Charting, Cervical Mucus, Running
Chart Questions:
Do not stress over your chart. It should be looked at in two ways:
You should be looking at your daily temperature in comparison to your overall data. Is this one an outlier? Are you lower than usual? What is going on in your life that might warrant this? Has your temperature spiked significantly? Is it coinciding around the time of cervical mucus? If so, it might be ovulation and not a fever. After three consecutive raised temperatures coinciding with cervical mucus, you can usually confirm ovulation, however, this leads into the next part.
The second way you should be looking at it is cycle to cycle. It's not always possible to confirm ovulation until afterwards. As you look at your trends from month to month, it becomes clearer as you learn your body. When you take a far-away approach, you will grow stronger in your ability to understand when your body is run down or rearing to go.
Cervical Mucus: What does it look like at different phases of the cycle?
Did you ever learn about clouds when you were in grade school? There’s cumulus clouds, stratus clouds, and cirrus clouds. But here’s the thing, not all clouds fit perfectly into these three categories blending into stages in between like cirrocumulus or stratocumulus. Cervical mucus is the same way. Sometimes you have a mix as you transition into different stages. Girls get really nervous about what’s what when they’re talking about their cervical mucus. Here are the main things to remember: the slipperier and clearer, the more fertile you are. Any cervical mucus is a fertile time; when you’re dry, it's not a fertile time. Your fertile window starts off stickier or clumpier and then gets more watery before it goes away. You shouldn’t have cervical mucus throughout your entire cycle (that’s usually a sign of low progesterone).
Did I run and recover at the same time?
At that point in time, I had actually pretty drastically changed everything and running regularly was nothing I decided to keep. I continued exercising, but I felt a lot of strain from running. I changed all my movement activity to be things that I enjoyed; I did things that I didn’t break too much of a sweat for. I was frequently getting tension headaches and so I used that as my gauge. If I did decide to run, it was in periods of running and walking based on how my head felt.
