When the plan exceeds the athlete's real time budget

The mismatch

The most common reason an athlete misses plan adherence is not laziness or fitness: it is that the plan was written for hours the athlete does not actually have. A "12 hour week" with a full-time job, family, and commute is aspirational. The real budget is often 8 to 10.

The Hub does not enforce a particular volume; the plan config holds whatever you wrote. The fix is to bring the plan in line with reality.

How to find the real time budget

Ask the athlete:

• Weekday training windows: typical morning, lunch, evening slots. How many minutes each? How many days per week is each window actually free?
• Weekend windows: how many hours, both days, with what family / work constraints?
• Recovery margin: how much non-training time around each session for warm-up, shower, eating, transit?
• Travel weeks per month: typical disruption.

Sum across a typical week. Subtract 1 to 2 hours for the margin (life happens). That is the real time budget.

How to scale the plan

If the plan calls for 12 hours and the budget is 9, you do not just cut everything by 25 percent. You decide what matters:

Keep

• One long session per discipline per week. Long ride, long run, long swim. These drive aerobic adaptation more than the mid-week sessions.
• One quality intensity session per discipline per week. Threshold or VO2 work. The hardest sessions of the week.
• Brick training at appropriate moments in the build.

Cut or compress

• Mid-week easy aerobic sessions that exist mainly to hit volume. Compress two 45-minute easy rides into one longer commute on the bike if commute is an option.
• Strength sessions can compress to 2 x 30 minutes with focused exercises, instead of 3 x 45 minutes.
• Multiple short swims can compress to fewer longer swims if pool access dictates.

Reframe expectations

• A 9-hour plan can still produce a competent 70.3. It cannot produce a competitive Kona-qualifier 70.3 for most athletes. The result has to match the inputs.
• Some race goals require more hours. Be honest about that with the athlete; they can choose between adjusting the goal and freeing up more time.

Updating the Hub

1. Edit the individual MacrocyclePlan config_json to reduce weekly targets per discipline.
2. Drop the lowest-value sessions from each week (the easy aerobic fillers).
3. Re-deploy if this is a team template change for an entire squad.

Adherence vs plan in the Hub

The macrocycle does not auto-compute adherence today (the roadmap-flagged "low adherence" view does not exist yet). The athlete dashboard shows recent volume which lets you eyeball it. Compare to planned weekly volume in the macro config.

What you do NOT do

• Write a plan for the hours you wish the athlete had. This is the most common coaching mistake. The athlete fails to adhere, gets demoralised, and quits.
• Apologise for cutting volume. A 9-hour plan executed fully outperforms a 12-hour plan executed at 70 percent.

See also: Macrocycle plan basics, Editing a deployed plan, Listing macrocycle plans.