The Four Inputs that Determine Your Progress

Steve: Athletes don’t necessarily want more data. Everybody’s sort of swimming or drowning in data. They want to know simply if what they’re doing is working or not

cta: Quick pause before we get back into this conversation. If you want the structure and accountability of working with coaches and other athletes, training groups is where a lot of people start. With training groups, you get your training plan, live workshops, live Q&A with our coaches, and a community of athletes which are all training for similar objectives. Plus, you get the new Uphill Athlete dashboards. The dashboards are designed to explicitly answer three questions: What do you do next? What is the highest leverage improvement you can make to your training? And show you that you’re getting fitter by continuous aerobic threshold measurements and monitoring. Join us at uphillathlete.com/training-groups. And now, let’s get back into this interesting conversation.

Steve: Welcome to the Uphill Athlete podcast. Today we’re gonna do something we haven’t done before. I’m gonna sit down with two people who have been building the next layer of how Uphill Athlete actually supports athletes. Will Zittlau leads the build of our new athlete dashboard, and many of you will know Coach Alexa Hasman, who, besides coaching and doing mental training coaching, also runs our training groups, and she’s the coach in the training groups that hears every day the questions that athletes are actually asking.

And we’re gonna talk about what we built, why we built it, what the athletes who are using it are telling us, and hint a little bit about where this is all going. So let’s start with the questions we keep hearing. I like to think that most of our athletes, specifically in training groups, they aren’t struggling because they lack motivation.

They’re, they’re struggling because they’re unsure of what to do. They’re unsure how to get started, and once they do, they’re unsure whether they’re actually improving. They’re anxious as to whether or not they’re in the right training zone. They’re worried that they might be training too much or t- not enough, and they worry about, like, what happens when they move a workout from Monday to Wednesday, and how they rebalance that, and how to use the time they have for training.

And those problems kind of lay out the structure and the boundaries, I would say, of kind of what we’ve been building. Alexa, you do your live coach QA, uh, mult- a few– every week. What are athletes asking you about? What are some of the patterns that– What are some of the worries? What are some of the concerns that training group athletes bring to you?

Alexa: Yeah, sort of touching on what you said, Steve. They want to know, am I doing this correct? Right? ‘Cause it’s hard to tell physiologically that we’re improving when we’re, when we’re doing it every day, right? So they wanna see how do– how can I tell if I’m improving? Or like you also mentioned, oh, I missed a workout last week, or I keep missing this one workout each week.

Does that mean that I’m ruining my training?

How does that look? So that’s the big question that I get every week.

Steve: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, that’s the reality of training, right? Like, you do miss workouts, and I find that, you know, I hear that athletes don’t necessarily want more data. Everybody’s sort of swimming or drowning in data. They want to know simply if what they’re doing is working or not. So that’s really great, Alexa.

Thanks for kind of cueing us in there. Will, do you wanna kinda take us through how we’re answering these questions? Specifically, let’s just start with what an athlete will see now when they log into the Upalace Train Groups dashboards

Will: Yeah. So, um, that was a great intro, and I mean, the goal of this was to keep it simple back to there being a lot of data out there, especially health metrics, and when you’re getting into this training, it can be confusing. And so with training groups, you’re gonna select a training plan, and then we’re gonna give you kind of four high-level scores to keep track of on your dashboard, so it keeps it very simple.

And those are consistency, training load, work-rest balance, and strength. And the goal there is to keep you aligned with whatever plan you’ve chosen, so you can see progress week over week, month over month, year over year, and see that these inputs are actually working. So that’s the first screen you’re gonna see is those four pillars that I just named.

