The Numbers Don't Know Where We Are

I'm in Park City right now with one of our elite athletes in the tail end of a few weeks of altitude training with a handful of genuinely hard sessions mixed into the block. And every single one of those sessions, the watts show up lower than they would at sea level. Predictably. Expectedly. The file looks "worse." But know that the effort was not worse, the effort was the same, or harder.

This is the exact moment where a lot of athletes get into trouble - not on the easy days, but right here, in the hard block, staring at a number that doesn't match what their body just did.

We love our numbers. Watts, pace, HRV, the little sleep score that ruins our morning before we've even had coffee. And they're useful - genuinely, not sarcastically!

But numbers are a snapshot from a specific altitude, a specific temperature, a specific state of fatigue. They don't know where we are. They don't know what we're carrying. They just report.

Perceived exertion does something the number can't: it integrates all of it - the altitude, the heat, the third day of a hard block, the bad sleep - into one honest read of how hard this actually is, right now, for us.

Eliud Kipchoge, arguably the greatest marathoner who's ever lived, still says it plainly: "Run by effort, listen to your body, and prioritize endurance over speed." Not "chase the pace." Not "hit the number." Listen.

So why does this trip athletes up so badly? Because the number feels objective and the effort feels subjective, and we've been trained to trust objective over subjective.

But subjective isn't the same as unreliable. Coach Mario Fraioli, who's worked with plenty of serious runners, put it well when he said one of the most common things he tells his athletes is, "You're not a programmable robot." We can't just set a wattage target and expect the day, the altitude, the fatigue to get out of the way for it.

So where does this leave us?

Both matter. I'm not throwing out the power meter in Park City this week, and I'm not going to start coaching entirely off "vibes". But when the data and the effort disagree - and at 7,000 feet they will disagree - we trust the effort. We trust what our body is telling us what it's doing, not what a number trained at a different elevation, a different day, a different version of us expects to see.

The athletes who become slaves to the numbers stop training the engine and start training the dashboard. And the dashboard doesn't finish the race. We do.

The numbers don't know where we are. We do.

Gratefully,

Mark

Team MPI