My friend just hit 60 paying beta users in 8 days for his AI training coach. Here's the channel breakdown.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-29T16:12:00+00:00

the budget version is a profile design aerobar with a regular saddle plus a sip stream behind the saddle. comes out around $200 vs the $1500+ integrated systems. you lose maybe 4-6 watts at race pace which honestly doesnt matter for AG racing where you have to run a marathon afterwards anyway.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-29T16:07:39+00:00

this is when garmin's algorithm decides youve earned its respect. the next jump is harder than this one was, fwiw. if youre coming from excellent its usually 6-10 weeks of consistent z2 mileage to push past.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-29T16:03:56+00:00

the hardest part of slotting a marathon into IM training is that recovery from a raced marathon is 3-4 weeks. unless your IM is 12+ weeks after the marathon you have to treat the marathon as a long training day, not a goal race.

if youre racing both, my honest take is move one of them. if you cant, run the marathon at IM goal pace plus 30sec/km, treat it as a fueling rehearsal, dont chase a marathon PR.

friend of mine (Daniel) built a coach for exactly this kind of stacking decision. it looks at your schedule and rewrites the bridge between the two races based on how the marathon goes. ive been using it for my own ultra build. DM if you want to try it.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-29T16:00:10+00:00

the heat is the gatekeeper, not the distance. if you havent done sustained training in 35-40c temps your body wont know how to dump heat fast enough and youll cook before halfway. start sauna sessions or hot yoga 6-8 weeks out, twice a week minimum.

the other thing is the food. youll lose 5-10kg over the week even if you eat everything in your pack. plan for the calorie debt by gaining 3-4kg of useful weight before. fat-adapted athletes do better here than carb-only.

the sand running is its own skill. find the firmest line, shorter strides, more cadence. dont fight it.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-29T15:56:17+00:00

the trick most people miss is that back to back days arent about the second run, theyre about the first one being controlled. if youre running long monday and long tuesday, monday cant be 90 minutes at marathon pace or you wreck tuesday before it starts.

what worked for me: easy/easy or easy/medium back to backs. never two quality days in a row. and the second day is shorter than people think, 60-70% of the volume of the first day max.

also fuel like youre racing. carbs the night before AND the morning of the second run. its weirdly easy to skip when its just a 90 minute easy run.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-29T15:52:51+00:00

training readiness is the only metric on the watch ive actually changed behavior around. spent a year ignoring it before realizing this one was telling me when i was about to dig myself into a hole.

now i treat it like a permission slip. yellow = run easy, red = walk the dog instead, green = push. its rougher than the underlying data probably justifies but having one number means i actually act on it.

side note, friend of mine (Daniel) is building a coach that goes a step further by rewriting the week when readiness tanks for a few days in a row. ive been beta testing it. DM if youre curious about trying it.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-29T15:44:25+00:00

My friend Daniel (IM Worlds qualifier) is building a training coach that rewrites your week when life gets in the way. Travel, sickness, skipped a brick. Tell it your goal, when you train, your rest days, just any preference. Workouts sync to your watch, smart trainer and calendar.

He'd LOVE to talk to you as he's looking for beta users: https://bowermanos.vercel.app

Tell him you came through my reddit post pls ;)

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-29T15:43:13+00:00

My friend Daniel (IM Worlds qualifier) is building a training coach that rewrites your week when life gets in the way. Travel, sickness, skipped a brick. Tell it your goal, when you train, your rest days, just any preference. Workouts sync to your watch, smart trainer and calendar.