Those are what we call training inputs. You can also see your today’s training plan and, uh, quickly chat with your coach on that screen as well. Um, we’re also gonna have calendar views for your plan and completed workouts, so you can see what’s up ahead. You can see your adherence to the plan, completion percentages, stats for the week, that sort of thing. And then also, we are gonna have those progress metrics, uh, but they’re gonna be a couple tabs over. So it’s only when you want to dig into the data that it’s actually there. So we’re gonna have things for CTL. You guys are probably familiar with that. Uh, volume. We’re also gonna be having aerobic threshold calculations, which I think is something very relevant for uphill athletes, but also something that traditionally gets missed by other software, like health software platforms that are out there. Uh, we’re also gonna have your anaerobic threshold, so you can compare the delta between them, which can be a really good indicator of preparedness for these longer efforts. Uh, and then other health metrics of well– as well with, uh, progress over time as well

Steve: Consistency, uh, gradualness of increasing the training load and modulating the training load were originally the three kind of, I would say, um, pillars or, uh, core ideas of training for the new alpinism. And then we added strength because that’s actually sort of become obvious that one of the things that happens is mo- if people skip a workout, it’s– in training groups, we found, I mean, like, so you could shout out if this is true or not, but it feels like it’s, if they skip something, it’s often strength.

Is that true?

Alexa: Yeah, it’s, and same with one-on-one athletes, like everybody, if they’re gonna skip something, it’s gonna be strength

Steve: Mm-hmm. So Will, what is consistency measuring, and how are we measuring it, and how is that unique?

Will: Yeah. So all of these are gonna be kind of stoplight scores. So we do give you a score of one to 100, but it’s also just gonna be color-coded, so you can do a really quick visual check.

Um, it is

Steve: by stoplight score? What does that mean?

Will: Ah, like green, yellow, red. So green, good, you’re adhering to the plan, you should expect progress. Yellow, maybe some workouts have been missed.

Um, your progress isn’t necessarily declining or decreasing, but just something to note. And then red is, you’re probably not gonna be expecting progress if you continue that training methodology. You’re missing the prescribed workouts, and it’s just not following the plan. Um, on that consistency score, so that’s gonna be basically completed workouts compared to what was planned. Um, so if you’re going above and beyond, you’re still gonna be rewarded for consistency. But if, once again, if you’re skipping workouts or swapping workouts for different activity types, that’s not gonna quite give you that scoring credit either

Steve: Great. So, the consistency score tells you if you’re showing up, and we can all agree that consistency is the single most important signal in training. So what about training load?

Will: Yeah. Um, so training load, I mean, other apps you’ve probably heard of, like training stress score, that sort of thing. So, training load is actually the gradual increase in loading over time. Um, and this is gonna be whether, like a combination of time, intensity, duration, effort, et cetera. It’s kind of one singular score that’s a proxy for all of those.

So once again, if you want to drill down into those specific categories, you can, but this is kind of– it combines just what is your general systemic load that you’re taking on with this training?

Steve: Yeah. So the training load tells you that you’re training enough and your training is– and you’re also not tr- training too much or you’re not training too little, that your aerobic system actually has enough, the right amount of load to continue to improve. And this is trying to capture that concept of gradualness, which was we gradually increase the training stress over time so at a rate at which the body can adapt and create positive gains in fitness.

So what about work-rest balance?

Will: Yeah. So work–

Steve: is a little… Yeah. Tell us about the work-rest balance.

Will: So work-rest balance kind of takes the two previous mentioned scores into account, and it’s looking at the longer-term scaling. So this is like you’re getting adequate rest while you build, but then maybe there’s also periodizations of, um, like you do a build week, so obviously your training load is gonna be a lot higher. Um, so we just wanna balance rest after those periods to make sure that each block of work prepares you for the next, um, kind of series. And maybe Alexa or Steve, you can expand on that better than I can, but that periodization of training is what that’s trying to capture.

Steve: this is capturing the concept of modulation that, that, that, you know, we typically have training volume or training stress that kind of builds from week to week for somewhere, you know, a few weeks. It varies obviously, but a lot of our stock training plans, it’s like a three-week build, a one-week recovery week where the volume and intensity is much, much lower, and then another, another build that picks up where the last build week left off.

So that’s what it’s trying to capture. So what about strength?

Will: Yeah. Um, strength is kind of its own consistency category in a lot of ways. Um, as you mentioned, I-I’m also guilty of skipping strength workouts. I think endurance athletes, this is often the first one people drop. Um, so we deser- we decided it deserved its own score. So this is how many and how well you actually complete your prescribed strength training sessions. Um, so you wanna keep this one green. You want a strong body. Uh, you’ll be a lot more durable if you don’t skip these workouts. But we, um, decided that it was important enough to warrant a fourth category on its own.

