Coaching in the Digital Era: Virtual Cycling with Velocity

I love your story and such a beautiful way to provide support for coaching. Like coaching can be super lonely, but endurance athlete, like being an endurance athlete can be also be super lonely. Like

having a platform to bring people together and doing

You know, the same grueling, abusive workout together is so meaningful and beautiful. So I'm truly enjoying the platform

Thank

Hello and welcome to the Athletes Compass podcast where we navigate training, fitness and health for everyday athletes. Today, we're talking about the future of virtual cycling with Robbie Ventura and John Nichols from Velocity Cycling. We'll discover how their innovative online platform with live two-way video instruction and real-time data is redefining virtual training.

and community that's important for cyclists at every level. Welcome, Robbie and John. It's good to have you here.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, good to be here.

So first of all, let's get down to the basics. What inspired the creation of velocity cycling and what problem were you trying to solve for cyclists?

there's two, there's two really starts to this program. One start was like literally, I don't know, John, had to be at least eight or nine years ago when we kind of banded together this thing, because we had multiple facilities, multiple training facilities here in, the Chicagoland area and our instructors were great, but our messaging wasn't always the same across all the facilities. So I kind of wanted this ability to coach.

facilities all over the place. All of our vision quest, had a coaching business, still have a coaching business called Vision Quest Coaching. And we wanted to have a similar message or I wanted to be able to instruct multiple facilities at the same time. So that was kind of the start of it, but it required so much technology. It was so unstable and the product just wasn't that great. So we just kind of shelved it and I tried to do a better job of instructing our instructors.

but flash forward to COVID and kind of for selfish reasons, we were, we made the product for VisionQuest. we, for initially, my business was just kind of tumbling to the ground because these facilities started, shutting down our, our, our governor, Pritzker, was very, very aggressive with shutting all facilities down. So we had zero, zero income, zero people coming in.

And we started to panic a little bit and, I started doing zoom classes and I started inviting all these vision clusters and just praying that they wouldn't leave. And, our, our reoccurring revenue started to tumble down and I was getting nervous. So we started putting on these virtual classes and people that would once drive to the facilities now bought smart trainers actually know what we did. We actually dropped off copy trainers and, and, and smart trainers at people's front doors. That's how desperate.

I was to keep my business alive. I have four kids. mean, I can't just like, you know, I'm going to go, you know, work at a whatever mall. so I, we literally dropped trainers off at like 50 people's houses and I said, just join my classes. Don't give up on us yet. We're going to figure this out. and we started putting classes together and we had a ton of people love the experience. The experience wasn't great either. It was actually pretty bad.

Yeah.

I didn't know what they were doing. The communication was all over one another. But a couple of our, our VQers were like, have you ever thought about like making this into a business and actually doing this for people? And I talked to John about it. We got some investors that were like, Hey, I put up money to do something like this. And we started the process of building this product that we thought could do three things. One is help coaches.

connect with their athletes, whether they had facilities or whether they had virtual athletes on a regular basis. The second piece was to really get athletes to connect with each other, especially athletes that were remote or that were virtual or that couldn't come to the facilities anymore. And what we found out is that it really was a special product and we wanted every coach. I'm a huge supporter of coaches. I think coaching is important. think

Everybody needs coaches. I feel like all people should be coached in one way, or form. It's just a faster way to get to where you want to go. And it's more rewarding because you're doing it with somebody. You make far less mistakes. And it's just more meaningful at the end of the day. It's just more meaningful to share in the journey with somebody that's looking out for you. It's like this weird thing that I just totally believe in and love. So we decided to, to, to,

help coaches in the best way we could. And from being a coach myself, since I retired from professional cycling, I didn't have a lot of people helping me build my business. I didn't have a lot of people helping me, do a better job at what I'm doing. in, in fact, I had everybody, every other app, every other thing out there was competing with me. So John and I vowed that our number one goal would be to help coaches and they wouldn't have to pay any money or do anything.

unless they were actually doing something positive with the product. And that could be retaining their athletes more. That could be building more athletes. It could be doing their job better. And velocity was born. And we've been flat out since trying to convince coaches that if you don't communicate with your athlete, if you don't teach them something, if you don't inspire them, if you don't get them together, eventually you will disappear because other people are going to be able to do that.

Thank

So we wanted to give coaches the opportunity to do so for free for nothing. Like you don't have to have a facility. You don't have to have overhead. You don't have to have a parking lot. You don't have to fix trainers. You don't have to do any of the bathroom, make towels, do all this crap that I was doing for the last 20 years at all my facilities and wasting all this money. And they could provide that exact same service with a camera, a microphone and a smart trainer. And that's all they needed. So that's a long story, but

Yeah.

