3,648 active calories. No workout.

On July 17 my watch logged 3,648 active calories. I didn't train that day.

The Calgary Marathon logged 3,415. That's the race itself, start line to finish line.

I was at work. Twelve-hour day shift, day ten of twenty-one shifts, and the only thing on my Garmin for that day is steps.

I work a 28-day rotation at a SAGD facility in northern Alberta. Seven days on, seven off, seven nights on, seven off. Every shift is 12 hours.

July didn't run that way. I went up on July 7 and came home on July 29. Seven regular day shifts, then seven overtime day shifts, then seven nights.

Twenty-one shifts. Twenty-one days. The off-block that normally sits in the middle is where most of my training volume lives, and it didn't happen.

This is the second one in a row. June went the same way, and August is doing it again.

I've written before about the rotation being an advantage. This is the other issue. This is what the log looks like when it doesn't run.

Most days a double. Ride or run around 3:30 AM, lift after shift at 6:30 PM. Twelve sessions in seven shifts.

Day shift is supposed to be the quiet block. I've said so in this newsletter. That week it wasn't.

July 15, 16, 17 and 18. Four straight days with nothing recorded at all.

For a while I explained that week as being tired. That's the easy story and it's wrong.

Stop looking at my training log and look at everything else that week.

I didn't stop moving during the overtime. I moved 27,000 more steps than I did the week I trained twelve times.

July 17 on its own: 15,365 steps, 137 minutes of moderate activity, 88 minutes of vigorous, a max heart rate of 162, and not one logged workout.

That's the day that beat the marathon. Not marathon day, to be fair. Marathon day beat it on both counts: 7,414 calories total, 5,115 of them active, off 46,842 steps. But the race itself cost 3,415. A Friday at work in July cost 3,648.

Same watch, same kind of estimate. One measured across a whole day, one across three hours and forty-one minutes. Take it for what it is.

I don't have a clever line about it. It was a very busy week at a plant, and the plant doesn't care what's on your training plan.

Here's the part I had backwards.

I slept 43 minutes more a night during the hardest week of work.

That isn't recovery. It's arithmetic. A shift is 12 hours. Add the half hour between camp and the plant and you're at 12.5.

Want 8 hours of sleep on top of that? You've got 3.5 hours left for the entire rest of your day. Eat, shower, get ready, call my wife. Training is 2 of those 3.5.

It doesn't fit. So the 8 hours isn't real, and on a normal camp week I get five, because sleep is the only account left to take it from.

Week two the training stopped and I got 43 minutes back. Not the full two hours. The job took the rest. But it came out of the same account.

I didn't sleep better because I'd recovered. I slept better because I wasn't stealing from it.

July 21 at 18:30 I finished my last day shift. I spent about 24 hours in camp and started the first of seven nights on July 22 at 18:30.

Lift at 2 PM before the bus, ride or run at 6:30 AM coming off shift. Ten sessions across seven night shifts, in the third week of a twenty-one day block.

I went back through the plan afterwards. July 22 to 29, I completed 100% of the scheduled sessions. Third week, on nights, after fourteen days I'd already worked.

The best lifting of my year sits either side of that line. July 19, still on overtime days, first session back after the four blank days: 225 lb for 6, 6, 6, 5, 4, up from 215 on July 8. Four days later, on nights, 225 for six, five sets straight.

Three automatic TFSA deposits went out inside those twenty-one days, $150 to $500 each. One landed on July 15, day one of the overtime.

They didn't need me to have a good week. They didn't need a decision at 3 AM. They were set up months ago and they fired.

My training needs a decision every single day. My contributions need a decision zero times a year.

If your schedule guarantees you'll have weeks where you make bad decisions, and shift work absolutely guarantees that, the answer isn't more discipline. It's removing the decision.

I'm not a financial advisor. But only one of my two systems cared how work went.

Seven extra shifts is 84 hours, all of it at double time. That's why people say yes.

What it cost was one training week and the 100 km I'd have ridden even at camp. An off-block would have been more.

I took it. I'd take it again. I'm just done being surprised by week two.

I'm writing this from camp on day seven of the next one. Tomorrow the overtime starts. Seven nights, then seven more nights of regular rotation. Twenty-one shifts again, fourteen of them nights.

I'm not predicting which week falls over. I finished every scheduled session in the last week of the last one, and I plan to do that again. The deposits go out either way. That's the whole point of them.

Next week: the renewal letter I nearly signed without reading it.

Reply and tell me what your schedule actually costs you.

— Kiegan