Am I making progress?

I have been exercising for just over a month now, which feels long enough that I should be able to notice something. Not necessarily abs. I am thirty, not delusional. But something. Stairs getting easier. Less dramatic breathing. A vague sense that my body has received the memo. Instead, I mostly feel like myself. The annoying part is that GRACE appears to disagree.

There are numbers now. More of them than I ever cared about before. Resting heart rate. Training heart rate. Sleep duration. Sleep quality. Recovery. VO₂ max. Things I knew existed in the abstract and had never once felt the need to understand. That was before they became mine.

My resting heart rate has come down a little. Apparently that is good. My heart rate during the same workout is sometimes lower than it was a few weeks ago, which also sounds good, except then one day it is higher again and I immediately start wondering what I did wrong.

Then there is maximum heart rate, which I made the mistake of looking into. I had assumed there would be a number. One simple, sensible number for a woman my age. There is not. There are formulas, averages, ranges and an impressive number of people confidently disagreeing with each other. I have now read enough about heart rate zones to understand that I previously understood absolutely nothing about heart rate zones.

VO₂ max is worse. GRACE gives me the number. I can see the trend. I know roughly what it is supposed to represent. What I do not know is how excited I am meant to be about it moving a little. Is a small increase meaningful? Is it measurement noise? Is it because I slept better? Is it because I pushed harder? Is it because I was less stressed? Am I actually fitter, or has my body simply become more efficient at surviving the particular machine I keep making it use?

This is what happens when you give me data. I start with one perfectly reasonable question and twenty minutes later I am comparing oxygen uptake ranges for women in their thirties while eating cereal over the kitchen sink.

Sleep has become its own problem. I used to wake up and decide whether I had slept well based on the extremely advanced method of asking myself whether I felt terrible. Now I can see how long I slept, how restless it was, how my heart behaved overnight and whether my recovery looked normal for me. GRACE gives me more context around that too, but that is the part I am not allowed to share. Honestly, that may be for the best. I already have enough material to overthink. What I cannot decide is whether all of this is useful or whether I am just becoming very well informed about being tired.

The strange thing is that the numbers are beginning to change before I really feel any different. My heart rate looks slightly better. My VO₂ max is creeping upward. Some workouts that used to feel awful now only feel moderately insulting. GRACE seems quite confident that something is happening. I am less convinced.

Maybe that is normal. Maybe fitness improves quietly for a while before your brain catches up. Maybe there is no morning where you wake up and suddenly think, ah yes, cardiovascular progress.

I think what I actually wanted was one number that said: you are doing this correctly. Instead I have been given several numbers, all of which seem to say something slightly different, plus a HUD full of observations I am apparently capable of turning into homework.

So I suppose the good news is that I am still exercising. The bad news is that I now know what VO₂ max means. This was probably inevitable.