Steve: Yeah. How do you talk in the training room about that concept of strength training or that concept of durability, Alexa?

Alexa: I think of it as the trunk of the tree. We are only– Our branches and the rest of our tree can only grow if the base of it is strong, and that comes from strength training. So it’s a critical piece of training

Steve: Yeah. And just in the coaching literature and discussions of the last, especially I’d say five years, this concept of durability has gained a lot of… I mean, these things cycle through time, but it’s, it’s kind of back in vogue to talk a lot about durability. And I think a lot of what people mean by that is doing this, the right strength training at the right time for the right reason, so that your body can, as you said, Alexa, continue to support all this other training without getting injured.

And I think that this is a, a big thing, and it’s why I just felt like it really needed, and we all talk about this extensively, that it really needed its own measure and its own accountability so that we can keep people progressing, not just for like 12 weeks, but for, you know, 10 years.

Will: Yeah. And it’s important to start that early too. Like, if you try adding strength to an already high volume block, like that’s a lot of central nervous system fatigue that you’re trying to suddenly just cram on to catch up. So

it is a fundamental pillar. Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So four inputs, I like to think of them as four really quick answers. No more guessing. You just quickly at a glance can see if you’re on track or not. And if you’re seeing something there that’s different than what you’re expecting, if I miss like four workouts in a row, I could probably go there and I’m knowing what to expect.

But if you’re, if it’s not what you expect when you get there, then that’s a signal to dig in a little deeper and figure out how to get yourself on track.

Will: Yeah. And so, I mean, Steve, you’ve been coaching yourself and others for 20-plus years. So when we started this project, you told me that when you sit down with a new athlete, these are the four things that you’re looking at and kind of thinking in your head. So why did you settle on these four?

Steve: Yeah, I think they just map to the most common patterns I’ve seen, um, behind people underperforming or not, not progressing in their training the way they expect to. They’re either not building up fast enough, they’re not building training stress quickly enough, or they’re doing it too slowly or not at all, or they’re not recovering from the hard weeks, or they’re skipping their strength workouts.

And there, there are these dashboards in TrainingPeaks that we’re all familiar with, and we’ve used in Apalache for about 10 years now. You know, CTL, ATL, TSS, uh, these acronyms, chronic training load, and training stress score are important. But for an athlete… As a coach, they work for me, but I found for athletes, they, they were, they just often felt overwhelmed.

And especially at the training group level, where I’d say, uh, people in the training groups tend to be less singular goal-focused. Like they’re not, they’re not… So many of them are like, “Hey, I have a, a race where I really wanna do really well in six months.” They’re more like, “I wanna continue to do this for a very long time, and I want this to just sort of be a base layer in my life, and, uh, do a lot of different things and ski in the winter and run a race in the summer and go on a rock climbing trip in the fall.”

And that, that tends to be the typical, um, I would say demographic that is attracted to the training group’s, uh, methodology and structure. So, you know, again, just going back to those original three principles: consistency, gradualness, modulation, then adding that fourth leg of the table with strength, and just trying to make it really…

Put it in plain language and make it simple, uh, and easy for people to understand their progress.

Will: Another thing that I think is worth bringing up, um, so these can also be kind of distracting metrics in a way too. Like, if you don’t know the fundamentals behind them and you’re just looking at your CTL and saying, “Why is it doing this? Why is it doing that?” after each workout, um, in some ways, you’re almost missing the point of that consistency, right?

Like, that’s why we’re taking a higher layer up.

Do, does that make sense? So yeah.

Steve: Totally. I mean, I think that, you know, CTL in a way it accounts for consistency, but it also is highly, you know, uh, dependent on what the TSS scores of the individual workouts are. So I think that that can, you know, uh, mask things that I as a… You know, I sit down as a coach and look at somebody’s training peaks.

I, I… That pops out at me, uh, really quickly. That’s like one of the first things I usually look at.

Will: And they could also be… Oh, sorry. Do you wanna… Okay.