I apologize, I probably bored you to some degree, but that's how Lassie was bored.

No,

That was

a great story.

that's a beautiful story, Robbie. I just want to chime in real quick and just say how aligned we are at Athletica. We support coaches as well. Marjaana and Paul are both coaches on Athletica. We do believe that the AI is kind of coming up to doing a really good job with the programming element, but that doesn't in any way exclude the key role of coaches and the fact that all coaches

offer their experience and their ability to teach their athletes things. And this is where we just love the marriage, the partnership with Velocity. We're just so aligned with that. just, yeah. Kudos to you guys. Love what you're doing. love, Marjaana I love being on the Velocity platform with Coach MJ. I try to join her as much as possible. I haven't made one with you yet, Paul, but I know you got your following as well.

I went to one of her classes, man, because it was like, I just felt like I was getting hit over the head. It was beautiful. It was nice. I can't believe you're under it. Yeah. It was a, was it a 30 over 30? It was. Yeah.

Nope.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, short interval, Short interval, DO2. Yeah, 33 session.

Yeah.

Yeah,

30s over 30s.

that was our biggest 30-30 session and you joined us after your own session.

Thank

Yeah, I wasn't ready for that. was like, yeah, I'm gonna join him, see how it's going. Then all of sudden I felt like I was rocking, just, yeah, I was in the corner.

But I love your story and such a beautiful way to provide support for coaching. Like coaching can be super lonely, but endurance athlete, like being an endurance athlete can be also be super lonely. Like you're somewhere in Revelstoke or, you know, somewhere in Ireland or, know, having a platform to bring people together and doing

You know, the same grueling, abusive workout together is so meaningful and beautiful. So I'm truly enjoying the platform

Thank

like, what do you like about the Velocity platform that's kind of unique to the whole experience? What are some of the things off the top of your head?

Well, before we joined Velocity, I would do these weekly sessions through Google Meet. And then we would go to another platform. I'm not mentioning names, but... And yes, we were chatting and we were connecting with each other, but now everything is on one screen. It's so much easier and it's more of a community. And everybody can talk to each other.

and see each other way better than from a Google Meet. So yeah, I think the community aspect is fun and also the gamification that you guys done and anyone can be the winner. You don't have to like crank out max power. So you can still win. And I know like a lot of our athletes are super competitive.

Yeah,

you win by performing your session to completion, which is kind of so cool, right? How close, how tight can you kind of get to actually performing your session with a level of precision or accuracy? And I love that too, right? And you can just see the learning effect that is immense in terms of the...

the completion and the compliance. It's really, really cool.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, you know, traditionally in all games, the strongest, the fastest win, right? There's very few people can be that person and they get lots of accolades. They win races, you know, everyone celebrates them and that's fine. Whatever. it's nice to be able to work on a skill or comply to the coaches plans or steps and win.

you

without any strength or horsepower at all. But you do have to have a skill and you do have to practice it. And anyone, whether you're, you know, a superstar high VO2 max athlete or not, can, can be competitive. And there's, it's very rare to have that opportunity to do that regardless of what type of athlete you are. And it really does reward consistency and practice. And to me, I want to reward athletes that are consistent in that practice.

The superstar that can dunk the first day comes to basketball practice. Great. Give me the kid who just will just keep showing up and grinding it out and listening and learning and practicing. They need to be supported and they get supported in this environment.

Really, yeah.

John, did you want to add something?

Yeah, no, what I was going to add on that, and I love that you honed in on that is what was important to us is there's a lot of plans. There's a lot of programs out there that focus on developing power and building that system is super important. But on top of that, we designed this platform to develop skills and learn how to shift your gears, to control your power and cadence, to learn how to navigate.

terrain and Robbie talks a lot about in his professional career where maybe he wasn't the strongest person out there. Maybe his power output was lower than some of his competitors, but his ability to be efficient, to have the skills of speed to really perform better out there on race day or event day or even group rides, not getting dropped off the back and.

That was really important to us in developing this platform. And that's what we built the gamification around is really so people can go out and we get these emails all the time, which are great. Someone just wrote in and said, I've written the same 20 mile loop outside for, don't know how many years, but after training indoors on velocity, I was faster and it was easier. And I was just intuitively doing the skills. And those are the stories that we love hearing about, about the platform.

