The best coaches and athletes remain adaptable and pragmatic, are quick to acknowledge mistakes and straying off track, and fast to course correct toward the goal and mission. Today, it is my turn to course correct, and I would like to share.

A few months ago I led the charge on excitedly introducing InsideTracker to the Purple Patch community. As an organization, we had two sides to the partnership. The primary, and vastly most important, was leveraging the service to help you - the Purple Patch athletes - make health and performance-focused improvements. The other was more commercial, introducing InsideTracker as our first sponsor of the podcast, and promoting to the broader listeners and followers of our education. We engaged with the relationship with vigor, as the coach in me really saw the potential to enhance our focus around habits, but also gain meaningful and tangible results.  I was equally excited with the commitments and excitement from the team at InsideTracker who were vocal in their hope to become a resource of support and education for Purple Patch athletes on an ongoing basis. In our excitement, we came out hot and heavy in a promotion lens to the broader Purple Patch listeners, but went on to do the same to our own athletes. 

In reflection, I feel like it likely seemed like just a hot and strong sell to you folks. Something I - and the whole Purple Patch team - have always committed to avoid doing. If we could go back in time, we would have rolled InsideTracker out to our athletes in a different manner that aligned with our methodology: anchored around education rather than promotion.

Though the launch was imperfect, in this story there is a bright note, and that is the success we have already seen with the project amongst our athletes. I strongly believe that leveraging aspects such as biometrics is most useful when there are clear applications of these findings via coaching. My hypothesis, shared by InsideTracker, was that utilization of the program, combined with Purple Patch education and coaching, would yield meaningful performance gains.  Well, the initial results are in for those athletes who did choose to go on the journey.  I won’t rehash with depth here, but I suggest you look through the results and the process in this outward facing Blog. There are clear and objective positive improvements in average biomarkers from our athletes. Let’s make a blanket statement of 25% improvement across many key performance metrics.  That’s strong, and exciting.