Um, in some ways, I guess they can also be misleading. Like, I’m just thinking of personal experiences here, but a lot of your Uphill Athlete training, you know, I’ve read the books, um, weighted training, like uphills, I’m not getting a score that feels related to my, like, relative effort on

those, those heights, right?

And so that’s the other thing.

Do you wanna

Steve: Yeah, let’s get to that in a minute. Alexa, when you are talking to athletes, uh, that since the dashboards have launched, which has been, you know, we’re recording this at the end of April, it’s been about a month now. How is it landing? Is the– What are the questions coming in?

Alexa: It’s, I mean, they’re, they’re, it’s definitely bringing up a conversation of like, okay, my score is I’m a yellow here in consist- or in like work balance, right? And so it brings up a conversation of like, okay, well, why is that? And usually, they can sort of backtrack and figure that out. Like, well, yeah, I did miss three workouts this week, you know? But it gives them a little bit of like, um, a cue to reflect, I think would be the best way to say it

Steve: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s good. That’s, that’s the right thing. That’s what we want is for these things to, like, bring, uh, attention and therefore trigger a conversation or a question or bring that into the group chat or the live Q&A, and then start that conversation that we have as a group, and sort it out, and everybody learns.

So it’s really a win-win.

Alexa: Yeah.

Steve: Let’s talk about the aerobic threshold a bit, because this is actually something I’m super excited about and I’ve actually been working on for a very long time, and there’s been a lot of starts and stops to this project, is figuring out how to solve the aerobic threshold test challenge without having to make people go do a test or run around the track or stress out about their– whether they’re using a wrist-based monitor or a chest-based monitor, and whether their route has a hill in the middle or not, or whether they have to recover before they do their aerobic threshold test, and all the kind of sticking points of the test can do what I actually do as a coach, which is I just have my athletes, like, train for a week or two, and I go in and I look in their data and I look and I can just figure it out.

So that’s actually literally, like, the approach basically it originally took is I sort of just sat down w- with a, with a computer scientist and explained to him, like, my process of how I try to figure out an aerobic threshold, and then we tried to codify that into software. And, uh, I would say that it’s, it was an interesting process in that it didn’t really work for a very long time, and then all of a sudden it worked, and it worked amazingly well.

So we’ll just, uh, take us through this a little bit. Um, let’s look at the, look at the progress tab and the aerobic threshold trend graph and maybe kind of show people what’s, what, what they can expect to see here

Will: Yeah. So the aerobic thresholds, uh, work is something that Steve mentioned he’s been working on for a long time, so I was really excited to finally have a place where we can, you know, integrate that into something. So it’s gonna live on the platform, and this comes into effect when you first sign up. If you have workouts that sync, uh, we can do that initial calculation there.

Otherwise, this is gonna be a rolling weekly statistic that updates. And what that means is you don’t have to do a specific heart rate drift test. Uh, you don’t need to worry about what watch is on your wrist if you forgot your heart rate monitor that day. You just do your training as prescribed, and you’ll see that trend change over time. Um, so this is gonna happen in the background, and it’s just another metric to see. However, um, once again, specifically for endurance sports, uh, this is a really important metric that gets missed by a lot of existing platforms out there. So I’m really excited that people can finally start to integrate this into their training as well

Steve: How is this landing with the athletes, Alexa? How are they using it? Are they finding it valuable?

Alexa: Yeah. You know, we haven’t used it a ton yet because we’re only a few weeks into using this program. But for me, as looking forward, I’m excited about it because a lot of what I do on the coach Q&A is also going through the AET test with people and determining what their heart rate drift is and walking them through it.

So it’ll get rid of some of that confusion that people have with, like, “Well, so what is my zone?” Or, “Did I do this test correctly? Do I need to do it again?” All of that should be eliminated

Steve: Yeah. And I wanna shout out to a former athlete I had, and she was training for Denali, and I had her doing all this low-intensity work. And after, like, eight weeks, she was just like, called me up, and she’s just like: “I don’t get it.” Like, you know, she was really pulling her hair out. She’s just like: “I’m just running around this park in circles, like, I’m going really slow.