Yeah. And I want to just actually leapfrog off that because I've been, you know, I guess relatively experienced athlete, but I'm still now learning new skills on velocity. it's just, it's using actually like the visual, you know, markers that you have there in terms of where I need to be. Actually the link with Athletica is mint because we've got our

our API kind of goes right through to the velocity. We actually like for this 30 30 second session that we were talking about with Marjaana I've got my zone six right in there dialed, but I've got to actually like there's this connection between my mind and the cadence to deliver that zone six kind of power. again, without the...

the gas gauges that you guys have there, the colorful gas gauges and stuff to know that I'm hitting those plus the gamification of the, know, wanting to hit that and beat all my friends like Cindy Maloney and others. It's just, my brain is picking up. I'm getting better and better at these 30 30s. And it's just super cool. And I can't believe that I'm an old man now and I'm still,

gaining more more excitement from my experience of training. again, that's because of you guys. So thank you so much.

and Paul, you touched on something in the athlete coach relationship is really important. back to those emails, the athlete community around the coach is also really important in MJ. You talked about you're isolated as an endurance athlete, but when you know, you're going to see friendly faces, you know, you're going to be training with people that brings joy. That makes it more fun. But also we hear all the time. I'm guilty of it a hundred percent.

I may have bailed on the six out of eight 30 over thirties, but I know you're there Paul and you're not quitting. know MJ is watching me in my data and I go harder. I perform better when I'm with other people and that's the community vibe that you get when you're all training together.

Totally.

Yeah,

100%.

Bye.

So,

for a person who has not experienced velocity before, how does velocity structure its workouts and training plans? What does it look like in a general sense? Clearly, they are designed for all levels of cyclists from beginners to advanced riders. How are you able to differentiate that?

So, so what we try to do in the workout builder that we built is really, we don't, I guess, encourage coaches to put workouts in ERG mode. we are a train based platform. So athletes actually have to shift their gears to control their power and cadence. need to shift their gears to navigate different trains and grades and targets. But what we really try to do is build these.

workouts based out of FTP where coaches can define, define the targets that an athlete needs to hit on a workout. And they need to control their power or cadence to get into those targets. And they get visual feedback of blue, or red. but we're really teaching athletes how to hit intervals in a way that

the window can be big that they have to get their power into, and then the coach can shrink it down. So they need to learn control over time. and that becomes engaging for the athletes, but they're also learning a skill and that's, why we structured the workouts on the platform in a very specific way, but also the coaches a hundred percent get to drive that. And Robbie, maybe you want to jump in on designing and building good workouts.

Yeah, I think designing and building good workouts that can mimic some of the challenges athletes face in the wild, right? For example, you know, we did a workout the other day where we did a climb. It was called KOMs, right? And you had this climb that these athletes would do. And normally a coach would deliver a workout and say, hey, I want you to ride three 10 minute intervals at 90 % of your FTP. That has been traditionally

how a workout has been sent to an athlete. Or I want you to do five three-minute efforts at over 110 % of your FTP. If you're a decent coach, you'll probably say over because you give them some range to work within. If they're having a great day, maybe it's 135. If they're not having a great day, maybe it's 115. So you want to allow flex when you're coaching an athlete, depending on how the day they're having. If they're having a great day, they can push a little bit more. And some days you want them to be real tight.

I don't want them to have flex because I'm not trying to do a really hard effort. I want them to be at a certain effort because I want this physiological stimulus and I want it to be right. So you can still do all of that on the platform. But now think about making that a little bit more interesting in the fact that you can teach them skills. So now instead of a three by 10 where they do 90 % of their threshold, maybe they do three by 10 but it's broken up into two minute chunks where there's some

you

there's some gradient changes, like you're doing a 10 minute climb. And these gradient changes are forcing the athlete to keep, you want them to keep this power the same and their cadence the same. That's much more challenging than just getting on a trainer and riding for 10 minutes at a given output. But it's much more realistic, right? Cause if you're out on the road and you're doing a 10 minute hard effort, there's going to be variations in terrain. You're going to have things you have to deal with.

So why not work on those skills indoors if you're gonna do them indoors, right? It's probably best to do it outdoors, but a lot of times we can't train outdoors, so we can create this environment indoors that's very similar to that. But now we can say, as soon as you get over the top of this hill, I want you to keep the power on for at least 15 seconds at 90 % of your threshold, so you can practice kicking it over the top, getting your speed up before you let off. And you can reward people that can actually do that at the end of the 10 minute effort.

you

creating points if they can keep their cadence up and their power up on the downhill. This sounds simple to the four of us because we're racers, we're riders, we do this all the time, but you take a new athlete and that's like a mind blow if you can teach them that. Cause when they get out on the road and they actually kick it over the top and they keep their speed up, they're going so much faster, so much quicker. And the reason why that John got that emo about that loop is because they learned to do that skill indoors with you.

