I was staring at this data every single day. I had no idea what it was trying to tell me.
Every morning from November to March, I woke up, lay still for three minutes, and measured my resting heart rate. The app is HRV4training , it tracks your physiological stress day by day and helps you understand how recovered your body actually is.
Here is what the graph shows:
November: stable and healthy. A body ready to race.
Late November into December: a rise around the first IBU Cup races in Austria and Italy. Race excitement. Normal.
December 21st: a sharp spike. That was Le Grand-Bornand, my World Cup debut and the illness that followed over Christmas.
January: relatively flat. The German World Cups. Tired, but managing.
February: look at what happens in February.
The bars climb and keep climbing, peaking right around my Olympic training camp and the Games themselves. The highest point on the entire graph. Every morning I was looking at these numbers and telling myself: this is normal, the plan is working, keep going.
I believed it. I had no reason not to.
What the data could not tell me was why.
On the Tuesday after my final race in Oslo, I took a blood test. The result explained everything.
The full deep dive, the season, the graph, and what the blood test revealed, is in my latest newsletter, Running on an Empty Tank.
Link in bio or reply to this and I'll send it to you. Worth the read.