Three Years, Many Setbacks, One Question Worth Asking: What Are You Capable Of?

Coach Megan // Athlete Spotlight

Every so often an athlete relationship reaches a point where you have to stop and just look back at the whole arc of it — not the next workout, not the next race, but the whole three years laid out end to end. This is one of those posts.

Big goals are even sweeter after setbacks

I actually knew Aaron before he was ever my athlete. Long before triathlon ever entered the picture, he was an athlete who came to a regular open water swim I coached in Berkeley, CA. So when he came to me in June of 2023 wanting to make a change, it wasn't a cold start — it was someone I already knew and trusted, ready to level up.

Aaron had completed a solid group program that just hadn't quite checked every box for what he needed — especially with everything tennis adds into the mix. No bike fit. No real nutrition coaching. Zero one-on-one time. Nothing dramatic, just a lot of gaps for someone who was ready to get serious. He already knew me, already trusted me, and loved the vibe of the athletes I coach, so he was ready to move out of a group program and into something built specifically around him.

He'd already done one half-Ironman in Santa Cruz, before we ever started working together — so he knew what the distance took. What he wanted now was individual, tailored coaching, and the chance to find out how far it could take him. Not a specific finish time. Not a Kona slot. Just the honest question underneath almost every endurance athlete's first ask — what do I actually have in me?

Three years, five Ironman 70.3s (four of them with TMT Coaching), one full Ironman, an emergency appendectomy, a freak ping pong accident, final-stage hallux rigidus, and — I still can't quite believe I'm typing this — getting hit by a car later on, and we have an answer. He had a lot more in him than anyone would have believed.

Teammates making everything better

The Start: Building Something Built Around Him

Because I already knew Aaron from open water, I also already knew this wasn't going to be a simple "add more volume" job. Aaron's very first training block with me was a bike-focused FTP build in June 2023, and if you'd told either of us then how much of this story would end up being written on two wheels, I'm not sure we'd have believed you.

Here's the part people don't expect: Aaron came in essentially uninjured. No lingering issue to train around, no old flare-up to manage. What he came in with instead was a very specific set of needs — tennis, which he wasn't about to give up (and we would never ask him to!), and a real hunger for the kind of individualized attention a group program just can't offer. So instead of building around a limitation, we built around a person: real one-on-one attention, an actual bike fit, and — for the first time — real coaching on fueling and nutrition, which would end up mattering more than either of us realized at the time.

We built the plan around his life. Careful, deliberate run-volume increases because — and I told him this early on — adding running is the riskiest way to build fitness, and it will find your weak links faster than anything else. A lot of "swing days" and permission to swap a run for a bike when his body was asking for it.

By December 2023, six months in, he raced his first Ironman 70.3 with TMT.

The Middle: Building It Back, Again and Again

If there's one throughline in Aaron's TrainingPeaks file, it's this: he never stayed down long, and he never once treated a setback as a reason to quit — even when his body seemed to be actively testing that theory.

Early 2024 brought an emergency appendectomy — about as out-of-nowhere as setbacks get, no training error to point to, just a sudden trip to the hospital. He was back running within weeks, joking about "post-surgery" mile splits that still weren't bad. By May 2024 he raced his second 70.3 with me (third overall, counting Santa Cruz).

Somewhere in that same stretch came a freak ping pong accident — yes, really — that left him with a complete AC joint separation, and final-stage hallux rigidus showed up in a foot that had never given him trouble before. None of it was on the training plan. All of it showed up in his body, and he kept training anyway. By October 2024, less than a year and a half after we started working together, he crossed the finish line of a full-distance Ironman — at a time so good, so far above his own target, that it was better than he'd let himself dream. And he had fun doing it.

His bike numbers tell the quiet version of this story better than any race report could. The power he was holding on our benchmark long rides climbed steadily, year over year — and so did his efficiency, meaning he wasn't just getting stronger, he was getting a bigger aerobic engine underneath that strength. That's the boring, unglamorous kind of progress that never shows up in a highlight reel, and it's exactly the kind that actually lasts.