Yep.

And not only do they learn the skill by basically doing it on the computer and being in the right ranges, but you're telling them why. You have a coach now that can tell them what to do in this situation, the reason why it's good. And if you really want to help an athlete get better, you not only give them the skills and the workouts that are going to make them better, but in the moment you're telling them the reasons why. You can educate them on why this is important.

you

So now you have this massive trifecta happening, right? They're learning a lot about the reasons why they're doing it. You're creating these stimulus is on the computer that allow them to really know where they should be. And you can repeat it five or six times in a row. You might get one chance to do that the entire week. If you hit the climate, the right intensity, whatever. Now I can mimic this four times, three times right in a row. And I will promise you that sort of repetition with the education, the skill and all that put together is 10 times better.

than me sending John a three by 10 at sweet spot. And that is why the program has horsepower and value. And if all the coaches realized, well, the coaches who have experience and actually know how, know the reasons why they're doing what they're doing, have a better time on this platform because they can communicate all these stories and these ideas. we haven't even got to motivation. We haven't gotten to other athletes, kind of looking at each other and, and, and getting motivated by picking their friends who they want to work out with.

Mm-hmm.

There's a whole bunch more than that, but as it relates to structuring workouts, that's the value.

That's so powerful. We are all about educating our athletes too. Prof and I, try to educate every single session we do. We have a little mini lesson at some point and explain why we're doing this and how to do it. It's such a one to many.

education, you're not just working with one athlete because it's time consuming, but if you have, if you're a coach and you have several athletes coming the same time, you're educating all of them in the same time. It's so powerful. I love that.

Now you

can share that link to someone who can't make it to the workout. Like, thing about it is once you have that down, now you can take that link and go, this person really needs, they have a hilly race coming up, they're gonna really have to do this type of workout, I'll just drop this in there and now they can just do it with me. It's not as great as seeing them, I get it, I mean, but the power of the recordings are massive.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Absolutely. And I can't emphasize enough like what you said, teaching how to crest the hill and getting that free speed downhill. It goes in any sport like I just did, cross-country skiing. this was home to me when I was a kid. You can't stop your effort.

At the top of the hill, have to keep going until you're gliding down the hill. And the same with cycling. So that's an amazing way to teach that to especially new cyclists.

become reliant on to hit my target, it all of sudden vanishes. It's gone. It disappears. Like, what the? It's like, and it's like, so like, okay, okay, interesting. And like for the last, and then it kind of comes back on the last five seconds, right? So you sort of see where you are, right? But I have no idea. I'm completely blind, but it's like, now I get the point. the point is intensity control.

Ha ha ha.

I've got to be able to, because I'm not gonna get that gas gauge when I'm actually out in the wilderness or whatever doing my actual session. It's important that my mind locks in on what that power is. so it's like that control between my mind and the the external load, the external cycling power that I'm trying to produce.

I couldn't believe it. Again, another massive teaching moment for me that, you know, I'm so-called experienced prof, right? Like, I'm like, this is incredible. So yeah, it was just, that was just, that was wild, that experience. And, and I got, and the cool thing is I got better and better as, as I, as I went and went along in the session, right? And Jay was saying, yeah, you prof, you did okay. You did, you got it. You, learned. I'm, you can teach an old dog a new trick.

You

Hahaha!

Yeah.

I have a

junior cyclist who has been showing up pretty much every week to my 30 thirties and she either spins at 120 or mashes at 50 and outdoor riding. And she's been gradually and gradually learning to pace herself with pedaling, different pedaling and different shifting. And, last night and our, know, she won the competition because she was, starting to understand.

the skill of changing gears and the skill of having different cadences for different purposes. And it's so cool to watch that process.

So Velocity emphasizes the kind of live instruction from the instructor with two-way video, real-time data feedback. How does this enhance the training experience compared to other virtual cycling platforms? This is a chance to kind of differentiate yourselves a little bit.

It's a single software solution. So it's not like what a number of people are trying to do, cobbling together Zwift plus a different platform and Zoom and whatnot. It's just a single integrated, you have two-way audio video, you can friend other athletes, you can put people you're looking forward to seeing or like athletes.

