The secret to being a successful athlete is twofold:
- Don’t get injured.
- Don’t take a year off.
If you can manage these two things, you’re already in decent shape. If you can’t, you find yourself in a less desirable position: mine.
It hasn’t all been bad, but the road back to my sport has been long, winding, and oftentimes frustrating. Athlete wellness isn’t always straightforward. Sticking to good habits is sometimes easier said than done. Rebuilding physical strength is hard. Rebuilding mental strength may just be even harder.
It’s tough to go from clearly defined goals, programs and habits to trying to find motivation, and struggling through workouts you breezed through just months ago. In these cases, you can feel directionless. What is the big picture? Is it worth it to try and come back to your sport? What do you need to do that? Where do you even start?
The answer is simple.
Like with most things, you start small, with one step at a time. Reinforce those good habits.
For me, I have been rebuilding fitness through some of the staple workouts I relied on before getting injured: mostly interval work and steady state on the bike erg. My fitness is not what it used to be. That’s for sure. But I’m glad to be healthy enough that I can even attempt some of these sessions. Seeing the difference in splits has been disheartening at times, but I’ve found it’s a very useful tool to compare where I was, where I am now, and where I’m trying to go in the future.
In revisiting some of the same workouts, I’ve also revisited some of my past CrewLAB reflections. Here are two reflections, one from March of 2025, and one from February of this year. Notice anything?
Without meaning to, I recorded the exact same workout. But what struck me was that a year later, I had almost exactly the same response. 20-minute intervals were clearly still a favorite. I was still making zone training and heart rate a priority. I was making conscious mental effort to think of my workout as an opportunity to get better—and not treating steady state like an enemy.
This realization prompted me to look back on other old workouts. Suddenly those logs I took for granted in the moment were not just records of a bygone time, a snapshot of an early weekday practice frozen for its own sake. They were important puzzle pieces that helped me understand who I was when I recorded them, and how that work made me who I am now.
I’ve always liked a puzzle, and I’ve always liked making things fit into place logically. Reading some of my old reflections compared to ones I’ve made more recently, I could see the big picture, instead of each one standing alone. I learned that many of my training goals and values are similar now to what they were last year — to me, that means even after a year of both progress and setback, the same things are still important to me, and I’m still making strides to achieve those goals. Even though a lot has changed this year, I’m still the same athlete that I was before. This is comforting. It means I haven’t lost everything — even though my fitness took a hit and I no longer have the structure of the team I was with previously.
Having a lot of time to reflect on my use of CrewLAB also led me to another realization: completing check-ins or adding reflections to workouts on CrewLAB shouldn’t be homework—and it’s not something you do just to get a coach off your back.
This also has two parts:
First, coaches can get good insight from athletes beyond numbers and scores.
Second, athletes can get important insight on themselves for themselves, not for their coaches.
For coaches, what you can learn from an athlete’s own words might be more insightful than their scores. How they approach challenges. How a setback or poor performance impacts them — is it the end of the world or an opportunity to learn what went wrong and did better? Whether an athlete is a problem solver or a problem creator makes a huge difference when it comes to their training strategy, and what they bring as an individual and a team member.
For athletes, check-ins and reflections are an opportunity for them to really get to know themselves and have a running log of how—and who—they were at any given point. I thought I was making notes on how I performed during a workout. But what I was really noting was how I approached a challenge, and what I valued most. I feel better finding my identity through those—am I someone whose value is tied to splits, or am I someone who values hard work, is focused on getting better, and tries to stay positive even amidst challenges?
Detailed reflections and record keeping aren’t the only factor, but they may be a bigger piece than we give credit for—and the more pieces we have to look at, the easier we can see the big picture. It’s not about how one particular workout went, it’s about using that one workout to piece together progress, priorities, and identity.
