What a sleep study and a CPAP taught me about the variable I thought I’d already ruled out.
Saturday night, Beard Guy slept 7 hours and 23 minutes. First time over 7 hours in 2026. He woke up and checked his watch the way you check a race result you weren’t sure you’d earned.
It took a machine strapped to his face to get there.
For most of his adult life, Beard Guy operated on the assumption that he was just built differently. Five hours, maybe less, wide awake before the alarm. Not a discipline problem, not a choice. Just the way the system ran. He trained hard, tracked everything, and quietly accepted that sleep was the one metric he couldn’t move.
His average sleep duration through the first few months of 2026 was 4 hours 32 minutes. He knew the number. He wasn’t particularly worried about it. Some people just don’t need much sleep, right?
Wrong. Spectacularly, measurably, data-confirmably wrong.
The HRV story started this. Elite HRV baseline at the end of 2025 was sitting around 780 ms RR, which isn’t a crisis number, but it wasn’t where it should be for someone logging the training hours he was logging. The data was telling him something. He just wasn’t sure what.
Dry January happened. Not a spiritual awakening, just an experiment. Remove alcohol, hold everything else constant, see what moves. By January 31, HRV RR had climbed to around 940 ms. Roughly a 160 ms improvement in 30 days without changing training, without sleeping more, without doing anything particularly heroic. Just removing one input and letting the system breathe.
That result was interesting. But something still felt off.
Body Battery kept bottoming out. Sleep scores were ugly. Not occasionally ugly, consistently ugly. Out of the last four weeks of data, the word “Poor” showed up so many times it started to feel personal. Scores of 27, 37, 38. Body Battery at 8. Nights where he went to bed at a reasonable hour and woke up three hours later for no apparent reason.
He went and got a sleep study.
Twenty point five events per hour. That’s the number. Every hour, on average, his airway was doing something it shouldn’t be doing 20 times. His body was waking itself up to breathe and then going back under, over and over, all night, every night, and he had no idea. He thought he was sleeping. He was not sleeping. He was surviving.
The CPAP started April 10. Ten days ago.
The floor has already moved. Sleep scores that were routinely in the 20s and 30s are now regularly landing in the 50s and 60s. Body Battery is recovering better. The “Fair” ratings, which used to feel like a minor miracle, are showing up multiple times a week now. He’s not fixed. Ten days on a CPAP does not undo years of fragmented sleep. But the trajectory is different.
And then Saturday happened. 7 hours 23 minutes. Garmin called it Poor, which, fair enough, the scoring algorithm has its own opinions. But the duration was real. The first time over 7 hours all year. Beard Guy woke up and didn’t immediately feel like he needed to negotiate with the day just to get started.
That was new.
Here’s the coaching translation, because there is one.
HRV doesn’t lie, but it also doesn’t explain itself. A low number tells you the system is stressed. It does not tell you why. Beard Guy spent months assuming the stress was training load, or work, or the usual suspects. He optimized everything he could see and the number moved, but not all the way. Because the thing dragging it down was happening while he was unconscious.
The 23 hours around the workout matter more than the workout. I wrote about this in The Workout Isn’t the Problem. The Day Around It Is, and it’s a line I use a lot. Sleep is the biggest part of those 23 hours. Not the sexiest fix, not a new training block or a different nutrition protocol, just actually sleeping. And for some athletes, actually sleeping requires figuring out why they aren’t.
If your recovery numbers are stubbornly bad and you’ve already addressed the obvious stuff, stress, alcohol, training load, screen time, and they’re still not moving, it might be worth asking whether you’re actually sleeping or just lying down with your eyes closed.
If any of this sounds familiar, whether you’re a triathlete watching your HRV trend in the wrong direction or just someone who’s been running on fumes long enough that it feels normal, that’s exactly the kind of problem worth bringing to a coaching call. Not because I have all the answers, but because sometimes the value of a second set of eyes is catching what you stopped noticing.
Book a free 30-minute call. We’ll look at what the data is actually saying.
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