And your coach is in the center with instructions. So you're going to hear your coach. Your coach sees you in everybody's data is fully integrated. So the coach is able to see all of their athletes. They're able to see their performance, the athletes performance data, but also their position and, able to give feedback on.

Hey, Rachel, I need you to shift one gear lower, make it a little bit harder. You're going to push your power up, bring your cadence down. You can give performance feedback like that. Or, Hey, Steve, can you soften your shoulders? It's not a pogo stick. Let's bring those elbows in a little bit and get a little more comfortable on there. And so there's that interaction and that really high degree of real time feedback. And Paul, you mentioned it, your athlete last night who's been struggling with cadence and they nailed it in the moment. And for you.

to share that with your athlete and coach them and see all that feedback you've been giving them and the athlete to feel validated in real time from you, her coach, as well as her other athletes. And other athletes, we've seen that they love cheering each other on, which is really great. And when you friend someone on our platform, you can see their high level. You can see whether they're doing the workout correctly, the way the coach has designed it.

Mm-hmm.

You don't see raw power numbers, but what that does is it enables athletes to kind of celebrate each other as they do well on the platform and know that the other athletes are seeing you when you're doing it right, which is a motivator on the platform. And we sort of, talk a lot about the community aspect, like I just was doing, and it is very important. And those are a lot of the sort of softer side of everything.

But we're also seeing huge performance gains on the platform. Robbie can talk to this. He's seeing people having their best FTPs ever, their best 20 minute, 10 minute, five minute power. And so there is a lot of these softer community, social, real time interaction and education. But we're also seeing all of the skill development and power and performance improvement.

Yeah.

Yeah,

I'll follow that up with again, we're really excited about what this does for coaches. It's really about giving the coaches the ability to, share their knowledge. and as, as well as, I mean, selfishly our camps, like to talk about stuff they want to sell, like training camps and, and clothing and events and different things like that. get a captured audience that are training, before and after class and even during class.

the excitement about the Stubborn coaches is really a growth in the coaches and the ability to share knowledge with the players. And I think about mean, it's so much more professional-based stuff. It's a lot more sophisticated stuff than it like. So it's a lot more legal-like. This is a different piece of the program. It's a much more professional-based program.

you know, talking about the other things that your, that your coaching business has. mean, one beautiful thing that has happened with the vision quest coaching business is our camps have filled up in like seconds. mean, everybody on this platform that's virtual wants to hang out together. They want to go somewhere and train like live with the people that they see virtually all the time. And it's been unbelievable for that, for us. So selfishly it's been, it's been terrific.

Hmm.

So we are coaching all the key sessions that come with Athletica plan. we got the 30-30s, we have strength endurance work, we have race pace. So all your key workouts will be guided.

live sessions and recorded and then played with replay. So they are all available for you. And I think Prof will probably talk more about the education part, but my hope is to build the community and help every athletic athletes to understand why they are doing the key sessions and how to do them.

I would also add MJ, don't forget about the tests that we've done on there as well. and Paul, I know you were liking, you were telling me that you like the, like the power profile test.

Yeah,

was like the best, it was the most enjoyable test I've ever done is the one on, you know, and I hate doing tests and it was, you know, on velocity with you, with you too, it was, it was awesome.

Yeah, it was kind of cool. again, John and Robbie, I know you're talking the lingo of FTP. We use critical power. And again, you guys are awesome. You can totally adapt to critical power. It's ultimately, we've learned from some of the world experts, they're ultimately the same sort of thing. But yeah, critical power is the key thing that we sort of follow. So we want to actually determine what that critical power curve is.

And in this one test that we have, we host on Velocity, you can rock up and do that test. And then you've got your critical power. It's kind of established. It is great to also couple that with the 20-minute all-out, which is the FTP test, which we also have on Velocity. And again, if you do that testing week, you'll come across those anyway. So you can now do those on Velocity.

The other cool thing that I hope I don't mind saying, John and Robbie, we've got in the pipeline is, and along the, the, the thread of, you know, breakout workouts, we're working towards having our workout reserve, our proprietary workout reserve embedded within

Velocity. And this is no easy feat for the developers that are putting this on. We do have this, of course, on the Garmin app. it's really now, it's in the future. We're going to actually have the workout reserve number available on Velocity, and probably for MJ's view as well, so she can kind of call out those breakout workouts or breakthrough workouts. Remember, when your workout reserve

hits 0 % or goes negative, you've hit a new maximal mean power, which is kind cool. And you can actually see that live just like you can with our Garmin app.

