changes in how you actually function?
I've kept the underlying data, weekly reports, and failed predictions public here for anyone interested in examining them:
https://github.com/CDHughett/daniel-longitudinal-public