About a week ago my daughter Carolyn, who is the source of many of the great new innovations in my aging life (she’s the one who put me onto stretch – U, among other things), told me I needed to get an Oura Ring. An Oura Ring is a “smart” ring worn on your finger (preferably the left index finger) that tracks health and wellness data using sensors rather than a screen or buttons. It tracks sleep stages (duration, and quality), heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV), body temperature trends, activity levels and calories burned, blood oxygen levels (SpO2), and respiratory rate. The way it works is that infrared LEDs and sensors on the inside of the ring measure pulse and blood flow and the data gets synced to a companion phone app via Bluetooth, thereby allowing the app to turn raw data into daily “Sleep,” “Readiness,” and “Activity” scores meant to reflect how recovered your body is every day. It’s not the first device to try capturing this data, but why other people like it…and why I like it…is that it’s more discreet and comfortable than a wrist wearable for 24/7 wear (especially overnight), it has longer battery life than most smartwatches (roughly 4-7 days), and it focuses on recovery and readiness rather than notifications or apps.
Oura needs a baseline period of data-gathering before its scores become meaningful, since “readiness” and sleep insights are calculated relative to your personal normal, not a generic population average. During the first few days, basic sleep/activity data shows up, but scores are somewhat unreliable since the app is still guessing at my normal ranges. In about 2 weeks Oura will start establishing a baseline for HRV, resting heart rate, and body temperature. In a month, the baselines should stabilize enough that daily scores start reflecting real deviations (with commentary like, “your HRV is lower than usual” with that actually meaning something). Then, after 2-3 months, it should have achieved optimal accuracy with enough data to account for weekly patterns, cycles, and normal variation, so temperature and HRV trend lines become genuinely diagnostic rather than noise. From there, consistent wear, especially overnight (sporadic use resets/confuses baselines) will be important as well as staying in the habit of logging tags (illness, travel, workouts) so the app can contextualize anomalies instead of treating them as pure noise.
I am already looking at my Oura app first thing every morning and several times later in the day to see how I’m doing. I haven’t really figured out how to make use of my Readiness score, but Sleep efficiency and Activity level have valuable information content for me. I’ve already learned that I’m not getting as much high-quality sleep as I thought and as I probably need. The next stage is to figure out the fixes to that, and Oura has lots of ideas that it likes running by me. On the activity side, I have been tracking my daily steps and my activities (just as a notation) for 7-8 months. I have three one-hour training sessions per week and one hourly Gyrotronics session, none of which gets well-captured in my steps. But what has always troubled me is that my motorcycle riding, which I have contended uses lots of energy and muscle power, has gone entirely unrecorded despite it lasting, on average 3-4 hours on those days. Now, Oura has filled in those blanks for me. Since it connects the dots between movement, heart rate and HRV, it’s able to estimate caloric utilization by calibrating my aerobic and metabolic activity. My riding today, which totaled just under two hours, and utilized 580 calories since the average heart rate recorded while riding was 120 bpm (my average resting heart rate is 59 bpm). That compares to my walking heart rate average of about 80-90 bpm. My training and Gyrotronics sessions have higher HRV, but the sustained heart rate elevation of motorcycling is by far the most intense activity I do most weeks.
Besides the unfamiliar Readiness score, I am also awaiting a Resilience score. I know the meaning of both words, but I admit to being rather unclear as to how to use the information content of these scores to improve my fitness. Sleeping more and better, exercising more and harder, and watching my heart rate are all things I can understand and appreciate monitoring. I am choosing to ignore the Stress ratings because I have never understood how to think about or deal with stress as a part of fitness and I’m unsure that I ever will.
When I think about my days these days, I think I may be sorting out what matters to me. The epiphany came to me while riding up Couser Canyon or Rice Canyon or perhaps through the hills of De Luz. It was a bright and sunny day that I thought was going to be a hot one, so I shifted our ride from Mesa Grande, which had a heat advisory on for the day. But the day was very temperate and there were even some nice cool ocean breezes flowing through Bonsal and Fallbrook, where we were riding. I was wearing some of my new, smaller clothes and everything fit nicely. The bike was in fine fit and all my electronics (Bluetooth included) were working as they should. I was listening to my 70’s Feel Good playlist, which is all up-tempo tunes that resonate with my youth and, not surprisingly, make me feel good. All of this worked together to make for a wonderful morning without a care in the world. I had put in a few hours of expert work revising a report. I had played with Buddy. I had prepped my motorcycle by checking the tires and gas. Len and I stopped at the Fallbrook Cafe for lunch and after my favorite lunch of chili, I was feeling pretty good. To top that off, with my Oura app telling me how much aerobic and metabolic value I was getting from the activity I enjoy as much as any, was a pleasant bonus.
This is a month of doing what matters most to me. As usual, I have Kim and Buddy by my side. I have my family staying with me (or at least half of my family), and I get to make them happy for a month. I feel healthy and am more fit that I have been in years. I have a new gadget to help me get even more fit. I have just the right amount of meaningful work that I truly enjoy. My garden is flourishing. The weather is great. This weekend I will go visit a dear friend whose life is drawing to an end. It will remind me even more that doing the things that matter the most to you is what we are supposed to fill our lives with. Some people say that you need to do what you need to do, not what you want to do. I prefer to reverse that. Do what you want to do…do what matters most to you…and that will cover everything you need in life. When your time is at an end, there will be nothing left undone.