Bachelor Week
Kristin left town and I immediately made excellent decisions.
Saturday: Mariners game. Good time. Home at a reasonable hour.
Monday was the call day — and somewhere in there, only three hours of sleep. Tuesday was rough.
The thing about being left to your own devices at 57 is that you have enough self-awareness to know what you're doing while you're doing it. A call shift that bleeds into a short night is just part of the job. You know what's coming the next morning and you get through it. The week built from there — four training days total, 462 TSS, 6.7 hours. Average heart rate across all sessions: 112.5. That number matters. Last week, carrying a bigger load of 537 TSS, the average HR was 115. This week, similar session structure, the heart rate ran lower. Same perceived effort, cleaner output. That's aerobic adaptation. It doesn't announce itself. It just quietly shows up in the numbers if you're tracking honestly and patient enough to notice.
HRV told the same story. Five valid morning strap readings this week — 6.8, 7.4, 7.6, 8.3, 7.1. That peak of 8.3 on Friday is the highest single valid reading in this entire rebuild. The body is absorbing the training load and coming back stronger. Slowly, without drama, the foundation is doing what foundations do.
Weight hit 176.8 on Friday — the lowest number in the dataset since we started tracking. The trend line over six weeks now points clearly in the right direction.
There's a session from Saturday worth mentioning: 2.5 hours, 158 TSS, average HR 112. That's a legitimate aerobic block, controlled from start to finish. Not a hero workout. Just solid, honest work that sits in the bank and compounds. Phil Skiba talks about chronic training load as the accumulated deposit of weeks like this — not any single session but the sum of enough consistent ones that the aerobic engine starts operating at a different level.
Six weeks of data now. The picture is becoming clearer.
The interruptions are still there — call days, short nights, a Mariners game, a week in Bellingham with too much wine. They will always be there. That's not a complaint. That's the actual texture of a life being lived alongside training rather than in spite of it. What the data shows is that the interruptions aren't derailing anything. The TSS is building. The HR is dropping. The HRV is climbing. The weight is trending down.
Bachelor week, as it turns out, was a good training week.
Kristin comes home to a husband who watched baseball, survived a call night on three hours of sleep, and still got the work done.
She'll be thrilled.
Weekly metrics: 4 training days · 6.7 hours · 462 TSS · HRV peak 8.3 · Avg sleep 6.9 hrs · Avg HR 112.5 · Weight 176.8 (low) vs. last week: 4 training days · 8.0 hours · 537 TSS · Avg HR 115 Six-week TSS trend: 326 → 468 → 453 → 406 → 537 → 462