Like, I don’t feel like I’m getting…” Uh, you know, and, and in a way, that, that call really stuck in my mind. Like, how can I make aerobic fitness progress visible? How can we do that? And this is how we do that. We’re, we’re going to measure it on a weekly basis. Like Will said, you need at least four weeks of data in there before it starts to, uh, become something that’s usable.

And we’re, we’re filtering that out for you, so you don’t– If there’s not enough data, you don’t see anything. But as soon as there is enough data, uh, it will surface a reading, and it will show in your, in your heart rate, and then it will track it over time. So you can literally, again, this is gonna be another layer.

Like, if your aerobic threshold is not improving over, you know, a few months, for example, then, you know, you can probably look back at the original inputs and see like: “Okay, what was I missing? Was I missing consistency? Was I, was I not modulating? Was I doing too much? Was I not doing enough training load?

Was I doing too much?” Like, those kinds of questions can be asked. Um, but hopefully, th- they don’t need to be because as you see your aerobic threshold line flattening, you’ll be like: “Oh man, I really wanna be… continue to improve. Now let’s look at the, the inputs and see where I’m missing, and let’s get that done so that I can continue to, to progress this way.”

I think it’s the single most important number for endurance athletes. And, you know, if we get it wrong in the testing, then also the rest of the program can be off. And this is true for people w- working off a regular stock training plan or working with a coach, except w- if you’re working with a coach, the coach can do all that work for you.

But now this sort of democratizes that work and makes it, uh, easy to do at scale for more people to, um, really, really help them figure out, uh, if they’re improving. And those of you who are thinking ahead and are familiar with the Uphe- Athlete system can already probably anticipate some of the knock-on effects of being able to map aerobic threshold.

And as Will said earlier, we know aerobic threshold, and now we can measure the difference between those, and we can start to sh- uh, work, get people to work towards being fit enough and show them when they’re actually ready to start adding higher intensity training in terms of zone three and zone four kinda workouts.

Will: And so Steve, uh, that’s maybe something worth talking about is the difference. I mean, it’s core to the Uphill Athlete ethos, but, uh, aerobic threshold versus anaerobic threshold. What other platforms get wrong by basing zones off anaerobic threshold? Maybe it’s worth kind of expanding on that a bit

Steve: Yeah. Um, I think everybody has had the experience where Garmin, you wake up one morning, and Garmin tells you your zones have changed. Well, it’s because you went out and you did a hard effort, and it saw that you could sustain something, heart rate at an, a higher anaerobic threshold.

And it’s really misleading, especially if you’re just training in zone two all the time, and then you happen to, like, go out and split a bunch of wood with your, uh, heart rate monitor on, and then it sees that your heart rate was, like, super high for, like, 45 minutes, and then it’s gonna tell you you have to reset all your zones.

So, you know, as you said earlier, most of the systems are based off of anaerobic threshold. Not that it’s a illegitimate way to approach it. It is a legitimate way to approach it, but it works better for people who are already very fit. For most people, focusing more on the aerobic base has been, you know, uh, one of the big messages about Pelathi over the last, like, 10 years, is going to be a better, uh, path and a more productive path, and they’re gonna get fitter and be able to do things longer, especially mountain athletes where our, our events, if you will, are just so long.

Like, you and I were ski touring, uh, last month, Will, together in Whistler, and we were out for, what, seven, eight hours? I mean, that’s, that’s not like a,

Will: Is that an average speed or?

Steve: Yeah, and that’s an average ski tour. It was no big deal, right? Like, it’s just, it was a pretty normal ski tour, even an easy ski tour, and, uh, that was, that was the duration.

Um, so I think that what I want people to feel is that there is going to be some support for automating, and there’s going to be a way to basically remove aerobic threshold testing from your life if you so choose. And I think that that’s, uh, gonna be super helpful for a lot of people.

Will: Yeah. And,

Alexa: be really helpful for coaches and for, for athletes

Steve: Yeah. Yeah

Will: Simplification

Steve: Yes. Simplification. One less thing to do. All you have to do is do your workouts. It’s great. So, uh, now one of the knock-on effects of this will be that we’ll be able to suggest training zones based on aerobic threshold, and that’s gonna happen as well within the dashboard. We’re not currently able to do that at this moment in time, but that is something that’s in the works, and I’m quite confident that we’re gonna get there.