Meanwhile, that shoulder needed real ongoing attention — a complete AC separation isn't something you just stretch away. Good rehab work, smart programming, and the occasional flare-up after tennis (which, for the record, I was never going to be the coach who told Aaron to give up tennis — some things are non-negotiable for a person's happiness, and a coach who doesn't understand that isn't doing their job). We managed it in real time, together, paying attention to it week by week rather than expecting one fix to make it disappear. These days that shoulder is about as good as it's ever been — he's back on the ping pong table, this time in real shoes instead of flip-flops.

The best races are together

The Setback Nobody Trains For

Then in June 2025, Aaron was hit by a car.

I want to sit with that for a second, because it's different from almost every other setback in this sport. Overtraining, you can see coming. A stress fracture, you can usually trace back to a training error. Getting hit by a car has nothing to do with fitness, discipline, or preparation. It's just life, arriving without an invitation, and it took his running down to almost nothing for a month while we waited on imaging and answers.

What happened next is the part of Aaron's story I'm proudest of, honestly.

He didn't disappear. He pivoted. Running wasn't available to him, so the bike became his outlet — not as a consolation prize, but as a genuine place to keep building. Through the back half of 2025, while he was doing physical therapy and slowly, carefully reintroducing walk-run intervals, his bike fitness didn't just hold — it kept climbing. By his December 2025 race, five months removed from a month where he could barely run at all, he posted his best-ever bike split — by more than ten minutes. Let that sink in.

The run came back too, on its own timeline, the way these things do. Slower than either of us wanted, at first — walk-runs, track sessions where his pace didn't match his effort, honest messages that just said things weren't right yet. And then, gradually, it wasn't slower anymore. By his most recent 70.3 this July, he crossed the run course close to his pre-injury best.

From struggling to walk without a limp — unable to run, unable to cross his legs, unable to lift that leg above ninety degrees — to a sub-10-minute-mile half marathon split, in about thirteen months, after being hit by a car. I don't have a tidy inspirational line for that. It's just true, and it's remarkable.

What This Was Actually About

Here's the thing about coaching someone for three years: you stop measuring the relationship in watts and minutes-per-mile pretty quickly. You start measuring it in the way someone talks to themselves when things go sideways. In whether they reach out at 10pm when a workout scares them, or go quiet. In whether a setback becomes a story about their limits, or just becomes Tuesday.

Aaron never let it become a story about his limits. Not the appendectomy, not the ping pong accident, not the hallux rigidus, not getting hit by a car a month before a goal race. Every single time, the plan was some version of: okay, what can we work with right now, and where does that take us.

If you ask Aaron what actually moved the needle most over these three years, he won't point to a power number. He'll point to two things: what felt like endless, almost invincible Zone 2 work building toward IMCA, and finally, actually mastering his fueling and preparation. He'll tell you racing feels different now — the same output takes less effort, comes with less pain, and somewhere along the way, races stopped being something to survive and started being something he genuinely enjoys.

Recently, Aaron let me know he's ready to step away from long course triathlon — not because anything went wrong, but because, in his words:

"This isn't because I'm unhappy in any way with our work together. We achieved exactly what I wanted over these few years. When I started with you, I wanted to see what I was capable of. Together we accomplished that and more. I couldn't have reached this point without your guidance."

That right there is the whole job, said back to me better than I could ever describe it myself.

He also said this, and I'm going to let it close out this post because I don't think I can improve on it:

"I don't see this as an ending at all. I see it as the beginning of a different chapter, and I know when I'm ready for another big triathlon goal, you'll be the first person I call."

The Actual Takeaway

If you're reading this because you're staring down your own version of Aaron's starting line — a body that doesn't always cooperate, a fear that something outside your control could take it all away — here's what three years of Aaron's data and a stack of his messages taught me, again:

Fitness isn't a straight line, and it was never supposed to be. The athletes who go the furthest aren't the ones who avoid setbacks. They're the ones who keep asking the next question instead of writing the final one. What can we work with right now? That's it. That's the whole approach.

Aaron came to us wanting to know what he was capable of. Turns out the answer was never really about watts or paces. It was about what happens after the appendectomy, after the ping pong table, after the car accident, after the flare-up — whether you show back up and ask the next question.

He always did.

Can't wait for that call, Aaron.

Coach Megan is the founder of TMT Coaching — The Mindful Triathlete. TMT offers personalized endurance coaching for athletes of all levels, from first sprint triathlon to Ironman, built around real bodies and real lives, not imaginary ones. Ready to find out what you're capable of? Book a free athlete consult and let's talk.