Slow Down to Speed Up - Project GWR Week 1
Hi everyone, and welcome to the first week of the Great World Race Project. To get us started I want to share why Ingrid and I stopped all of our cardio training to get ready for seven marathons in seven days. That sounds backwards. It wasn't. In this video I explain what happened when we stopped, why our injuries finally healed, and the one question I want you to answer before we set our next health and wellbeing goals.
Watch time = 3 minutes. Worksheet below.
Slow Down to Speed Up
A couple of years ago Ingrid tripped in an airport coming home from a swim camp and badly sprained her ankle. Bone bruise, torn ligaments, some nerve damage. She spent the next two years trying to come back, and every time she got close, she reinjured it.
I was in my own version of the same thing. I was rebuilding my business after COVID, which meant living in airports and hotel rooms, training whenever I could find a gap, and slowly getting less healthy the harder I worked.
So we stopped. She stopped swimming. I stopped swimming, biking and running. All of it.
And we started to heal.
Here is the mechanism, because this is the part that surprises people. Connective tissue does not repair on the same schedule as muscle. When you load a tendon or a ligament, you trigger collagen synthesis and collagen breakdown at the same time, and breakdown runs ahead of synthesis for roughly the first 24 hours. Your net gain only shows up somewhere around 36 to 72 hours later. If you reload that tissue before the window closes, you spend month after month sitting at a small net loss, which is exactly how an ankle stays injured for two years while you train hard every week.
Training was never Ingrid's problem. The missing recovery between the training was the problem.
There was a second layer for me. Constant travel keeps your sympathetic nervous system elevated, disrupts your sleep timing, and raises your circulating cortisol, and when you add hard training on top of that, your body reads it all as one continuous load. When you remove one large stressor, the whole system gets room to recover.
There is a cost to slowing down. We lost aerobic fitness, and by January 2026 my VO2 max read 31.6, which for a former competitive athlete is a warning light. We made that trade on purpose. Aerobic fitness is the thing you know how to rebuild, and structural capacity is the thing you cannot shortcut, so we gave up the first to restore the second. Lowering our total stress load also freed up the energy we needed to do the rebuilding when the time came. This month my VO2 max reads 43.
Stress plus rest equals growth. Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness wrote that line in Peak Performance, and most of us are fluent in the first term and skip the second.
About three months into slowing down, we were at dinner and Ingrid said she wanted to do something so hard that finishing it would prove she could do anything. I went upstairs, emailed my buddy who runs the Great World Race, and told him we were coming. That moment was only available because we had made space for it.
So before we talk about goals, and we will, I want you to do something smaller.
Your 1% this week: Name your current state and trajectory out loud. Not where you want to be. Where you are actually heading if nothing changes. Write one sentence. If the answer is good, keep going. If it needs a correction, you have just done the hardest part, which is building your awareness. Once you have that reality check, we can set the right course.