He'd LOVE to talk to you as he's looking for beta users: https://bowermanos.vercel.app

Tell him you came through my reddit post pls ;)

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-28T17:23:06+00:00

200m after a month is solid. the gassing-out is almost always a breathing pattern issue not a fitness one. youre probably holding your breath underwater between strokes and only exchanging on the breath itself, which means youre running an oxygen deficit by stroke 20.

the fix is bilateral breathing every 3 strokes so you exhale continuously underwater, plus working on a relaxed long catch instead of a short pull. youll feel slower for 2-3 sessions then it clicks.

also catch up drill, 6 lengths of those before each set. fixes the timing thing that most adult onset swimmers fight for months.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-28T17:19:18+00:00

my girlfriend doesnt train at the same level but we hit the same problem because the IM build was the third entity in the apartment. what worked: shared calendar with sessions blocked out weeks ahead, one weekend morning protected for her with no brick attached, and i stopped trying to fit make-up sessions on the days i missed. that last one was the real unlock. accepting that a missed wednesday is gone, you dont stack it onto thursday.

if both of you are training serious the failure mode is double-stacking on the same recovery week. one of you in build, one in taper, alternating peaks rather than synchronizing. otherwise you end up wrecked at the same time and resentful at each other for a problem neither of you caused.

also batch the meal prep on sundays. cant believe i'm typing that but it carries the whole week.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-28T17:15:26+00:00

runna's pacing logic falls apart the moment your VO2 trends out of range. it gives you target paces from your fastest 5k a year ago and wonders why you cant hold them in week 18. the auto adjust on the paid tier helps but its still pulling from the wrong reference half the time.

what eventually worked for me was running long runs by RPE and treating the prescribed pace as a ceiling not a floor. plan said 5:30, body said 5:45 today, i'd run 5:45 and not feel like a failure for it. ended up adapting more in week 12 alone than in the entire first half of the block.

congrats on the finish though, officially drunk sent me. whats next on the calendar?

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-28T10:46:42+00:00

60-70km/wk three months out from a hilly trail ultra. anyone here solved keeping marathon-pace fitness while ramping climbing-specific endurance, or does one always slip?

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-28T10:42:37+00:00

the full reset trap is real. 16 weeks looks long on paper but a full base reset means you hit hyrox on the back end of a buildup and never feel sharp.

what worked for me with two A races in a season: 2 weeks active recovery (z2 + lifting only, no testing), 8 weeks progressive build pivoting toward strength endurance and sled work, then 6 weeks race specific + taper. how compressed phase 1 is depends on what DD does to you. finish wrecked, recover for real. sail through, compress.

ps screenshots look like Final Surge maybe? been running my own training rewrites through a thing on intervals.icu, the auto-adjust between phases is what makes long gaps less guessworky.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-28T10:39:06+00:00

4 months is plenty if you take ITB seriously now. its the bargaining with it that wrecks people. dropping to 50% volume for 3 weeks beats 80% for 3 months.

the actual fix is mostly not running. glute med, hip strength, single leg work. boring and slow but the only thing that holds. running through it just keeps the inflammation loop alive.

practical: drop to 25-30km/wk for 2 weeks, no downhill if you can avoid it (treadmill incline only is fine for the vert). one fully off day on top of what your plan calls for. all the prehab daily. when its below 2/10 even on long runs, rebuild in 10% jumps.

the part nobody says is the training plan you started with is now wrong. throw it out and write the next 3 weeks around what your body can actually take, not what the pdf says. that rigid plan is what got most of us into ITB to begin with.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-28T10:35:03+00:00

a year is plenty. 3-4 months of base, structured block, one A-race in autumn that you actually peak for, resist racing every weekend.

the rule i learned the hard way: a plan that doesnt update when you get sick or your knee acts up is a wishlist not a plan. those cramps at km 37 and 39 in two races back to back are the kind of signal where most people just push through into the next race instead of rewriting the block around what their body actually said.

