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It 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!