Yeah, and I-

Very

close. There's no engineers on the call, so I can make development promises in their absence.

Ha!

Thank you, John.

Thank you for pushing.

But we are very, very close. So that'll be available imminently.

Amazing.

Woof woof.

But

I can't highlight enough how important it is for a coach to see their athletes in a hard session. Because I remember a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago, Prav had been back country skiing the day before and he rocks up to the 30-30 session pretty fatigued. So because in Athletica, we have individualized plans, so not everybody's...

Shocker.

not everybody has the exact same 30-30 session for that day. So when I see somebody's getting close to their limit, I can ask them to, okay, you rest the next 30 and then pick it up again, or maybe today is a good time for you to call it and then just spin for cooldown. So I can't highlight enough how

useful it is to actually see the athlete.

Yeah,

that is just such a good call, MJ. And it's like, it is true coaching, because again, in the typical online world of coaching, you, you you here's your blanket prescription, right, whatever it might be. And the typical online coach has no idea really, your individual, the athletes individual readiness to perform that session. And we all know we've all

gone up to a session and been completely ready or over ready. And we've also all been to the back country ski condition, right? Where it's like, you are just ratchets, pardon the language, but it's like, you just cannot, there's nothing, you just cannot dig in at all, right? And like, yeah, you could totally tell MJ, like from, not just from the metrics, but from looking at me. And then you coached me and it was perfect. You told me, just go every...

Yeah.

Yeah.

go every second one and I was still able to participate in the experience, which was cool.

So John and Robbie, what's next for Velocity? Are there any upcoming features or improvements in the pipeline?

I'll just give them one, one cool one. you know, sometimes people do a class, right? They have their computers over here and then they get on their bicycle and then I'll say, Hey, you know, adjust your FTP up or I'll say, you know, so just crazy Paul that you just mentioned, adjusting workouts in, in workout. I always have, and this is just something I do. People do a blind two minutes at their critical power or FTP early in the ride.

to get an idea of how their perceived exertion lines up with how they feel that day. And if their perceived exertion is I'm at FTP, they're at, or critical power and they're at 85%, they're not having a good day. Or if they're at 110%, they're having a great day. So early on we use blind to help people learn if they're strong or weak for that day. So when you came back from back country skiing, you might've thought you were at critical power, but you were only at 85%. So you should have known right there that I'm toast. So when that happens, I'll say, Hey Paul,

you might want to reduce your critical power by 10 % today. You're just not there and you want to listen, you want to have fun, you want to enjoy the class, but you don't want to go too deep here because you you over train and you'll have a negative effect. So Paul has to get up, go hit his FTP down and then get back on his bicycle. It's a long way to say that we have a companion app now. So your phone can control everything on the screen and you can do all this cool stuff with your phone. You can give kudos, you can do different things to enhance the social element as well.

and it's all done from your phone, so you never have to get up and adjust things. You can do your Aero stuff from the phone. that is, it's actually out. We just don't have it out for everybody right now, because we're just like anything, you sometimes you have to fine tune things a little bit and experiment.

Totally,

John or Robbie, do you want to add anything else before we wrap things up today?

I just want to say thank you for everyone that gives us a shot. We have a good idea, but we're definitely not, you know, we have a lot to learn. I love feedback from great companies like Athletica that can help us make our product better. There is a big space here. And I think collectively as coaches and as users of this technology can come together and just keep making it better. And we appreciate.

the people that take a chance in creating that human engagement. we just thank you more than anything.

Yeah, yeah, the thanks right back to you, Robbie and John and your team, just for your innovation and your vision and pushing through the classic entrepreneurs fight there, Robbie, when you were describing your story right back from the beginning. I just love it. think we all relate at Athletica to the fight. And again, love, just want to continue.

you know, this journey with you guys, with this partnership. We're super stoked with it and yeah, look forward to continuing to watch us grow together in the future.

It does.

Thanks for

exploring the path to peak performance with us today on the Athletes Compass podcast. When you subscribe, you'll ensure you're always tuned in for your next journey into endurance mindset and performance. And when you share this episode with a friend, teammate, or a coach, you'll be helping them discover new ways to level up their training in life. Take a moment now, subscribe, share, and let's keep navigating this endurance adventure together.

For more information or to schedule a consultation with Paul, Marjaana or me, check the links in the show notes. For John Nichols, Robbie Ventura, Marjaana Rakai and Dr. Paul Laursen I'm Paul Warloski and this has been the Athletes Compass Podcast. Thanks for listening.