Alvin Cheng | Illustrator

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My recent long long flu, and my relationship with technology — Garmin and Strava

Alvin Cheng

As you know on the article On productivity and misery, I had flu for almost a month with a series of symptoms like headaches, feeling too hot and too cold, tired, cough with yellow phlegm, sweating while sleeping… When I hang out or went back to work, I felt sick again so I had to stop doing everything but stayed at home lying on my bed for the whole day.

The illness did let me learn a lot, but before talking about the takeaway points, I am here to show my relationship with technology when I was ill. Those data allows me to understand how my health condition was going.

Stress as shown in my smartwatch

I have a Garmin smartwatch most of the time to record running. I sometimes use it for facilitating my meditation. Even though it was designed for running, there are some metrics for me to track my health. I used it once after my COVID vaccination.

Stress level is an indicator of whether one’s healthy or not. Usually sleeping is the most relaxing state, as shown below the blue colour which means “very low”. When at rest doing nothing, one may get blue or orange colour but the level is something like not more than 50.

The indicator is based on Heart Rate Variability (HRV). Higher HRV means lower stress and vice versa. High HRV implies the body is able to adapt different changing situations as the heart rates can be varied in different periods of time. Lower HRV can be related to various factors like inflammation because the body is too ill to adapt different circumstances. As you are more vulnerable and less resilient to various conditions, you have to be free from some situations like very cold or busy environments, and you have to find ways to relax. Under serious conditions, you have no choice but to go to bed.

I was so ill on 30 December 2024. On 29 December (Sunday) I was out for portrait sketching, and I was so tired at the end of the day. You can see during the sleeping time, I was so stressed — orange colour almost throughout my sleep. That means my body was so weak to adapt different environments including my comfortable room.

On 30 and 31 December 2024, I worked in the afternoon and evening shifts. Even though the working hours were not so long, I had breaks which were before normal dinner time so I found it especially difficult to work, and easily felt tired after work. You can see below I couldn’t have a good sleep: I sweated all the time or I felt either very cold or very hot even with my heater on. I had no choice but to stop doing everything, and I needed to have a sick leave from the beginning of the new year.

I had to stay at home lying on my bed, and wrote to my GP. Thankfully I could have an appointment on Saturday (4 January 2025). He wrote me a medical certificate and prescribed me an antibiotic for 5 days.

Although I was not suitable to go out, I still needed to in order to get foods from supermarket. I chose to travel by bus and wore a mask to protect myself. I was tired again after the visit until 9 January when I didn’t feel worse again.

That’s why on 10 January, which was my birthday, I tried to arrange my celebration, and staycation in Eastbourne (an hour train from London) for me would be the safest for me.

After the trip I no longer felt worse, but my data on smartwatch told me I was still very stressed when I was out. While I stayed some time in my room, I walked a bit along the coast in the sun, and visited the art museum nearby. The tight clothes which could bring me warmth might add stress to me.

Body Battery

There is also another metric called Body Battery, which shows how much energy one have from the beginning to the end of the day.

Usually if one sleeps well, the battery level will be “recharged” to 100%. But if you don’t sleep enough hours or can’t be asleep / you are ill, the body battery will not be able to go back to the full capacity.

This is what has happened since my illness, and I have been able to get fully recharged since the beginning of this week!

Of course, there is still something that data can’t tell, especially my feelings when I was talking and running. Since 10 January I was better, I still felt like I was going to cough when I talked long. From 19 January I no longer have that feeling anymore. As I have been ill for almost a month, I am very cautious because I don’t want to be sick again, especially recalling my experience at the end of December. I still spend time on resting even though I start doing something again.

Feedback from AI by Strava

Another app Strava has recently introduced a beta version of AI called 
“Athlete Intelligence”. Even though I am not an AI person as said in the previous article, this AI provides a very useful summary especially when a human is not good at analysing various kinds of statistics from smartwatches.

But summary is not an end. I still have to interpret the content, make observations on my body and my experience and even ask questions. Not to just rely on and even trust AI. For example, in the feedback of my first run after illness, AI said,

Your heart rate peaked at 140 bpm, which is your highest in 23 days.

So why did AI just compare to 23 days but not more days like covering my running habit before the illness? I first misunderstood that I had an exceptionally high heart rate probably because I didn’t totally recover (as I felt I couldn’t reach the performance as in the past). When revisiting my previous record which was on Christmas Day, my heart rate reached 165 bpm which was higher than the 140 as told by the AI. Thus the statement here is meaningless and I still need to understand my feelings when I am running.

First run:

On my second run: I could run more smoothly after 2–3km. I brought more clothes with a jacket but I needed to put it off when running. I was wondering if I felt ill again when my body was exposed to cold environment like that.

Conclusion

I first noticed I was sick on Christmas Day, after taking a night bus ride with a passenger in front of me who kept coughing. On the following day I decided to get a sick leave and went to a convenient store to have a medicine. At first I felt a little bit better and thought I could go back to work while spending some time on resting.

However I was totally wrong, and I needed to stop doing everything except lying on my bed. Otherwise, I would never get well! My stress level on my smartwatch had shown that, and I needed to consult my GP.

A 5-day antibiotic treatment did give me an obvious improvement, and one of the aims of the staycation, besides celebrating my birthday, was to let myself walk a bit in the sun and have a hot bath to make my body warmer.

But recovery never comes in a second, but gradually. My smartwatch does show that. First of all I couldn’t talk much and wanted to cough if I kept speaking, maybe due to bronchitis. What’s left right now is my running performance as I haven’t done for almost three weeks.

Of course I had flu in my life, but this is the first time I have it for very long time — not only those symptoms just playing around me, but also that I have no choice but to stop.

Sometimes my observation can help, while professional people like doctors play the role of diagnosis, and technology can give us some clues about what happened.

I don’t want to complain I was unfortunate, but I can’t say this is a good thing. But without this long period of illness, I will never learn something on it, which will be discussed in my next article.

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