Data or Intuition?

This is part 1 of an article exploring the nervous system, identity and motivation.

I didn’t always believe in things I couldn’t measure.

When my daughter was six weeks old, I took her to a cranial osteopath. She was colicky, inconsolable, arching her tiny back as if trying to escape her own skin. I remember sitting there, watching this stranger hover her hands near my baby’s head as though adjusting invisible threads. I thought it was utter voodoo nonsense. I wanted monitors, data, heart rates, something quantifiable. Not fingertips and intuition.

Years later, still data driven, I awake every morning and check my watch to tell me if I can train. Resting Heart Rate, HRV. Readiness score.  I talk about the nervous system the way some people talk about weather fronts — as if forecasting the day depends on it. And in a way, it does, but I am trusting a graph more than my own instincts. I have learned to outsource the conversation with my body to data because it feels safer than listening to what my body is trying to say.

Listening means acknowledging what we fear might be true. It’s funny how belief works - it creeps in via desperation, not logic. 

People think endurance is about pushing. It isn’t. It’s about enduring the conversation between what you want and what your body is able to give. For a long time, I mistook silence for compliance. I took a steady heart rate and a strong stroke as permission to keep going. It took injury, hormone confusion, nights of lying awake with my pulse thudding in my ears, to realise the silence was withdrawal. The body doesn’t stop talking; it just stops wasting its breath when you refuse to listen.

Science gives me the language for what I’d felt long before I understood it. The vagus nerve — this wandering, delicate thread connecting brain to heart, lungs, gut — is not just anatomy. It’s how the body says, you are safe. It slows the heart, deepens the breath, softens the edges of thought. When we speak about heart rate variability, resting HR, recovery, we’re really speaking about capacity — not to perform, but to return. To come home to ourselves after the storm.

In my twenties, my nervous system was a live wire. I could wake before dawn, ride eight horses, run ten miles, teach a novice how to jump without gripping the reins like a lifeline, and still have enough in the tank to go out that evening. Now, in my fifties, hormones have shifted the goalposts. Oestrogen — once a quiet guardian of resilience, mitochondrial efficiency, tendon suppleness — has stepped back.

Perimenopause stripped away all my clever coping mechanisms. The hormonal rhythm that once buffered my stress became erratic. Nights of waking at 3 a.m. with my heart pounding as if I’d sprinted, when all I’d done was dream. That’s the thing about cortisol — it doesn’t ask permission. And adrenaline has no moral compass. They rise for tigers, but they also rise for unanswered emails, loneliness, silence where horses used to breathe.

Cortisol, once my loyal companion in long races and late nights, had become a squatter, raising my heart rate at rest, thickening my waist, thinning my patience. My body hadn’t betrayed me. It’ was simply asking me to change the conversation.

At first, I didn’t. I trained harder. I chased numbers with the desperation of someone who fears stillness. It worked, for a while. Until it didn’t.

For two years now, I haven’t touched a horse. Haven’t mucked a stable, brushed a mane, or inhaled that soft, grassy breath across my cheek. Their absence leaves a hollow where purpose used to sit. When the horses went, the stables fell silent in a way I couldn’t bear. So I filled it with strength training and then triathlon — with training plans, lactate thresholds, long rides in winter rain. You can outrun many things, but not the feeling that you’ve become a guest in your own life.

It’s strange, the things that finally make you stop pushing, stop fighting. Not always the dramatic injury, the snapped tendon or the hospital visit. Sometimes it’s quieter: a morning when the wetsuit feels heavier than the water, or a race where you’re surrounded by people but feel entirely alone. For me, it was a long ride on a grey day. I should’ve been strong — I’d hit every session, ticked every box — but my heart rate was high, my patience low, and somewhere I realised I wasn’t chasing a finish line. I was running from a version of myself I didn’t know how to grieve.

I missed horses. Not the sport, not the ribbons or the discipline — but the quiet presence of them. The way they required you to be both strong and soft. You can’t bully a horse into trust; their nervous systems are too honest for that. They read the tension in your hands, the shallow breath, the racing heart. They mirror it back to you without judgement. Much like our own nervous system. You can't bully it into giving the capacity you desire simply because you demand it.

The nervous system doesn’t care how many miles you’ve banked or watts you’ve pushed. It deals in safety, threat, recovery. Beneath every decision — to move, to rest, to endure — is a negotiation between sympathetic drive and parasympathetic release. Fight or flight; rest and repair. Most of us live suspended between the two — not quite running, not quite resting — a kind of physiological limbo. We call it productivity. Our bodies call it unsustainable.

All the data we now obsess over — is simply a reflection of that balance. It’s not a score of fitness or willpower. It’s a measurement of adaptability. High variability means your heart isn’t marching to a metronome — it’s dancing, responding, adjusting to breath, emotion, thought. Low variability means rigidity; a system braced against the world. You can’t fake it. You can suppress symptoms — caffeine, discipline, a well-curated Instagram feed — but the body knows.

I’m still not back on a horse. I’m not sure when I will be. That absence still aches, but I’ve stopped trying to replace it with finish lines and medals. Triathlon isn’t a distraction anymore; it’s a language. A way of listening. A way of being in the world without demanding it make me feel invincible. Because in the end, the body doesn’t ask for heroics — it asks for safety. The central nervous system doesn’t restore itself through willpower, but through reassurance, rhythm and return. It softens when the breath lengthens, when the gaze widens, when movement is chosen rather than demanded. This isn’t giving up; it’s remembering. Remembering that strength without softness becomes armour, and endurance without recovery becomes escape. I’m learning to meet my body where it is, not where I think it should be — to let capacity build gradually, patiently, without force.