How We Learn Where You Are Before We Write Your Training

Why "where am I right now?" is harder than it sounds

Most athletes can tell you their goal race and their best week of training. Far fewer can tell you their real average over the last six weeks, or which of their sports is carrying the load and which is quietly behind. That isn't a failing. Memory keeps the big weeks and drops the quiet ones, and a busy life blurs the rest.

The trouble is that every coaching decision after this point depends on the starting picture. If we start from the best remembered week, the first block is too big and the athlete spends a month digging out. If we start from the goal race alone, a sport that isn't ready gets asked for race specific work it can't hold. If we miss how much life stress the athlete is carrying, the weekly load is set for someone with an empty calendar.

So the question here is simple to ask and takes care to answer: what is actually true for you right now, in each sport and in your life? The rest of this article is how we answer it.

What we ask when you join, and why each answer matters

Every new athlete fills in one intake. Each question is there because it changes a decision.

• Your sport and background. What you race and how long you have trained tells us how much your body has already adapted, and which sport is likely to be the most fragile.
• Your devices and units. Whether you train with heart rate, power or both decides how we write your targets.
• Your real schedule. Which days you can train, which day you take off, which days can hold a long session, whether you can double up and how much time you have. A plan that ignores this gets missed, and missed sessions are the most common reason a build stalls.
• Your races. What you are aiming at and when, so we can mark which races matter most and set the time we have to build.
• Your preferences. The sessions you enjoy, the ones you dread, and how you like to strength train. An athlete who dreads a session finds reasons to skip it.

One to one athletes also tell us about their goals, their race history, their life load, any recent test results and their recent training files. They answer a short set of mindset questions too, which help us decide how to talk with each athlete and how to explain the training to them.

Reading your fitness one sport at a time

We track fitness separately for bike and run, because one can be well built while the other is fragile, and a single total hides the difference. An athlete with a big bike and a small run can show a healthy total and still be one hard run block away from trouble.

We also hold a simple floor. If your bike fitness is under 45, or your run fitness is under 35, on the chronic training load scale TrainingPeaks uses, that sport starts in Base and Durability. That holds whatever your race calendar says. The reason is tissue as much as fitness. Harder work asks more of joints, tendons and muscles, and a sport below the floor hasn't built the base to carry it. Skipping the base doesn't save time. It moves the cost to later in the season, when it is harder to absorb.

That floor shaped the plans for two of our athletes this fall.

Graham's bike and run fitness against the floor

What it measures. Graham Lloyd's fitness on the bike and on the run on September 1 and October 31, 2026, against the floor for each sport.

The story at this point. Graham came to ANC strong on the bike and rebuilding his running. His log from February to May was swimming, riding and long walks. On September 1, just before the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship in Nice, his bike fitness was 49, above the floor of 45. His run fitness was 19, well under 35. By the end of October, with recovery after Nice and no race booked, both had come down.

How to read it. The tall bars on the left are the bike, and the short bars on the right are the run. The orange lines are the floors. A bar under its line means that sport starts its next block in Base and Durability.

You might see this in your own training if one of your sports feels strong and the other feels like it is always catching up. The weaker sport usually needs its own block.

Graham's run couldn't be judged by a test in June, because you can't test a run you aren't doing yet. So we evaluated it with three things: his heart rate, the pace on his watch, and how his legs felt in the first mile and a half. He told us his legs were stiff at the start of every session and loosened around that point. Angela called that good data, and it became a signal we used for months. The floor told us how to pace his race in Nice and what to build after it. His run stayed in Base and Durability, by design.

Ben's fitness against the floor after his marathon

What it measures. Ben Creswick's bike and run fitness on October 30, 2026, three weeks after the Victoria Marathon, against the floor for each sport.

The story at this point. Ben raced IRONMAN 70.3 Tri Cities on September 20 and the Victoria Marathon on October 11. After Tri Cities his run stayed race specific while his bike went back to base work, because he had no bike race for eight months. A month of run focus left his run fitness at 54, well above its floor. His bike fitness was 43, just under 45.

How to read it. The navy bar is the bike and the orange bar is the run. The teal lines are the floors. The bike bar sits just under its line. The run bar is well above.

You might see this in your own training if you just finished a season that leaned hard on one sport. The other sport may need rebuilding before it is ready for harder work.

The floor was one of three reasons Ben is in Base and Durability in both sports now. His next A race, IRONMAN 70.3 Victoria on May 30, 2027, is about 30 weeks away, which is the time to build an engine. His marathon showed us that long range durability is the thing to build next. The numbers, the calendar and the race all pointed the same way, and when three separate inputs agree we can commit to a block with confidence.

Readiness: telling useful tiredness from too much

Training is meant to make you tired. The question every week is whether the tiredness is the kind that turns into fitness, or the kind that turns into a missed week. They can feel the same to the athlete and look similar in a single number, so we read several things together.

We look at how your completed sessions compared with the plan, what you wrote in your comments and messages, and your heart rate variability and resting heart rate if you track them. Signs that fatigue has gone past useful include poor sleep, rising effort for the same work, a resting heart rate that has crept up, very low form, or simply the word "tired" showing up comment after comment. One of these alone is usually noise. Several together are a pattern, and when that pattern shows up midweek we ease the week then and there. Waiting for the planned easy week would mean several more days of load on an athlete who is already past what they can absorb.

Readiness can also be good news. In late October Katy checked in with us over two days, and once her sessions came back on plan her readiness read clear on every marker we track. That let us move her carefully toward a Hybrid block for La Quinta 70.3 on December 6. Careful was the right word. Good numbers never override a poor position to absorb more, and one good week is a reason to proceed slowly. Anything about how your body is holding up goes to Angela, every time, and she decides those calls herself.

Evaluation after a race

A race is the most useful test there is, and we evaluate every one. We look at what worked, what we would change and what we should celebrate. Then we look again at the calendar and redefine the block.

After his marathon, Ben's race told us what his run can hold for hours, and it shaped his winter. After Nice, Graham's numbers and the floor sent his run back to Base and Durability, and his walk run ladder kept climbing inside that block. On October 11 he ran what he called his "fastest 5k since June 2018 which was in a race." Each athlete got a different next step, because each evaluation found something different.

What evaluation needs from you

Evaluation is only as good as what we can see. That asks two things of you. The first is your real week: the actual hours you have, the days that are fixed and the ones that aren't, and the training you have really been doing. The second is honest comments. If every session is written up as fine when it isn't, we are evaluating an athlete who isn't there.

Here is the short version of what goes into each weekly evaluation.

• Your fitness, by sport. Is it rising, holding or falling, and is it above the floor?
• Your fatigue and form. How tired are you compared with your normal, and which way has it been moving over the last five days?
• Your completed sessions. Did you do what was planned, and how did you execute it?
• Your comments and messages. What did each session cost, and what is happening at work and at home?
• Your recovery signals. Sleep, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, soreness and mood.
• Your calendar. How far away your next important race is, and what is coming up in your life.

None of these decides alone. A great week of numbers with poor sleep and a sore calf is a week to hold. A tired week after a planned push is often exactly what we wanted.

Keep reading in the How We Coach series

• StressLogic in four steps
• Part 3: Setting your Critical Power and Critical Speed
• Part 4: Fitting training to life
• Load and recovery

Athlete stories from this article:

• Ben Creswick at the Victoria Marathon
• Katy Walmsley: Faster With Age