It’s on the roadmap. Uh, how do you feel that that’s gonna land, Alexa, when, when athletes are way– going to have a new, uh, set of training zone heart rates suggested to them, and then of course, they’re going to accept the suggestion, or they can set them manually however they want? Or, and do you think that is going to be another thing that’s, that’s helpful and is going to lead people to do a better job with their training?

Alexa: Yeah, I think it’ll provide a level of relief, right? ‘Cause right now they’re like, “I’m pretty sure these are my training zones,” right? But there’s a lot of uncertainty in there, right? They’re basing it usually off of a test that they did, and then, like you said, they’re getting notifications that are like, “Hey, your zones have changed.” Well, have they? And so it causes all of this uncertainty. Am I training in the right zone? Am I, am I actually in zone two when I’m training? So this is gonna provide some reassurance with that, which is gonna be really nice

Steve: Yeah. And we’re telling them that their zones should be training as they get fitter, right? As the top of your zone two heart rate, that h- that number changes and increases as you get fitter. Like the zones need to– that zone two gets wider, and the gap between the top of zone two and the bottom of zone three gets narrower.

And so that’s, that’s good. That’s healthy. Again, that’s like a measure that, like, “Hey, we’re progressing. You’re getting fitter.” So I think that’s gonna be really helpful.

Alexa: Yes

Steve: Will, let’s talk about, uh, just the m- how the, how this is gonna work in terms of calculating that difference, that delta between aerobic and anaerobic thresholds and how we’re going to surface that for people

Will: Yeah. Um, so your aerobic threshold and anaerobic threshold delta, that’s kind of your preparedness for those harder efforts you, you mentioned that, Steve. So it’s not a super complicated calculation. It’s one minus AET over AMT, uh, if you can visualize that calculation. But, um, you want that delta to be less than 10% basically. And so once again, right now you j- you know, you do a one-off heart rate drift test, maybe that wasn’t the most accurate test. You’re, you’re not doing that every week, so you’re now two months outdated since you last did one. Uh, we wanna keep that score kind of fresh and present, especially as we start incorporating those more high-intensity workouts as you get closer to your event, basically. Um, so yeah, we’re looking for less than 10% there. Um, but the fact that we have both will, uh, really kind of put front and center your preparedness for those higher intensity workouts.

Steve: Yeah. And I think as Will said, you know, we’re gonna– we have the input view, the calendar view, and then we have what we call the progress view, where you can see the, your progress in different, in, in different metrics. One of them will be progress as it relates to, at least currently, you know, these things are evolving and we’re trying to simplify them even further, but they’re currently progress in terms of chronic training load, progress in terms of training volume, progress in terms of aerobic threshold, the strength training trend, how is your, is your strength going expected to maintain or improve?

Uh, your actual anaerobic threshold number for that week, your anaerobic threshold number for that week, that delta that you just had, and then w- also pulling in resting heart rate for those that are using that, uh, that metric or, you know, using some sort of device that is pul- is recording that. If that’s pulled into TrainingPeaks, it will be pulled into your dashboard.

So, and then that’s going to provide… We’re going to be able to then generate insights on your progress for you that will, that will be present on that, uh, on that dashboard. So I think that’s a little further out in terms of getting the insights there, but that’s definitely on the roadmap, and there’s already a space there.

Like mine currently, right now, I’m reading it, it says, “My Zone 2 at 65% of volume is optimal for base building. The distribution supports aerobic development while allowing adequate recovery.” All stuff I knew, but it’s, it’s looking at that, it’s, it’s looking at my data, and it’s, you know, it’s telling me, uh, that, that I’m in the right, that I’m doing the right distribution of, of Zone 2 for my, where I’m at in my program.

So I think that that’s, that’s, uh, gonna be super useful and super powerful. So with these insight layers, the idea is that if you, you know, we all still sometimes have questions and instead of guessing or googling or, you know, your coach is asleep pretty soon, you could just going to be able to ask right inside the system.

