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ornoth_cyclingIt took better than four years, but COVID finally found our residence, just in time to knock everyone down over the Fourth of July holiday.
In my 2024 PMC Ride Report I talked about how it interrupted my training for the biggest cycling event of my year, so I won’t go over that again. But I haven’t felt quite as strong on the bike since then, so I wanted to take a quick peek at whether COVID had any long-term effect on my cycling.
I decided to run some numbers, and if there’s one thing I have, it’s numbers!
To be unbiased, I decided on my protocol without looking at things beforehand. I’d compare my statistics across three two-month time periods:
- May 1 to June 30 2024: the two months just before I contracted COVID
- July 16 to September 15 2024: the two months right after I recovered from COVID
- July 16 to September 15 2023: the same two months, but one year earlier
My hypothesis was that any post-COVID effects might show up as a decline in power and O2 saturation, and possibly an increase in heart rate.
Now let’s see the resulting numbers. I lined them up in chronological order.
| Statistic | Jul-Sep 2023 | May-Jun 2024 | Jul-Sep 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Activities | 42 | 42 | 40 |
| Activity Hours | 74 | 69 | 79 |
| Avg. Power | 127 | 130 | 124 |
| Max. Power | 680 | 677 | 721 |
| Avg. HR | 127 | 125 | 126 |
| Max. HR | 154 | 147 | 150 |
| Resting HR | 52 | 54 | 53 |
| Weight | 74 | 76 | 75 |
| Temperature | 36.6 | 36.7 | 36.7 |
| BP | 106 / 78 | 109 / 76 | 108 / 72 |
| O2 Sat. | 95 | 94 | 93 |
| Body Fat | 15.3 | 17.3 | 16.6 |
| Hydration | 54.1 | 52.6 | 52.9 |
The numbers are pretty clear: there’s no evidence of a systemic decrease in my fitness as a result of COVID.
In fact, if I looked at these numbers out of context, I’d say that the (pre-COVID) May-June period shows a slight decrease in performance from my 2023 numbers, but that there was a slight improvement in the July-September period (following COVID). Counterintuitively, nearly every statistic was either flat or slightly improved post-COVID! Of particular note were improvements in my max power and body fat percentage.
There were only two stats that were noticeably down, and they were the exact ones I hypothesized: a 4.6% decrease in my average power, and a slightly lower O2 saturation. The former was only a decrease of six Watts, which isn’t huge and could be partially explained by my workload composition. The latter stat does decrease with age, and I have a history of asthma and chronic bronchitis, but a two-month average of 93% is pretty low, even for a senior.
But those two stats didn’t change very significantly, so I can’t attribute it specifically to COVID. And all the other data point to the past two months being pretty normal for me and my body. So I guess I won’t argue with that!
