Coach Croft

Some of y’all spent 10 years teaching your body that exhaustion equals fitness, then give a new training approach 14 days before declaring it doesn’t work.

That’s not an HRV problem. You may need to adjust your unfounded expectations.

Your nervous system may still be figuring out what “normal” looks like.

Swipe through before you let your watch ruin your morning.

Three mornings, three different training readiness scores…

13 → 41 → 55

Nothing changed in my training.

I didn’t suddenly become fitter. I didn’t discover a secret recovery hack and I didn’t take a week off.

I slept.

After a weekend of travel, disrupted routines, and less-than-stellar sleep, my Training Readiness took a hit. A couple nights back in my own bed and things started trending in the right direction again.

This is an important reminder because athletes often make the mistake of treating sleep as a daily pass/fail test.

One bad night doesn’t automatically mean you should skip training.

If you’ve been sleeping well overall, your body is still benefiting from the recovery you’ve accumulated over days and weeks. You may feel a little less spark during the warmup, but that doesn’t mean all adaptation has disappeared overnight.

The opposite is true, too.

When you’re stuck in a rough sleep cycle, one good night can be the first domino. Then another. Then another. Before long, recovery metrics improve, training feels better, and your body starts finding its rhythm again.

Fitness is cumulative. Recovery is cumulative, too.

The goal isn’t perfect sleep every night. A rhythm that’s good enough is often enough.

If you’ve never heard me on a podcast or talk about training as a masters or menopausal athlete, you’ve heard me say old ways won’t open new doors.

This might just be one of the hardest lessons endurance athletes ever learn, too. Because many of us say we trust the process. Far fewer are willing to actually surrender to it.

Trust sounds good when the process looks familiar. When the mileage is high. When the workouts feel hard. When exhaustion feels like proof that you’re doing enough.

Surrender is different though. It asks you to release the belief that success can only happen one way.

For masters + peri/menopausal athletes, that’s where things often get uncomfortable. The body changes. Recovery and stress changes. Life gets chaotic. Yet many athletes keep reaching for the same tools that worked ten or twenty years ago and wonder why the door won’t budge.

The goal isn’t to do less for the sake of it. This is where you do what strategically moves you forward and sometimes that means a few less miles. Sometimes it means more strength work + more recovery. Sometimes it also means letting go of timelines that no longer serve you.

The dream doesn’t have to change. The path might need to adapt slightly.

And that’s often the difference between trusting the process and surrendering to it. One believes. The other lets go.

Older Fans After Dark.
Episode: Hydration Trauma.

The same generation that survived on hose water, cafeteria pizza, and pure determination is now carrying emotional support water bottles everywhere we go.

We aren’t soft, we finally learned what hydration feels like and we’re not going back.

Also we’re in peri/menopause now and if I forget my electrolytes there’s a non-zero chance I’ll become a cautionary tale.

Growth. ✨

Or as we call it in midlife: Learning things the hard way and then becoming aggressively committed to them.

10 years ago, I had a hysterectomy at 38.

I didn’t set out to become a menopausal marathoner. In fact, I resisted the marathon for years and was convinced I’d be one and done.

Somehow, over the last decade, I’ve learned a lot from both.

Ten years.
Ten marathons.
Countless lessons about resilience, adaptation, trust, and what it means to keep moving forward when life doesn’t go according to plan.

I could list a million of them but this carousel shares a few of the biggest ones.

I’d love to hear: what’s a lesson your body has taught you that you couldn’t have learned any other way?

I don’t do many treadmill runs anymore.

There was a time when I practically lived on one. I was the runner chasing mileage, stacking 10-mile runs on back-to-back days because I wanted to prove something. Looking back, I wasn’t really asking myself how uncomfortable I was willing to get. I was mostly asking how much I could do.

Somewhere along the way, that changed.

Around the time our house burned down, I started intentionally choosing discomfort. More heat. More cold. More wind. More rain. Not because suffering makes you a better athlete, but because I wanted to become less dependent on perfect conditions.

These days, I’ll run outside in most weather. The exceptions are usually lightning, ice, and cold rain. I’ve run a marathon through the downpours of Berlin and raced a half marathon where parts of the course were underwater. I know I can handle difficult conditions when I need to, which is exactly why I don’t always need to.

This weekend I chose the treadmill because I wanted or because I couldn’t handle the rain. I wasn’t really avoiding discomfort. But adapting to the situation in front of me was the right choice for that day.

That’s a lesson I wish more athletes understood.

The same morning, a local race was cancelled due to severe storms and lightning. I saw several athletes post that they ran the course anyway so they could “earn” their medal. And that’s where I think we sometimes lose the plot.

Running through discomfort can be a skill. Ignoring legitimate risk is not. Toughness isn’t doing the dangerous thing when a safer option exists.

Toughness isn’t proving how committed you are to strangers on the internet and it isn’t refusing to adapt.

The strongest athletes I’ve coached aren’t the ones willing to endure the most discomfort. They’re the ones who know which discomforts are worth embracing and which ones deserve respect.

Because race day won’t always give you ideal conditions. Training won’t always go according to plan. Life definitely won’t.

Adaptability isn’t weakness. In fact, it’s one of the most important performance skills you’ll ever develop.