Will, where are we at with this capability and, you know, w- what is the kind of roadmap, granted that this is going to drop, uh, at the end of May, and we’re still a few weeks away from that currently. If you look out, what does this look like on the roadmap?

Will: For sure. Yeah, the capability’s there and, um, anyone that’s in the tech space right now that knows that software is moving incredibly quickly. So, um, I think this year you’ll expect to see some layer of that

Steve: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I think for sure this year and probably in a few, in the next few months. I think the way to think about this is, is simple. It’s, we call it Maria, and Maria is an intelligence layer that holds all of the intellectual property and methodology of Uphill Athlete. And Maria sort of functions as a, uh, three– Like, I, I like to think of it as a three-layer cake, uh, or a multi-layer system where Maria is suggesting or proposing things like, “Hey, your training zones, your aerobic threshold has changed.

I think your training zones should be this now. Accept, reject, you know, modify your training zones manually,” whatever. Um, and then the, the athlete gets to decide. So nothing on that platform is, is going to happen to you. Things simply get suggested to you. Um, and in some ca- you know, eventually, uh, this will, this functionality will exist for the one-on-one coached athletes as well, but the coach or you or your training group leader or coach will be able to decide.

And I think it’s… Maybe, should I, you think I should talk about Maria and how she got named?

Will: Yeah, I think you should really open it with that. I don’t know. I thought it was a great story when I read it. I don’t know if Alexis seen that project charter, but it’s–

Alexa: yeah, yeah,

Will: cool. yeah

Steve: Yeah

So Maria is named Maria because of a woman I knew who was a really incredible person. Her name was Maria Frantar, and she was a climber on the first expedition that I ever went on in the Himalaya back in 1990. Went to Dhaulagiri. And she, at that time, I think had climbed five 8,000-meter peaks, if I remember correctly.

And she did summit Dhaulagiri that summer and became the sixth woman to climb– To the– She– That became her sixth eight-thousander. And some of you historians will remember there was a race for the– to be the first woman to climb all 14 8,000-meter peaks. And there was a Polish woman, uh, Wanda Rutkiewicz.

I believe I’m saying that name wrong, but I will… That’s the best I can, I can do. And I think Wanda had one more. And so, uh, unfortunately, a couple of years later, Maria passed away after summiting Kanchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world, and, um, was no longer with us. And she’s one of these people that has– that I’ve lost in my life that somehow continued to just have this outsized influence.

I spent a l- only two months with her, but we were– She was essentially the, the climbing leader of the expedition, and I was sort of the gopher and the translator and the, the, the native English speaker. And, uh, so she and I spent a lot of time together. We bought like, I don’t know how many hundreds of kilograms of potatoes and sugar and flour.

Like, we, we, you know, we, we organized porters. We, we organized everything for an expedition back in 1990. And so I always thought that she, she was such a powerful woman and such– Just one of these leaders that just her very presence provided clarity and calmness and trans– like she was very transparent.

And as I was working on how this– I wanted this to be and was trying to think of, you know, she kept coming up, coming to mind because of those qualities. And that’s kind of what I want this layer, this intelligence layer to become is something that is trustworthy, it’s calming, it’s, it’s gives, it gives people clarity, and if they have a question, they can simply ask without having to leave the platform.

I’ve been using this in beta since last August, uh, and testing it and improving it, and it’s pretty awesome. And I’m really, really excited as well to get this out. And it– that you’ll see this, this tool and a number of layers, uh, throughout Pill Athlete in the coming year, and I think it’s going to really help people get answers.

You know, in the old days, we had things like forums and stuff like that, and now all of that IP and intelligence can be, you know, housed in one tool, and we can give a lot of people access to it. So it’s gonna be pretty cool, and I’m pretty excited about it.

Will: Yeah. That’s a really powerful backstory, and it’s, um, I don’t know, it’s very cool you’re honoring her in that way. Um,

yeah

Steve: it on Instagram like a month or so ago, just a little bit of the backstory, and her daughter reached out to me.

