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One of my athletes had a family emergency last week. They’ll be off the schedule for two weeks. The right move there isn’t to adjust the training — it’s to back off training entirely and shift into support.
Check in. Offer care. Hold the structure on their behalf while life takes the foreground.
I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been doing my own version of it. I moved from San Francisco to Berlin last year, and these last many months in the body have been inconsistent.
The honest read for a long time was that I was failing at it. The better read, the one I came around to in the last few weeks, is that I hadn’t been failing — I’d been allocating.
I put a long list of other things ahead of the body on the priority stack — building this business, the move from San Francisco, the work I came to Berlin to do. On those things, I accomplished ten times what I imagined a year ago. The body was getting inconsistent training because inconsistent training was what the priority stack left room for.
Not failure. Calibration.
There’s a version of this most people miss. Hard week at work, travel, two bad nights of sleep, a deadline that eats the back half of Tuesday — the training stress and the life stress collide, two sessions get missed, and the athlete calls the week a failure.
But training stress and life stress run through the same recovery system. There isn’t a separate budget for one and the other.
There’s one capacity, drawing from the same well, and the body doesn’t care whether you’re spending it on a hard interval session or on a week where life takes the foreground.
The body just registers the spend.
At the end of every week, I ask my clients three things. What was the week like, how did they feel, what got in the way.
Those answers are the signals. Without them, I’d be coaching in the dark.
When a week comes back with hard life and missed sessions, the right read isn’t we failed.
The right read is: your recovery budget was already spoken for, and the body needed a different week than the one we’d planned. That’s fine. We understand why, and we adjust the next week.
We don’t write the whole thing off and start Monday with a clean slate and the same plan.
The same reframe is why this newsletter looks different than it did two weeks ago. The version of me that wanted to write diagnostic essays here was working hard in a direction that wasn’t quite right.
Two weeks of rebuilding wasn’t lost effort. It was reading the week and adjusting.
None of this means the work gets easier. It means you stop fighting each week and start trusting your read of it.
Progress isn’t what you force in any one week — it’s what shows up when you read each week honestly, week over week, over a long enough arc.
The athletes who do best with PSP figure this out somewhere in the first months together. They miss a session and don’t catastrophize. They have a hard week and don’t write it off.
They get curious about what the body is doing, and the curiosity compounds into something pass/fail thinking never reaches.
If you had a hard week recently and it cost you two sessions, that week wasn’t a verdict. It was data. The next week doesn’t have to be a fresh start — it just has to be the right one.
If something here is hitting, reply and tell me — I read every one.
—Ivan
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