That’s extra disappointment that’s mild, not disappointment that’s extra-mild. But that comes later.

I’ve had to ease off on training for a few days because of my new medication. I’ve moved from Gabapentin to the more modern and designed-for-purpose nerve blocker Pregabalin. I’m having to start on a small dose and work up so that side-effects can be controlled. This will take some weeks and in the meantime the pain is not being blocked. It is persistent and very, very severe.

But it’s the side-effects rather than the pain that have been preventing serious training. I won’t go into details (unless anyone is genuinely interested for medical reasons) but exhaustion has been a key factor. Those days are over, for the time being, and I put in a very respectable hour of training this morning.

The disappointment is that my Wear OS watch hasn’t been as useful as I had hoped. This is no real fault of the watch: it measures my various functions with what seems like reasonable accuracy and graphs it all nicely. I wrote a little metronome app which pulses the watch to train me to keep to a particular time with my pushes.

All of that worked fine… but I’ve found that the main factor in my performance is how tired I am. When I’m sleeping well (for me), I can see my performance steadily improving (speed and endurance) and when I don’t sleep well, the decline is dramatic. Nothing else really seems to have a noticeable effect. So I’m not sure the watch is really helping.

This is disappointing; I’d hoped that the watch would help me improve my performance. I might have to see if I can find some better software.

Two other complaints: most decent wheelchair gloves have a strap around the wrist that helps with durability. This means that I have to wear the watch halfway up my wrist. Second, while the watch’s workout software has a wheelchair option which works pretty well to map distance and route when I’m out and about, it doesn’t do a good job of measuring virtual distance on the rolling road.

There was an option, when I bought the rolling road, to include some extra measuring stuff and an app. But ooooooh noooooo, I knew better and told them no, my watch had it covered. This might have been a mistake and I might have to go crawling back for the extra stuff.