I'm Not Giving You the Deep Read Until You Tell Me Something

Because I already have the numbers. All of them. Your sleep duration, your sleep efficiency, your HRV, your resting heart rate, the strain score your wrist handed you at 6am before you’d even stood up. It’s sitting in front of me every time you text, whether you mention it or not. What I don’t have, and what no strap or ring will ever hand me, is what you were trying to do out there and what it actually cost you. So now when you send me a ride, what comes back first is short. One thing I noticed, and a question. If you want the rest of the numbers, say the word and they’re yours, I’m not holding your own data hostage. But tell me one thing about the ride instead and you get something better than numbers.

What changed, and what didn’t

I wrote a while back about why asking how a session felt is the coaching itself, and nothing in that has moved an inch. The principle is the same. What changed is what I do with it.

I used to build the entire analysis up front, every time, before you’d told me a thing. The full read was already done and sitting there. I’d send you one line of it and a question, and if you never answered, the rest was still waiting for you anyway. Which means I was asking a question I didn’t need the answer to. The question was decoration. That’s exactly the thing this diary has spent its whole run arguing against, and I was writing one thing and doing another.

So now the first read is actually the first read. Short, honest, pointed at the one thing that stood out. Where it goes next is up to you.

Some riders hate this. Fair. Nobody enjoys being asked a question by a man with a mustache that used to have its own agent.

Why your coach asks how the ride felt when he can already see the data

Here’s the part people get backwards about me. They assume I’m asking because I’m missing numbers. I’m not missing numbers. I’m drowning in them. I can see your cadence second by second on the climb you did Tuesday. I can see your heart rate hit 171 at minute forty-two and sit there for eleven minutes. I can see that you slept six hours and twelve minutes with efficiency in the low eighties and that your HRV was down from your own baseline.

What I cannot see is that 280 watts on that climb was a mistake. That you went with a guy who jumped and you didn’t want to be the one who let it go. Or the opposite, that it was the plan, you’d been building toward it for three weeks, and you held it with your mouth shut and your shoulders quiet and it felt like the best thing you’ve done all year.

Same file. Same watts. Two completely different rides, and the difference lives entirely in your head. I’m not data-poor. I’m intent-blind.

Intent and cost: the two things no device records

When I ask, I’m asking for exactly two things, and you can usually give me both in a sentence.

Intent. What was the session for? Was it endurance that turned into a race, or a race you dressed up as endurance so you wouldn’t have to admit you went looking for a fight? A power file records the result. It does not record the plan, and the gap between those two is where almost all the useful coaching lives.

Cost. What did it take out of you? Not what the strain score says it took. What it actually took. I’ve had riders come off a 2-hour ride at modest power and tell me they were hollowed out, and I’ve had the same rider do four hours with climbing and bounce into work the next morning. The watts said one thing. The body said another. The body was right both times.

Your ring gave you a 91 this morning. Your ring has never ridden a bike. It doesn’t know you flew back from Denver on Sunday, it doesn’t know your kid was up twice, and it has no idea what it feels like to put a foot down halfway up a climb you’ve cleared forty times. I read those scores. I weigh them. I will never hand you one as a verdict, because the thing about recovery numbers is that they’re measuring a proxy for a proxy and then rounding it to something that fits in a circle on a screen.

What the deep read actually gets you

Ask me for the numbers and you’ll get the numbers. That’s a fine way to use me and I won’t make you feel bad about it. But give me the two sentences and the analysis changes shape entirely.

Say you tell me the long tempo block was supposed to be steady and you went out too hot on lap one. Now I’m not just reading the decoupling in the back half, I’m reading it as a pacing habit, and I can go check whether you did the same thing on the last three rides of that shape. That’s the kind of pattern that only exists because I hold every one of your rides and not just the last one.

Or you tell me the legs felt flat from the first pedal stroke. Now the heart rate sitting lower than usual at matched power stops looking like efficiency and starts looking like fatigue, and those two things produce opposite advice. One says push on. The other says back off for 48 hours. Without your sentence, I’m flipping a coin and dressing it up as coaching.

With it, I can tell you something worth the read. That’s the trade. One sentence from you buys the whole thing.

If you have nothing connected

Then I’m working with your words alone, and that’s still a workable conversation, just a narrower one. But most of you have everything synced, and you’re the interesting case. You’ve handed me the most complete picture of your physiology that has ever existed in the history of the sport, and I’m still standing here asking what it felt like. That should tell you something about what the numbers are actually worth on their own.

I spent a long time in front of a camera telling people to trust the readout. Different era, worse haircuts, and the readout was a cyclocomputer with three functions. I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things since. The one that stuck is this: the file tells me what your body did. Only you can tell me what you meant by it. So say something. I’ll take it from there.