Should You Let Data Dictate?

Modern training apps claim to be able to monitor your form, fatigue and race-readiness by algorithm. But can artificial intelligence really know more than you about your body? Hannah Reynolds investigates.

Imagine this scenario: an athlete is preparing for a competition, carefully recording every session and watching the peaks and troughs of their data curves with an eagle eye. They heap on training stress while balancing it with judicious amounts of rest, all the while noting their fitness scores creeping up as the number representing their form hits the golden target on the right day. Everything is in place for the ride of their life. But when race day comes, it just doesn’t happen — they underperform, the PB proves elusive. How could this be, they think, when everything was objectively on track?

Our use of data to inform choices, particularly in a business setting, is now second nature. Whether consciously or unconsciously, data drives many of our daily decisions. The emotionless philosophy ‘numbers don’t lie’, letting data make decisions for us, gives us a pleasing kind of certainty. But not every ingredient of fitness or form is quantifiable — leaving big gaps in our self-knowledge. When it comes to our bodies, is letting data dictate our training a risky strategy?

Cycling coach Holly Seear (springcyclecoaching.co.uk) uses data driven site TrainingPeaks to set and monitor her clients’ sessions. The key to making decisions, she says, is “high-quality data and tracking over a long period of time.” One recorded session tells you very little, but over time “the numbers start to give a really good clue and patterns begin to emerge.”