Day 32 of 300: Sunday League and the Load Ratio Bomb

Mar 22, 2026

We won 5-4. That’s all that matters, really. Everything else in this post is just the body’s invoice for 102 minutes of Sunday football.

I woke up with a training readiness of 52. Moderate. HRV was 48ms for the weekly average, stress history was good, recovery time was zero. The acute load sat at 102 and the load ratio was in a healthy place for the first time in weeks. All green lights. So I went and played football.

The match

Five-nil on both training effects. That’s the maximum Garmin will assign. I’ve never seen it before. For context, the squash session two days ago scored 1.8 aerobic and 2.3 anaerobic. The base runs have been landing around 3.3 aerobic. This was a completely different animal.

An average heart rate of 138 across 102 minutes means I spent most of the match in zone 3 and above. The max of 175 is only 7 bpm below my theoretical max. Football doesn’t have the recovery breaks that squash does. You jog, sprint, contest, then jog again. The heart rate never really comes down. The average stays high because the floor stays high.

The load ratio bomb

This is the story of the day. Before football, the acute load was 102 and the load ratio was sitting somewhere around 1.0x. I’d spent the past week carefully nursing it back from 2.1x overreaching to optimal.

After football, the acute load jumped to 651. The load ratio hit 2.8x. Training status flipped straight back to Overreaching. One session undid a week of patient recovery.

431 training load points from a single activity. To put that in perspective, a typical base run adds about 80-100 points. The squash session added 37. This football match dumped more than four runs’ worth of load onto the system in one hit.

Body battery: 84 to 5

I started the day at 84. Fully charged. A good night’s sleep (well, fair, 64 score, but the body battery liked it). By the end of the day, body battery was at 5. Five. The football match alone cost 29 points, but the rest of the day’s activity drained the remainder. Total drain across the day: 82 points. Total charge: 46. Running a deficit of 36.

Garmin’s feedback was blunt: “Sleep preparation, not stress data, active, intensive exercise, body battery low.” Translation: go to bed.

1,210 calories in context

The squash session burned 581 calories in 109 minutes (5.3 cal/min). This football match burned 1,210 in 102 minutes (11.9 cal/min). That’s more than double the burn rate. The difference is sustained intensity. Squash is explosive bursts with long rests. Football is continuous movement with occasional sprints layered on top.

Total daily calories hit 4,731. Active calories were 2,241. I exceeded my step goal of 15,000 with 19,053 steps, over a third of which came from the match itself. Vigorous intensity minutes for the day: 101. That’s two-thirds of the entire weekly target in one afternoon.

Sleep the night before

Only 11 minutes of deep sleep. That’s awful. The sleep score of 64 is being propped up by decent REM and a low stress average of 19. But the deep sleep percentage tells me the body wasn’t fully restoring itself overnight. Playing 102 minutes of football on 11 minutes of deep sleep is not ideal. The 96-hour recovery estimate probably reflects this as much as the training load itself.

96 hours to recover

Garmin wants me to rest for four days. Training readiness after the match: 1 out of 100. Literally the lowest possible score. Recovery factor: poor. Training load factor: poor. The only things that stayed green were HRV (weekly average of 48ms, rated very good) and stress history (75%, rated good).

Four days takes me to Thursday. That’s a long time to sit still. But I know what happens when I ignore these numbers. Two weeks ago I was overreaching at 2.1x and it took six days of feeling terrible before the body cooperated again. Now the ratio is worse at 2.8x. The smart move is to rest properly.

Was it worth it?

We won 5-4. I burned 1,210 calories. I ran nearly 6 kilometres without thinking about running. My heart rate hit 175 and I didn’t notice because I was too busy trying to track back. The training effect maxed out at 5.0/5.0, which means the cardiovascular stimulus was as high as it gets.

The load ratio is wrecked. Body battery is on the floor. I need four days of recovery. But this is exactly the argument I made after squash: the best workout is the one you don’t realise you’re doing. Football takes that and turns the dial to eleven.

The aerobic and anaerobic systems both got a maximum stimulus. No base run will ever do that. No structured workout would push me to 175 bpm for fun. Competition does something that training can’t. It removes the governor. You don’t hold back because there’s a scoreboard and a ball and ten other people depending on you.

What’s next

Rest. Properly. The plan for the next four days is sleep, hydration, and easy movement. No running until training readiness climbs above 40. The load ratio needs to come back down before I add anything else.

I’ll probably end up playing football again next Sunday regardless of what Garmin says. But between now and then, the job is recovery. Let the chronic load absorb this spike. Let the body battery charge. Let the deep sleep come back.

Day 33 of 300. Won 5-4. Body completely spent. No regrets.

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