What three months of workout comments can tell you

Your athletes have been sending signals. You've been reading them one at a time.

You read your athletes' workout comments the same way you read text messages: one at a time, in the moment. That's the only way it makes sense to read them. But it also means you'll probably never notice what changes over a longer period of time.

There's a pattern that's hard to catch in real time: an athlete whose comments get shorter. Not dramatically. They don't go quiet overnight. They go from "felt strong on the intervals, legs were a bit heavy but pushed through" to "done". In the moment, "done" is just a quick check-in. Read against what came before, it's a flag.

Coaches who've been doing this for years develop instinct for this kind of drift. But instinct takes time to build, and it still fails for the athletes you're least worried about. The reliable ones. The ones who never miss a session, who you trust to tell you if something's wrong. They're the ones most likely to drift quietly.

What I've started testing is asking AI to read across an athlete's workout comments for the past 90 days and tell me what's changed. Not the workouts. The comments. The tone, the length, the questions asked or not asked. Ask: what do you notice about how this athlete has been communicating?

The answer isn't always alarming. Sometimes everything looks fine. But when something has shifted, it's obvious in hindsight in a way it never was reading one message at a time.

You might catch athletes who were heading toward cancelling. Then you can reach out. Some might admit to thinking about cancelling, others might just needed a different race goal to get re-engaged. Neither conversation would have happened if you'd waited for them to come to you.

AI doesn't replace the coaching instinct here. It extends it to the athletes you haven't been watching as closely, because nothing seemed wrong.

This week: Pick some athletes, and go back through their last 90 days of workout comments as a block. Ask an AI tool what's changed.

This could take a while depending on what coaching platform you use as you'll need to be able to copy and paste each comment along with the dates.

If you are a Training Tilt coach though you could just use our new Claude and ChatGPT integration and just ask "Look up the last 90 days of notes and workout comments from Cam. What do you notice about how his communication has changed over that time?"

Then you'll have the results in just a few moments. Just another example of the flexibility you get from giving your own AI tools access to your coaching platform.

More demos of that new integration here