Deoptimizing My Life

Is it bad to want to know less?

I woke up in the Tahoe AirBnB the morning of the 2017 Spartan Race World Championship and, as usual, checked my Whoop readiness score first thing.

3%.

THREE PERCENT - and I had arguably one of the biggest races of my life that day, where I was hoping to secure a second Spartan World Championship title.

3%.

The number haunted me during my mobility routine and pre-race breakfast of Pop-Tarts (Cinnamon Roll) and peanut butter. I managed to shake it off and forget about it, but I did go on to have one of my worst races ever - failing obstacles, shattering my pinky finger, and, for the first time in my obstacle racing career, finishing outside the top 10 in 11th place. There were a lot of “what happened out there?” questions I faced while I elbowed my way through the crowd post-race to get to the urgent care for them to take a look at my poor shattered pinky finger.

I took my Whoop strap off that day and never wore it again.

That’s not to say I had a healthy relationship with it beforehand. I never sought out a Whoop - one of my sponsors got it for me in 2016 through a pro athlete deal, so I figured “sure, seemed like a smart thing to do.” Smart…maybe for some people. I had a tendency to use the Whoop strap in a perverse way - to just see how high I could get that “strain” score on a daily basis. Anything less than a 20 was a failure. Any day where I was “recovering” was a failure. Leave it to my eating disorder and OCD to take a recovery tool and make it into a perverse torture device.

My Oura ring that I received as a gift later that year didn’t fare much better.

In 2017, both Whoop and Oura were still in their infancy - niche devices used by the tip of the spear. Over the past decade, they’ve become ubiquitous among athletes, weekend warriors, biohackers, and wellness gurus alike. Beyond Whoop and Oura, we now have the ability to track…everything. Our weight, our exercise, our sleep, our blood sugar, our ketones, our sweat rate, our heart rate, our periods¹, and even our bowel movements. We track, and quantify, and analyze and stress about how we can optimize..,everything.

I thought about this as a I watched an ex prick his finger every morning, measuring his ketone levels. A CGM slapped to his arm, giving him warnings that the cauliflower he just ate spiked his blood sugar AND kicked him out of ketosis. But he had the personality where he could laugh it off, then say “fuck it” and proceed to eat an entire mini-bar of gummy bears and chocolate chip cookies and go about his merry way. He could check his sleep score, shrug, and immediately go on with his life.

If that Whoop strap taught me one lesson, it’s that I am not that person. I am the person for whom tracking does more harm than good.

Perhaps this is rooted to my history with eating disorder recovery. Unlike many eating disorder sufferers, I never counted calories and I avoided scales with every ounce of my being. I didn’t want to know, because I knew that knowing would only drive me and my obsessive-compulsive tendencies to a very bad place.

So over the past decade, as the world has focused more and more on tracking and optimization, I’ve opted out. I’ve turned off sleep tracking and heart rate on my watch (bonus - it saves batteries!), I rarely wear a heart rate strap while I run, and I actively avoid trying to see my step count for the day. I went from getting blood work done 4x year to once a year (unless there is something seriously off), and I’ve declined bloodwork panels with tons of extraneous tests that may or may not have significance. I don’t want a full body MRI, I don’t want to know my APOE4 gene status despite there being a strong Alzheimers link my family, and I don’t want a Coronary Artery Calcium (CAC) scoring heart test despite LDL that consistently and stubbornly sits just about that 100mg/dL cutoff regardless of what I do.

I realize this flies in the face of “knowledge is power” and “the more you know, the more prepared you can be.” In a world where we have access to knowing so much about our bodies, I may seem like the outlier for saying “no thank you, not for me.” Perhaps I’m leaving performance on the table. Perhaps I’m burying my head in the sand avoiding a potential catastrophic medical issue.

Perhaps.

But perhaps I’m valuing my mental health and my recovery journey with health anxiety and health-related OCD more right now. I’m coming off a rough fall of an extreme OCD health-related flare where I made decisions in a panic I’m not super proud of. It sucks, but I learned some things, including a reiteration of the fact that for me, optimization and the fear of something going wrong with my body may actually lead to more harmful things (such as the mental and physical stress of potentially unnecessary tests and medical procedures).

Beyond just tracking, I’m re-evaluating my relationship with something in our lives that new research has shown is actually pretty terrible for us. As more and more of my friends choose to completely abstain from alcohol, I actually done the opposite: I’ve started having a drink once or twice a week after a few years of complete abstinence. Long gone are my days of beer bongs and shot skis and flip cup, but sitting around at a dive bar with friends and a beer is something I realize I’ve actually missed. Sure, I imagine if I tracked my recovery and sleep score, I’d see the impact there, but the bonding and social experience that comes with hours of meandering conversations over a few drinks with friends on occasion seems a worthwhile trade-off to me.²

Similarly, strict 8:30pm bedtimes have given way to poetry open mic nights that keep me out until midnight, to the aforementioned bar conversations, and to a late-night movie or conversation with a loved one. You’ll still find me crawling into bed at 8pm some nights when needed, but the stranglehold on my sleep schedule has eased in favor of broader experiences and saying “yes” to what life may have to offer beyond the regimented schedule of a training athlete.

My grandma passed recently at the epic age of 102. And she lived to that age doing so many things that longevity influencers would balk at: buttering her toast with lard, eating potato chips for lunch, having 2 martinis every night for decades. She also lived by herself for 35 years after my grandfather’s death, and didn’t really have an active social life (research has proposed that living with a partner and having lots of friends is a key to longevity). She never took a supplement or pill in her life, and only saw a doctor when my dad forced her to. So if you take her n of 1, none of this longevity and optimization shit makes any sense. (I will say she was an extremely low stress person so maybe that had something to do with it. You know what’s not low-stress? Tracking your freakin’ sleep scores.)

Like so many things in life, perhaps it’s the unsexy “everything in moderation” that wins out. And probably so much of it comes down to an individual’s personality. What I have to trust in this day and age of optimizing and maxx-ing everything is that for me, personally, less is more. Doing less, knowing less, testing less, optimizing less.

Cheers to that.

1. Ok, this is one thing that I actually do believe in tracking and wish I had done so earlier!

2. There’s actually an entirely separate post about the interplay of alcohol and my eating disorder that’s been sitting in draft form for awhile now, but the tl;dr is that complete abstinence from alcohol for me can actually be an eating disorder behavior that indicates I’m not doing well in recovery (fear of calories, etc). It’s a tricky subject to broach, but definitely curious if others can relate there.