You Are Your Own Experiment. Here's What It Actually Means For Your Triathlon Training
- Craig Miskin
- Jul 9
- 4 min read
I've done the intervals - V02 max. Carefully placed, correctly prescribed and sensibly periodised. The kind of high intensity work that every training plan, every coach, every physiology textbook will tell you is non-negotiable if you want to get faster. The ceiling raisers.
And they wreck me. Every. Single. Time.
Not uncomfortable - actually wrecked. Three days of compromised training following one hard session, even when that sessions is prescribed within what my fitness should be able to handle. A level of fatigue accompanying it that I just don't get elsewhere. For years, I assumed it was a mental thing. A toughness flaw. Something I just had to push through. So I kept pushing, tried different protocols, read the science and kept paying the same cost.
Eventually I stopped fighting it. Not because I gave up on the intensity - it's covered and recommended for very clear reasons. Instead, because I started paying attention to my own data rather than the generic prescription.
That shift - from following a plan to understanding my own response to training - is probably the most useful thing I've done as an athlete. Interestingly, science backs it up.
What The Research Actually Says
A 2018 review by Vellers, Kleeberger and Lightfoot examined inter-individual variation in adaptations to both endurance and resistance training. The finding that should make every athlete stop and think: not all individuals respond well to exercise training. Some showed no meaningful response. Others responded poorly. Some excelled. And genetic background contributes significantly to why the same standardised programme produces wildly different outcomes in different people.
Same plan. Same effort. Genuinely different physiological results.
This isn't a fringe finding — it's increasingly well-supported across the literature. Individual response to training varies far more than most generic programmes account for. You see it all the time with outliers and degrees of standard deviation. The assumption baked into most training plans is that if the stimulus is correct, the adaptation follows. For some people, some of the time, that's broadly true. Where deemed statistically significant - most people, most of the time. For others, it isn't — and no amount of discipline or consistency will change the underlying biology.
That's not failure. That's information.
What This Means In Practice — Become the n=1
Back to my intervals problem. Once I stopped treating my disproportionate recovery cost as a personal failing and started treating it as data, a far clearer picture emerged.
My body responds better to endurance work and sweetspot training — the kind of sustained, moderate-high intensity effort that sits below threshold. I build real fitness from it, I recover from it normally, and I perform consistently off the back of it. Some of my best performances have come off blocks of this type of training, with little if anything over threshold.
High intensity work above threshold? The adaptation is there if I give it enough time and space. But, for me, the cost-to-benefit ratio is genuinely different to what the standard prescription assumes.
So now I use it selectively. Off-season, when there's no race pressure and I can afford three days of reduced training without it mattering because there's not something approaching that I need to be ready for. I'm lifting my ceiling when I have room to absorb the cost, then building the training after that actually improves my performance closer to race season.
That's not avoiding hard work. That's understanding my own experiment well enough to use the right tools at the right time.
The Question Worth Asking Yourself
Most athletes follow a plan. Fewer athletes actually study their own response to training over time and adjust accordingly.
Here are the questions worth sitting with:
What training consistently makes you better? Not what should make you better according to the plan — what actually does, based on your own data across multiple training blocks.
What training costs you more than it returns? Not what's hard — hard is fine. What produces a recovery cost that's disproportionate to the adaptation you get back. Or for the returns offset against an increased injury risk?
When does that training actually work for you? Because almost everything works at the right time in the right context. The question isn't whether to use a tool — it's when.
Why This Matters More If You're Time-Crunched
If you're like me and fitting training around a full-time job, a family, and everything else life requires — the cost of a three-day recovery hit isn't just physiological. It's a missed Tuesday session, a Thursday run that becomes a walk, a weekend long ride that gets cut short because you're still carrying the weight of the previous workouts.
For the time-crunched athlete, training economy isn't a nice-to-have. It's the whole game. And training economy starts with understanding your own response well enough to stop spending resources on stimulus that doesn't return what it costs you.
Generic plans aren't built for your biology. They're built for an average that may or may not represent you. The athletes who improve most consistently aren't always the ones following the best plan — they're the ones who've paid enough attention to their own data to know what their body actually responds to.
What To Do With This
Start treating yourself as an experiment rather than a subject. Keep a training diary that goes beyond sessions completed — note how you felt 24 and 48 hours after key sessions. Track which training blocks produced your best performances versus which ones left you flat come race day. Look for patterns across seasons, not just weeks.
Your n=1 data, collected honestly over time, is more valuable to your performance than any generic programme could be. Because it's yours.
If you're not sure where to start with understanding your own training response — or if you've been following plans that aren't producing the results they should — that's exactly the conversation I have with athletes before we build anything together.
Sign up to the mailing list below — I'll be sharing a practical framework for auditing your own training response in an upcoming newsletter. It's free, and it's going where subscribers go first.
No resets. Just evolution.
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