Sleep Data Tracking Overall Health Fitness – Post Epidural Recovery

To put it bluntly – sleep is grossly underrated. How many times have you heard expressions like; poor sleep – that’s what coffee is for, or I will get plenty of sleep when I am dead? Well there are a ton of quality, peer reviewed studies and reports that clearly demonstrate the importance of good sleep, not just one night but repeatedly for both physical and mental health. But don’t take my word for it, the topic is well covered in Dr. Peter Attia’s great book Outlive and this great podcast. https://peterattiamd.com/understanding-sleep/

With that as a backdrop I share with you my recent and on-going horrible sleep patterns, their root causes, and the demonstrative if not devastating impact this poor sleep is having on my health, fitness, and psyche.

You may recall I recently experienced a massive lateral herniation of my L3/L4 disc and a herniated L5/S1 disc. The L3/L4 showing up in the MRI as a 90 – 95% lateral blockage of the vertebrae space for the associated nerve bundle going to the left leg. No, the herniation did not happen all-at-once. From what I can now surmise from the feeling/sensations I am having post epidural, the disc has probably been herniated and every now and then ‘lightly’ touching the nerve bundle for years. The current event started evening of October 27 with the peak pain starting Thursday night / Friday morning October 30/31. See: https://raam2cc.org/2025/11/17/well-that-didnt-go-as-planned/

So my sleep has gone to Heck (see Hecla). And with it as noted above – my health, fitness, and psyche. Let’s start with a recent sleep score from my Garmin Venu 3 (as is all of the data to be presented) which was a rather pathetic 50. This comprised of a mere 6:04 hours/minutes on a night where my body battery was almost down to zero and the recommended sleep time was over 8:30.

Digging further into the data we see the sleep was made up of 1:06 Deep sleep, 4:14 of Light sleep (when you sometimes think you are awake because your brain won’t shut down), 44 minutes of REM (which is now great for me as there were weeks where I had 3 to 4 days of 0, ZERO REM), and then we have the Awake of 2:05. This awake is truly wide awake, generally so I can go take some Tylenol for the pain, use the massage gun located on my nightstand, to provide some temporary relief in my quadriceps. Sometimes getting out of bed to walk/almost crawl in order to get some blood flowing in the leg and feeling back as at night it tends to go numb down to the knee.

There are two further sleep metrics and these are very much tied to fitness and overall health. They are Resting Heart Rate (RHR) and Heart Rate Variability (HRV). HRV tracks the variation between contraction electrical pulse signals with longer typically representing calmer / fitter conditions and shorter a sure sign of stress. RHR represents the degree to which the heart and cardio-pulmonary system is both rested and fit.

Here we see data from Saturday night with a RHR of 47. To put that in perspective on Sunday night October 25th after a 340 mile training week my RHR was all of 40. It is typically in the 36 to 38 range. 47 is higher than almost any time since I turned 12-years old. Not good! This is what pain, meds, stress, poor sleep, and depression lead to. Not a good place to start training again, not that I could as I am far from properly healed. My RHR and HRV will be good leading indicators that I am on the road to recovery.

Finally the HRV. We can see something went well with HRV during Thursday night. I really hit the Oxycodone and Tylenol combinations all night long. However I would rather not need to rely on drugs to sleep. See the above Peter Attia podcast, the experts agree quality sleep is natural not induced. However – with my nighttime pain levels I may still need to keep popping a few pills. Frankly Saturday night the 1 AM Tylenol worked reasonably well.

I plan to come back periodically to report out on nighttime pain levels, sleep data, and how I am progressing on my road to recovery. Yes, that means I am predominantly optimistic that I will, in the not too distant future be able to go back to the gym, ride my bicycle, and get a good night sleep.

May your nights be less stressful.