Load Management
Garmin just bought TrainingPeaks. A note on betrayal, old patterns, and why the right response is patience, not panic, from someone rehabbing a shoulder.
Fab’s Friday Field Notes
Headache this morning, and not just from the news. Went for a run anyway, the first real one since the injection. The shoulder’s been the whole story these past weeks: consult, scan, the needle, now physio twice a week rebuilding what decades of climbing, skiing, mountain biking and cold belays wore down. This week’s verdict was good: decent range coming back, decent strength, on one condition. Don’t overreach. Load it too fast, and I undo six weeks of patient work in one session.
Came back from the run, opened my phone, and read that Garmin has bought TrainingPeaks.
I put real time and real money into that platform. Months trying to understand something genuinely complex, failing at parts of it, paying for the Uphill Athlete programs, not because I wanted another mainstream fitness app but because I was looking for a tribe. A small, serious gang who cared about proper training and not about boxes and badges. Same instinct sent me to TrainingPeaks Virtual a while back too, a sharper, smaller platform than Zwift, before either went mainstream. Now Garmin owns that as well.
I love Garmin. I’ve said so for years. But reading the news, the feeling wasn’t neutral. It was betrayal, the quiet kind I get every time something small and specific gets folded into something big and generic. I’ve watched this shape before: Tacx in 2019, Firstbeat in 2020, both absorbed gently, both eventually less open than promised. No reason to expect this one goes differently.
Here’s the thing the shoulder’s been teaching me all month, though. The instinct after news like this is to overreach. Cancel everything, migrate everywhere, make the point in one furious weekend. That’s the same mistake as loading a joint before it’s ready, satisfying for about a day, and then you’re back to zero, or worse.
So the plan is smaller and slower instead. Back up my .FIT files this week. Have a proper look at Intervals.icu on the side, no rush, no drama. Keep training on Garmin, keep coaching where I can, and let the rest sit for now rather than force a decision the way I’d force a rep my shoulder isn’t ready for.
Some things you rebuild carefully, on purpose, over months. Turns out that’s not just shoulders.