I'm training for an Ironman and my coach is a knowledge graph

An Ironman is an information problem

The training is hard in the ways everyone expects. What nobody warned me about was the information. A full-distance race takes the better part of a year to build toward, and over that year the advice piles up: my physio's rules for a calf that flares when run volume climbs, my bike fitter's reasoning for moving my saddle, a fueling plan a nine-time finisher talked me through over coffee, my own notes on which long rides went well and why. Each piece arrives once, out loud, and starts fading on the drive home.

I don't have a human coach. I have a plan I trust and people I ask. Which means the job of remembering what everyone said, and what my body did about it, has always landed on me. I used to do that job badly.

What goes in

Two records, one place.

The first is automatic. Paredra syncs my health data from my Garmin: heart rate variability, readiness, the activity log, the workouts, arriving day after day into the same space as my recordings and notes. When I want to know what my training actually looked like in March, the log is there. Not my memory of March. March.

The second I capture on purpose. I record my sessions with my physio and my bike fitter, with their permission. I asked each of them before the first recording, and both said fine. Those conversations become transcripts I can search, next to my race reports and my weekly notes.

Then the useful thing happens: the pieces connect. The calf in my physio's transcript is the same calf in my March notes and the same calf behind two missed run weeks in the log. The names and the things link up across everything I put in, so the pile behaves like one body of knowledge instead of three apps and a notebook.

Asking my coach a question

In October, deep in the taper crazies, I couldn't remember the fueling numbers from that coffee conversation in spring. I searched for it and got the transcript back, his exact figures, his exact warning about trying anything new on race day. In February, calf tight at mile four, I pulled up what my physio actually said about running through tightness versus stopping, in her words, not my anxious paraphrase of them. Then I opened the activity log on my phone and scrolled back to the last time this happened, and saw that I'd come back fine in eleven days.

The deciding stayed mine, every time. What changed is what the deciding is based on.

The answer to most training questions is something someone already told me. The difference now is that the telling can be found.

What it does not do

Paredra doesn't coach. It has never suggested a workout, ruled on my taper, flagged a pattern, or offered an opinion about my Tuesday. The knowledge graph in the title holds knowledge; it doesn't have opinions. The plan is mine, the calf rules are my physio's, and the interpreting of my own numbers stays with me and, where it matters, with my doctor. What it does is narrower, and for a self-coached athlete it's exactly the missing piece: it keeps everything my people told me and everything my watch measured together, searchable, in a space I own.

Health data syncs from Garmin and Oura today. If your numbers live somewhere else, they don't reach Paredra yet.

Race day is in November. My coach is coming along. It fits in a jersey pocket.

I asked my physio and my bike fitter before recording our sessions, and you should too. Check the recording rules where you live. Paredra is not a medical device and gives no medical or training advice: it keeps your numbers and your notes together, and the deciding stays with you. Your recordings and your health data stay in your own space, and we never train models on your content.