Drive the bus

“How do you feel”?

“My recovery is 38 percent”.

That’s not what I asked.

I feel like I have some version of that conversation most weeks now. Sorry, most days, with some very smart people. CEOs, founders, athletes of varying descriptions. I ask a simple question about their own body and they check their wrist before they answer. Some of them go to the app before they’ve even got out of bed. They wake up feeling fine, see a red number, and decide they’re tired.

Those that know me are well aware I’m not antidata. Far from it. I track everything, I’ve lived in TrainingPeaks for almost two decades, and I’ll happily talk HRV with anyone daft enough to ask. Used well, the numbers are awesome. They catch the illness three days early. They show you the pattern you’d never have spotted. They keep you honest when you swear you slept eight hours and it was five and a half.

But somewhere along the way we handed over the keys.

We love to use the bus analogy so let’s apply it here quickly. You’re driving. The device on your wrist is a passenger. A very useful one, sitting up front with a map and a lot of opinions. Listen to it. Ask it questions. Just don’t let it take the wheel, because it has never actually driven before. It doesn’t know you had a hard conversation with your business partner yesterday. It doesn’t know you have two sick kids at home. It’s guessing, very cleverly, from your wrist.

So here’s the line I keep coming back to. Tell me how you feel, not how a gadget tells me you feel.

The first answer is yours. The second is somebody else’s opinion about you.

Most of us have gone quiet on the inside. We stopped checking in with ourselves because something offered to do it for us, and it was easier. Legs, breathing, mood, appetite, how badly you actually want to train today. That’s data too. It’s the oldest data set there is, and it’s the one you’ll still have when the battery dies at 11pm and you can not find the charger. I was fortunate enough to be enjoying a coaching career before these gadgets were invented. Yes we had HR data from a session and splits from our Casio but that was it. The data we spoke about was the data within us, something a device can not pick up.

Calm on race day or when you have a board meeting is built months before. Part of that build is learning to read yourself. If the only way you know you’re ready is a green light on a screen, what happens when the screen is wrong? Or blank?

Try this. Wake up, and before you look at anything, get out of bed and stand in one spot, give yourself a score out of ten. Energy, mood, body. Write it down. Then look at the device. Do it for two weeks and compare. Most people are surprised how often they were right. Some find out they’re the one who needs recalibrating. Both are useful. Both put you back in the driver’s seat.

The watch is never just a watch. It’s a question about who’s in charge. Tomorrow morning, before you check anything, ask yourself how you feel. Then answer honestly. Drive the bus.

No Weakness,
Marcus