Will: I

Steve: so I’m actually gonna try to meet her daughter this summer. That will be like a, a nice moment. I’ve never met her before. I d- I, I’d forgotten honestly that, that she had a family and hadn’t really thought about it in many years, so it’ll be exciting to reconnect with her family, um, in part because of this project.

So it’s also kind of a cool full-circle moment.

Will: Yeah. She’ll keep overseeing athletes on their expeditions and, uh, keeping them to their goals

Steve: The overall arc of all of this conversation, and what I wanna leave people with, is that we are working to help people reduce their guesswork so that they can continue to adapt their training in the most intelligent way, uh, recognizing that life happens, and that we– the dashboard provides simpl- simple simplicity that the– and that the dashboard provides simplicity of being able to automate aerobic threshold determination, reduces guesswork.

It makes zone targets and training zones accurate, and updates as your aerobic system improves, triggers when you should start doing harder intensity, higher intensity work. And we’re also, if I can tease a little bit, building other things I think are gonna be really cool, like automated ways to update training stress scores, TSS, for those that speak the lingo, for pathway, vertical gain, and trail and snow conditions.

So, you know, we’ve had fudge factors in the past for that. All of that’s gonna be automated and run from your dashboard, and you can, you can set– You can, you, you’ll be able to tell that, you know, “Hey, I was ski touring and there was a foot of new snow and we were breaking trail,” and it will adapt the TSS score for that.

Um, so I’m, I’m really excited about that. And these are things that are just outside of the area of expertise of what TrainingPeaks has been able to do, and they are problems that we have been able to solve with code. And they are coming thanks to the work of Will, who is serving as, as PM on this project, and Nikita, who is the, the software engineer who’s building a lot of the code, and, uh, Mike Arpea, who has been helping us with some other aspects of the, particularly the data, um, base management and, and, and, uh, building of, of the back end.

So I think that that’s hopefully super helpful for people going forward.

Alexa: So, Steve, the goal of Uphill Athlete is to never grow fast. It’s to make sure that we’re coaching our athletes well and, and reducing uncertainty in the mountains. So how does this dashboard sort of encompass that and answer that question?

Steve: Yeah. I mean, I think this goes back to kind of how Up Hill Athlete came to be, and kind of came out of me just wanting to do something important or, or wanting to bring some value back to the mountain community that has given me so much in my life. And the way I sort of think about that is how can I provide as much value to peop- you know, as many members of our community as I can?

And I think one of the ways to do that is to remove uncertainty and provide clarity. I think education, uh, is a big piece of that, and I think these tools can leverage that same mission and effectively help kind of allow that growth to compound on its own. And I think training groups has been really the right place to do this because we have this, like, really great engaged group of athletes using these things.

And sometimes we’re, you know… Like, we didn’t talk about this, but last week we got some feedback on Thursday, and we’ll push the update to fix the, you know, complaint on Monday. And so that kind of feedback loop is really, really valuable. And training groups is for athletes who want more than a plan but don’t need one-on-one coaching.

And they’re very, very often very long-term, uh, athletes are staying. We have athletes who have been in the training group now, I think, since 2022 or so. So I think that that’s, uh, really, uh, a valuable test bed. And, you know, if you’re currently a training group athlete and you’re listening to this, like, uh, I hope you’re getting s- uh, get excited and share this, uh, podcast with friends that you think might, might need it.

And if you aren’t in training groups and you’re thinking that training groups might be for you, I think that what we have started is pointing towards something that is going to continue to improve and get better throughout at least 2026 and probably beyond, and it’s the smartest way to s- and the smartest place to start if you wanna begin with training.

So I think that, uh, yeah, let’s keep pushing these updates and getting these things out to athletes, and I’m really excited for what’s to come.

Will: Thanks, Steve.

Steve: Thank you, Will. Thank you, Alexa. Thank you both for all the work you’ve done on this, and more good stuff to come.

Alexa: Yes, thank you

Will: Yeah, thank you

Steve: Hey, real quick, before you go. Everything we publish, the articles, new podcast episodes, and the live webinars, are announced first in our newsletter. You can elect to receive between one and three newsletters a month. They’re written by the coaching team and me. And if you want them, sign up at uphillathlete.com. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you in the next week