Vätternrundan 2026 has been on the calendar for months. 315 kilometers around Lake Vättern is a goal that demands a real build, and I have always known this year would require a proper preparation block to get there in good shape.

What I did not plan for was the heart issues that derailed the start of the year.

After weeks of reduced activity and a slow, careful return through February, I found myself in an uncomfortable position. The goal was still real. The timeline had not changed. But the way I had always approached training for a big event — build the plan, execute the plan, adjust when necessary — no longer felt right. Pushing through had already cost me once. I was not interested in making that mistake again.

The challenge was finding a way to pursue a serious goal while staying genuinely responsive to what was happening in my body. Those two things are harder to hold together than they sound.

The Problem With Rigid Plans

For most of my training history, I have worked with structured plans. Set the target, map out the weeks, follow the prescription. That approach works well when life is predictable and your health is stable. It starts to break down when neither of those things is true.

A comeback build after a health setback is not a stable situation. Some weeks are fine. Others fall apart because of poor sleep, travel, work pressure, or a recovery signal that simply does not look right. In those moments, a rigid plan becomes a liability. You either ignore the signal and push through — which is exactly how you end up in trouble — or you deviate from the plan and spend mental energy trying to figure out how to rebalance without losing the thread.

What I needed was not a better plan. I needed a better way to make decisions at the point where the plan met reality.

A Different Kind of Decision Support

When I built PacePartner, I wrote about the gap I was trying to close — the space between having good data in Intervals.icu and knowing what to actually do with it on a given day. Using it through this comeback has made that gap feel more concrete than ever.

The thing that matters most is not any individual feature. It is the fact that PacePartner already knows the context. My HRV trend, my current ATL and CTL, what is on the calendar, what I have done recently. When I open a conversation, I do not have to explain the situation. I can just ask the question I actually have.

That changes what the tool feels like to use. It is less like querying a system and more like thinking out loud with something that already understands where you are.

What This Looks Like in Practice

There have been two situations that capture it well.

The first was a morning after poor sleep. My readiness check did not look right — recovery was not where it needed to be for the threshold session I had planned. On a normal day I might have talked myself into doing it anyway, convinced myself the data was an outlier, and pushed through. Instead I asked PacePartner whether the session made sense given where I was. It confirmed the signals were not good and suggested a short recovery ride instead. That was the right call. The session could wait. Protecting the week was more important than hitting the planned interval.

The second was a travel situation. I arrived late at a hotel, tired, with no practical way to get on a bike. The planned workout was a ride. I needed to replace it with a run. In the past that would have meant pulling up Intervals, manually figuring out what an equivalent run might look like in terms of duration and effort, and making a judgment call about whether it still served the week’s purpose. Instead I had a quick conversation, got a replacement workout that made sense for the day and the broader context, and was done with the decision in a few minutes. No mental overhead. No second-guessing.

Both of those feel small in isolation. But those are exactly the moments where a comeback build either holds together or quietly starts to unravel. Getting the small decisions right, consistently, is what makes the difference over a twelve-week block.

The Shift That Matters

Coming back from a health setback forces a kind of intentionality that is easy to skip when you are healthy and things are going well. You can no longer afford to ignore signals, override fatigue, or default to “more is better” when in doubt. Every decision carries a bit more weight.

That has actually changed how I think about training in a way that will probably stick beyond this year. The goal is not to execute a plan. The goal is to arrive at the start line in the best possible condition — which means making good decisions at every fork, not just following a script.

PacePartner fits that way of thinking. It is not a coach. It is not a black box that tells me what to do. It is a tool that reduces the friction of making a sensible call when the situation is ambiguous. That is most of what self-coached training actually requires.

Where Things Stand Now

It is mid-March. Vätternrundan is in June. The build is early, and the priority right now is staying consistent without overcooking the recovery that still feels fragile. The goal for this year is not a time target or a performance breakthrough. It is to arrive at the start line healthy, ride 315 kilometers well, and finish strong.

After the year this has been, that is enough.

The training blocks ahead will have messy weeks. Travel, disrupted sleep, work pressure — all of that will keep happening. What has changed is that I have a better way of navigating those moments when they arrive. Not by ignoring them. Not by grinding through them. By making a slightly better decision, a little more quickly, than I would have otherwise.

That is the whole thing, really. Small decisions, made consistently, over a long enough period. That is how you get to the start line.

Try It Yourself

If any of this sounds familiar — training around a big goal while life keeps getting in the way — give it a try. It is free and there is no credit card required.

→ pacepartner.app

It connects to your Intervals.icu account through OAuth, so setup takes a couple of minutes. From there you can start asking it the kinds of questions that usually require a spreadsheet, a coach, or just too much mental energy at the end of a long day.

I am still building it in the open and genuinely want to hear what works and what does not. If you give it a go, let me know what you think.