I'm 48. Married, three boys, CTO at a mid-cap, twenty years in the Netherlands now. Grew up in north Queensland playing everything — rugby league, basketball, golf, athletics, whatever was on. Australian Army — infantry — until I was 24, 25, then a couple of years travelling. Fitness has always been there, one way or another.
Always there — but it wasn't a straight line. I climbed the corporate ladder, travelled a lot, ate because I could. Blew out to 123 kilos, probably 30, 32% body fat. Couldn't run a few kilometres without blowing up. I'd train hard — CrossFit, HWPO programming, these things — pick up some kind of injury, stop altogether, stop caring. Then start again. That yo-yo went on for years.
Change came. Not from a workout — from finally building a methodology. Probably two years ago I started piecing together what's right and what's wrong for a person my age. Recovery. Sleep. One thing leading at a time. Two years on that system: weight down to 102 with probably another 10 to go, 20, 30 kilometre runs non-stop, and a 70.3 I organised myself — swim in a 50 metre pool, transition in my office car park, two bike loops, out onto the run. To be honest, I didn't finish it. Cramped up 10, 12 k into the run and that was that. Not a fitness problem — a hydration problem, a salt problem, a feed problem. I enjoyed it anyway. I'll conquer one next year.
I tell you that because pretending you're finished is how you stop, and because this whole thing is built on not being a fake.
Here's the actual problem I couldn't buy my way out of. For planning, I'm not one athlete — I'm three. A triathlon, a Hyrox, a strength target, all sharing one recovery budget, around a full-time job and a weekly flight to Prague. My stack was TrainingPeaks for the endurance, Hevy for the lifting, a spreadsheet to stitch them together. The spreadsheet didn't know anything. Didn't know a heavy leg session 18 hours before a quality run costs you both. Didn't know a race in July and a race in December need different training to coexist. Every time life moved a race, the replanning was mine, by hand, in an evening I didn't have.
So I'm building the tool: one calendar that holds all three goals as equals. An engine that enforces the phase separation instead of suggesting it — it will not schedule the week that costs you both goals, and it gates the next block on the deload actually happening, because I know exactly who skips deloads when training feels good. Numbers built for people our age, from the research, not the marketing. And when the plan tells you something, you can ask it why.
I'm not a scientist, and I won't pretend to be one. I'm a self-taught athlete who reads the studies, tests them on himself, and writes down what survives contact with a real job, a real calendar, and a 48-year-old soleus. Everything I publish shows its sourcing. When I get something wrong, I'll say so in public.
If you're the one with three apps and a spreadsheet — this is for you. That's it.
Training methodology, not medical advice.