Why I ride more slowly now: the detour that changed my morning training

The morning with the red patch

I still remember standing in the bathroom thinking it would go away on its own. A red area in my eye, clearly visible. No pain, no great drama – but equally nothing that belongs there.

My first reaction was to make sense of it. In the weeks before I had been training excessively: weight training in the mornings, genuinely heavy, with an endurance session on top. I was tired, I was drained, and I had the feeling I was asking too much of my body. The red patch fitted that picture. So I told myself: that was the overload.

In hindsight it is precisely that conclusion where I hesitate today. I had it examined by an eye doctor, and that was the only right decision that morning. But back then I had already assembled a cause for myself before anyone else had looked at it. I would not recommend that to anyone.

What I understood training to be back then

I come from a mindset in which effort is the measure of all things. If a session hurts, it worked. If I can barely climb the stairs afterwards, it was a good session. I never questioned that, because it worked in other areas of my life.

Applied to my metabolism, it meant: blood sugar has to come down, so the session has to be hard. I trained in the mornings because I wanted to start the day that way, and I kept ratcheting up the workload. Weights first, then endurance. Fasted. Before work.

That I was working against something I had not understood at all only became clear to me years later.

Stopping

After the business with my eye I dropped morning training completely. Not reduced, not adjusted – dropped. It had simply become too unsettling. I had the impression of doing something to my body without knowing what exactly.

That phase was uncomfortable. For years I had had a structure that began in the morning, and suddenly there was nothing. I switched to midday sessions, irregularly, without a plan. It was not a good state, but it was an honest one: I had no idea what my training did to my blood sugar, and for the first time I stopped pretending that I did.

The point where feelings became data

At some stage I bought a Peloton bike. Not because I wanted to go back to hard training, but because I needed something at home that works without fuss. And in parallel I started measuring continuously.

That was the actual turning point, not the bike. Before, I had opinions about my metabolism. Afterwards I had curves. And the first thing the curves showed me was that I had been wrong.

What I saw was not what I expected: when I trained hard, the value went down fast and deep – sometimes below 70, in individual cases towards 60. At first I chalked that up as a success. Then came the part afterwards. The value did not stay down. It came back, and markedly higher than it had been before.

How I picture it today

It took a while before I understood what is probably happening. When blood sugar falls towards 70, the body reads it as an alarm. The liver releases glucose to pull me out of the low.³ It does not ask whether I brought the low about deliberately.

My picture of it now is: the harder I push the value down, the more decisively the liver pushes back. So with my training I was triggering precisely the release I wanted to avoid – and because I am insulin resistant on top of that, the braking signal afterwards gets through less well. The result is a value that overshoots.

I deliberately write „my picture of it“. The underlying physiology is well described, but that it runs exactly this way in me is my interpretation of my own curves. Proof would require a clean comparison under matching conditions, and to this day I have not done that.

The years before: why I trained that way at all

To understand why I overdid it, I have to go back briefly. Since 2014 I have approached my metabolism without medication. That was a deliberate decision, and it has a side effect that is rarely discussed: if you forgo tablets, lifestyle is the only tool you have left. And when your own tool does not seem enough, the obvious answer is to grip harder.

Then there is the fire service. I am a volunteer, and that means call-outs, often at night. There you learn that seeing it through is what counts and that you function even when it gets uncomfortable. That attitude is worth its weight in gold on a call-out. Applied to my own metabolism it was a mistake.

So for years I nurtured an equation: more effort equals more result. And I even had confirmation for it, because various things did improve. I just never checked whether it was because of the volume or in spite of it.

What stopping did to me

The months without a fixed morning routine were harder than I expected. Not physically – there it was more like relief. It was my head. For years I had told myself that this hour in the morning was the reason I was doing well. Take that away and an uncomfortable question remains: was it really?

In hindsight that question was the best thing that could have happened to me. It cleared the way for something I would never have done otherwise: measuring instead of believing. Had I simply carried on a little more quietly after the eye, I would never have started documenting. I would have carried on having opinions.

What I got wrong on the way back

The restart was not clean. When I began with the bike and the sensor, I wanted quick answers. I switched classes, varied intensities, moved times of day – and all of it at once. In the end I had plenty of curves and not a single conclusion, because I never knew which change was responsible for what.

That I now ride almost always the same classes is the consequence. It is more boring, but it is the only thing that permits comparison at all. Change everything at once and you learn nothing – that holds for training just as much as for diet.

The second mistake was the measuring itself. For a long time I only looked right after training. The value looked good then and I was satisfied. That the interesting phase only begins afterwards I noticed only when I started looking again an hour later.

Why it is 45 calm minutes today

Out of all this grew a routine that looks unspectacular from the outside: 45 minutes of low impact riding, resistance at level two, mostly the same classes. I could do considerably more. I simply no longer want to.

The reason is not caution for its own sake but what I see in the curves: at this intensity the value falls slowly enough that the alarm system does not kick in. The rebound afterwards is flatter. Across the whole morning I come out better this way than with a hard half hour after which I spend two hours fighting the result.

There is something else I had underestimated: at level two I can talk. I dictate notes, thoughts, sometimes whole article drafts while riding – parts of this one were written on the bike. I prepare the day while I ride. That turns an obligation into time I engage with rather than time I get behind me.

What else has changed

My resting heart rate has come down considerably over time. So has my weight. The values as a whole sit calmer than they used to, and I less often have those swings where in the evening I no longer know where they came from.

I would like to be able to say that this is down to the training. Honestly: I do not know. Over the same period my weight changed, my diet, my knowledge of my own metabolism. All of it runs at once, and I have no control group. I only have myself, and I write down what I see.

What I would pass on

If I were allowed to pass on one thing from this story, it would not be my protocol. It would be the question behind it: how do I actually know that what I am doing works?

For years I trained in the firm conviction that I was doing my metabolism good. I had good reasons, I had discipline, and I was still wrong – not about whether movement helps, but about how much and when. I only noticed once I started writing it down.

The other thing is the red patch. I had it examined, and I would advise anyone to do the same – but faster than I did, and without first assembling a reassuring explanation. In diabetes the eyes belong in regular check-ups, regardless of whether anything is currently noticeable.¹ That is the one point in this article where I do not want anyone to follow my example.

Where I stand right now

My fasting value is still higher than it should be. I can dampen the dawn phenomenon, not switch it off. I keep riding in the mornings, I keep recording, and I keep experimenting – just no longer with brute force.

Next I want to measure two things properly: what happens if I ride the same morning once with a markedly more intense session, and whether 30 minutes achieve the same as 45. Both could be answered. So far I have not done it, and until then much of what I describe here remains a well-founded assumption.