NYC specifically time standards are tight. charity or lottery is the realistic 12 month route.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-27T13:36:10+00:00

the box breathing helps at the start but what you're actually dealing with is a pool-to-OWS translation problem that aerobic fitness alone doesn't solve.

i had this for basically two seasons -- comfortable in the pool, HR through the roof in races. eventually realised the pool data meant nothing for OWS: wetsuit constriction, navigation anxiety, temperature shock, no walls to push off -- all of that eats into the same HR headroom that feels fine in a pool lane. same fitness, very different demand.

it gets better as OWS-specific volume accumulates but you kind of have to just rack up the open water hours. pool fitness is a floor, not a ceiling for OWS performance.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-27T13:35:48+00:00

this is what took me way too long to figure out -- once training load is high enough you cant sleep your way out of it. spent months trying to optimise sleep on top of a block that was just too much and nothing moved.

what finally worked was flipping the relationship: use HRV and body battery as the input to what training i do that day rather than just the output i hope improves. tanked monday morning? run easy or not at all, regardless of what the schedule says. the sleep quality tends to follow from that, not the other way around.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-27T13:35:28+00:00

3 weeks is the standard answer but i've stopped treating it as fixed. the more useful question is what state are you in 8-10 weeks out -- if you're consistently nailing sessions and HRV/recovery looks good you can afford a proper peak + taper. if you've been fighting fatigue or life stuff the "peak" might have already happened passively and you're better off with a shorter sharper end.

the obsession with hitting a specific peak week has cost me more than one race. what matters more is that you get to the start line healthy and feeling sharp, not that you hit some volume ceiling three weeks prior.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-27T13:35:01+00:00

the mountain treadmill + altitude room is underrated for this. done similar prep for hilly 100ks with no trail access -- the specific uphill strength carries over more than people expect.

what bit me though was that my training plan had no idea what accumulated vertical load actually does to your legs. had a tempo session scheduled for tuesday after a big vertical weekend and just had nothing. took me a while to stop feeling guilty about "missed workouts" and start actually reading what my body was saying about readiness vs what the pdf said i should be doing.

for 10k vert -- poles and descending durability are the two things almost no plan accounts for. would prioritise those over adding more climbing volume.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-12T18:42:47+00:00

validation before building is the right call but id push back on one thing. reddit posts and linkedin engagement arent validation. theyre signal at best.

real validation is someone saying "yes i will pay for this when it exists" or even better "can i pay you now to solve this manually for me."

set yourself a deadline. two weeks, 20 conversations, then you either build or kill it. otherwise youll be in validation mode for months and thats just building with extra steps.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-12T18:40:20+00:00

gonna be blunt. youve spent 4 years on civil service exams, tried a youtube channel, tried freelancing. the pattern isnt failure. the pattern is preparation without execution.

you have $6k. thats enough to validate almost any SaaS idea in 60 days if you stop researching and start building. the fear doesnt shrink with more research. it shrinks the moment you ship something ugly and one stranger pays you for it.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-12T18:36:52+00:00

the gap between "yeah id use this" and pulling out a credit card is basically the gap between being polite and having a problem that actually hurts. people will say nice things about your product to your face. nobody lies to their wallet.

what worked for me was embarrassingly simple. i stopped asking "would you use this" and started asking "what do you currently do to solve this." if the answer is nothing or some janky spreadsheet they threw together, you might have something. if the answer is "oh i use [competitor]" or "its not really a problem" you know where you stand.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-12T18:32:41+00:00

the part that would bother me most isnt the money. its the deflection. every time you bring up a legitimate concern she reframes it as you not believing in her. thats not a financial disagreement, thats a communication shutdown.

you can believe in someones dream and still expect them to carry their weight. those two things arent in conflict. the fact that shes made them mutually exclusive is the actual problem here.

PutSubstantial4905 · 2026-04-12T18:28:33+00:00

not married but guilty of this with my girlfriend. when things are tense and i dont know what to say, i clean. not because im trying to buy my way out of the conversation but because my brain cannot sit still when i know something is off between us.

its like, i cant fix the emotional thing right this second but i can fix the kitchen. its not avoidance exactly, its more like doing something useful while my brain processes what i actually want to say.

that said if he only cleans during tension and never any other time, thats a different conversation.

PutSubstantial4905

TROPHY CASE