Getting A Coach

Sometimes, knowing too much may be bad for you.

My Garmin is telling me that my Heart Rate Variability is too low, my Resting Heart Rate has gone up, on average, by seven beats, and my Sleep Score is beyond abysmal.

If I didn’t wear a sports watch then I wouldn’t know any of this and would have blithely carried on with no care in the world, instead of feeling like I’m about to keel over at any point. My pre-watch fifty-year-old self would have skipped along believing that she had many decades of happy life ahead of her. Now her fifty-two-year-old counterpart is cowering under the covers, re-checking the metrics and grabbing her chest in total paranoia.

I don’t have any actual physicals symptoms. Alright, I do feel a bit more tired because I know I haven’t been sleeping very well for about a fortnight. There’s no reason for that other than that great evolutionary joke that is perimenopause. Nature, the prankster, giving women two stages of hormonal chaos to bookend our species-saving purpose. I haven’t physically partaken of this great rite of passage, but I still get the roller-coaster joy.

The timing of my imminent expiration has not been the best. I have just hired the services of a coach for a couple of months to help me along with my next challenge: to speed up my 5K time. We’re only on Week 1 and already I’m scaling back my commitment to the weights and have dropped one of my runs, so that does not bode well.

The main reason I chose Matt was that I could afford him, at least for a couple of months. That’s no reflection on him; he does our club coaching on the track once a month and he seems like he knows what he’s talking about. He also has a nice month-by-month coaching plan so that you’re under no obligation to continue if you can’t or don’t want to. This suits me very well because I don’t work and so have very little disposable income. 

Why am I spending any of it on a coach at all then? Because I want to see what it feels like to be told what to do. I don’t mean for that to sound servile, but I do know that every time I attempt to follow an off-the-shelf training plan, I end up going off-piste exceedingly quickly. Because of life or laziness. My deal with Matt is that he gives me only a week’s worth in advance and we’ll chat on-line (or face-to-face if I get to his Monday night group – not obligatory) about what I have going on in the following week, so that it realistically matches up with my life and how I have got on with the previous runs.

Like this week for example, the very first week: I told him I wanted to do the Tuesday club night, and I’d be in Stratford-upon-Avon for a couple of nights. He did give me an optional run on the Monday just gone but because that was the day after a race (not the Half but a local six-miler), he was quite happy for me to miss it if I felt tired. I did miss it.

He sends his sessions via my Garmin. Yes, that self-same piece of equipment that has got me in a fluster. I suppose it does have its uses, and I won’t throw it in the bin just yet. If I were sensible, I’d just wear it for my runs and then take it off so that it doesn’t give me all this gloomy news about my ticker. But I’m in too deep with the numbers and a bit addicted to the graphs. Will the HRV downward curve eventually turn into a smile? Or will this getting coached lark be my final running adventure?