R words — Rest and recovery

It was chilly when my alarm roused me at 7:00am. I hit the snooze button at least three times before I threw off the covers and parked myself in the shower. A latenight work call (hello timezone shifting) meant I was working on just four hours sleep, but I had a date to meet a friend in town before she and her family headed back home. The plan was to have breakfast together and then I’d answer a few emails before indulging in an nap of undetermined length.

I’m bad at rest days normally. And I have no reference for what overdoing it feels like post-hysterectomy, especially when you’re feeling good. Still, it’s not hard to parse that after a Sunday that included an outing to a hockey game, an early dinner with friends and a late night meeting before my morning coffee date, that the smart call was to declare Monday a rest day. The 37 reading on my Garmin’s Body Battery validated this approach.

So today has been spent — ‘puttering’ — is what my father might call it. After I returned home from breakfast, I spent an hour or so returning emails and doing some follow-up from the late night meeting and then shut my computer. I lounged for the rest of the morning, rousing myself only to put a batch of yogurt on to set and to make myself some lunch. I went downstairs to collect any physical mail from my box in the lobby (raise your hand if you only check your actual mailbox 1-2 times/week), caught up on a couple of shows I’d missed over the weekend, made myself a snack, and then napped again. By dinnertime, I was awake and thanked the past version of me who’d cooked enough creamy chicken and spinach on Sunday so there were leftovers to warm up and serve with rice. All in all, a chill day.

But by the time I crawled back into bed around midnight, my Garmin still only read 41, so my plans to walk 5k on Tuesday got shelved in favor of more recovery time. I felt fine, I wasn’t grappling with fatigue, but I am learning to trust my data as a metric for when to spend some quiet time right now, instead of pushing through because I would ‘normally’ work out on a Tuesday.

Who knows, maybe I’ll acquire the habit of recovery as a routine through all of this?