I Lift Four Times a Week and Have No Idea What I Benched Last Monday

I’m building the strength tracker I actually want. For myself first. Documenting the whole thing here.

I am doing Ironman 70.3 North Carolina in October. I lift four times a week. I’ve done countless races.

I have no idea what I bench pressed last Monday.

Not because I forgot but because I never wrote it down. I open three apps to figure out what I’m doing on a given day. TrainingPeaks tells me about the bike my plan has next. Runna tells me what run is next. MyFitnessPal asks me what I ate. None of them know that I also lifted yesterday. None of them know that lifting four times a week while training for a 70.3 is a tightrope between getting stronger and getting hurt.

So here’s what I actually do: I make it up.

I show up at the gym Monday and try to remember what made me feel great last week. I do five sets of something. I leave. Next morning I’m back, hoping I’m slightly stronger than the version of me from the previous day who is now, conveniently, unverifiable.

This is not how a serious person trains. And yet, when I look around the gym, I’m pretty sure most of the people there are in a similar boat. With the ‘hybrid athlete’ identity exploding: triathletes who lift, lifters who race. The tools haven’t caught up. So I’ve decided to build the tool I want.

There is not a working name but the idea is simple: one place that knows about everything I’m doing — strength, endurance, nutrition, recovery — and helps me make better decisions because it has the context. The first feature, the wedge, is a strength tracker that survives a heavy triathlon training block. Fast to log between sets. Aware that I have a long ride Sunday. Doesn’t pretend lifting and running are the same problem.

I’m not building a Hevy clone. Hevy is great (from what I hear). So is Strong. They just don’t know I’m training for a 70.3. I’m not building a TrainingPeaks competitor either — TrainingPeaks owns triathlon, but it doesn’t care that I’m under a barbell four times a week. I’m building the bridge between those worlds, for the kind of athlete that, until pretty recently, didn’t really exist as a category.

For now, me. I’m the only user, and that’s the point. I want to ship something I’ll use on a given Friday morning when I’m trying to figure out whether I can lift today without wrecking tomorrow’s long run. If it works for me, I’ll think about whether it should work for anyone else.

If you’ve read this far and thought “yeah, same” — then I’m probably building this for you too. But I’m not going to pretend to know that yet.

Two reasons. The first is accountability. I’m much more likely to ship something if even one person knows I said I would. The second is documenting the build is its own kind of creative work, and I’ve been missing that in my life.

I’ll post here roughly weekly. Some posts will be technical (Garmin syncs, exercise databases, the weird edge cases of parsing a training plan). Some will be reflective (what I got wrong, what surprised me). Some will just be screenshots and bad design experiments. The 70.3 is in October. I want a working V1 in my own hands before I get on the start line.

Let’s do it.

-Matt