Thirty of thirty nine signals showed a change point, and a long noisy record searched backwards will nearly always give you one. What makes this real is several independent domains leaving home in one window and never coming back.
Swimming gives athletes the biological passport Holmer describes — and the pool is its laboratory.
His decisive point is that the signal is not an abnormal number but a body that has stepped away from its own baseline coherently and durably. Here that was HRV more than halved (179 to 91 ms on the daytime measure), resting heart rate up from 44 to 49, sleep and walking capacity sliding in the same cluster — all unfolding four to six months before the event, in a heart already carrying an enlarged ventricle, valve disease, and an old infarct.
The pool offers one of the closest things to laboratory conditions in sport: same lane, same length, same temperature, no wind or gradient. A swimmer who holds 30 strokes per 50 at 1:15 for two seasons and then needs 34 for the same speed has stepped away from their own baseline in exactly the way this post describes. The pace clock and the stroke count are the passport; the wearable just automates the stamp.
What the training log adds is the other deviation: 69 workouts in 79 days, 20 more than all of 2024, the final one among his hardest. The wearables described the vulnerability; the ride history described the load. The question this leaves open, and it matters beyond this case: in a healthy athlete, does a coherent, durable multi-domain shift ever precede the breakdowns we can still act on — overtraining, injury — or does the passport only ever tell us, postmortem, what the body already knew?
Biological passport is a great way to frame it. Comparing you to you is where wearables earn their keep. As someone who runs sleep trials, I'd love to see more research on what to do once the signals converge. Great breakdown
Scare mongering at it's best . Basically a load of waffle about what it may or may not be able to predict at some unknown time in the future. Fine if you have nothing better to do. No I am not about to change my refurb garmin watch.
Interesting analysis, not scare mongering. Really a vivid study of hubris where the guy was obviously pushing the envelope excessively with no regard for recovery. Your garmin watch is probably fine as long as you can manage a realistic review of your performance level. You’re probably one of those I go by feelings guys and expect others to also toe my one size fits all conclusions, aka “waffle”
I think it’s only scare-mongering if companies release a feature before it’s validated enough to be meaningful! Which there’s (hopefully) regulation on. No “death dates” here. 😄
In reality there is very little regulation on advertising. Tai Chi are allowed to say "Running breaks your joints" and " Over sixty's should not be running" both of which are outright lies.
Even with careful analysis of the data it would have been too hard to narrow down the day or week he was going to die but maybe it would have guided him to reduce intensity and possibly live longer. Hospitals now monitor some patients remotely to allow them to wait at home but the monitoring is more detailed than we’ll get from a watch soon.
Would a defibrillator have been a good investment for him?
The fall alert is great, any senior or person living alone should consider it.
My Garmin will sound a really loud alarm if my hr drops below 40. Would this wake me if I was having a heart attack in my sleep or just wake my wife after it was too late?
Interesting article! One thing that stands out is that he had severe, symptomatic mitral regurgitation with LV enlargement a year prior. He therefore met criteria for valve repair or replacement at that time but for whatever reason chose not to. This is a red flag. Did he have some other medical problems that made him refuse valve intervention? Might these have predisposed him to sudden death? Maybe the change in HRV reflected medication changes related to his other problems, for example.
Thirty of thirty nine signals showed a change point, and a long noisy record searched backwards will nearly always give you one. What makes this real is several independent domains leaving home in one window and never coming back.
Swimming gives athletes the biological passport Holmer describes — and the pool is its laboratory.
His decisive point is that the signal is not an abnormal number but a body that has stepped away from its own baseline coherently and durably. Here that was HRV more than halved (179 to 91 ms on the daytime measure), resting heart rate up from 44 to 49, sleep and walking capacity sliding in the same cluster — all unfolding four to six months before the event, in a heart already carrying an enlarged ventricle, valve disease, and an old infarct.
The pool offers one of the closest things to laboratory conditions in sport: same lane, same length, same temperature, no wind or gradient. A swimmer who holds 30 strokes per 50 at 1:15 for two seasons and then needs 34 for the same speed has stepped away from their own baseline in exactly the way this post describes. The pace clock and the stroke count are the passport; the wearable just automates the stamp.
What the training log adds is the other deviation: 69 workouts in 79 days, 20 more than all of 2024, the final one among his hardest. The wearables described the vulnerability; the ride history described the load. The question this leaves open, and it matters beyond this case: in a healthy athlete, does a coherent, durable multi-domain shift ever precede the breakdowns we can still act on — overtraining, injury — or does the passport only ever tell us, postmortem, what the body already knew?
Biological passport is a great way to frame it. Comparing you to you is where wearables earn their keep. As someone who runs sleep trials, I'd love to see more research on what to do once the signals converge. Great breakdown
Scare mongering at it's best . Basically a load of waffle about what it may or may not be able to predict at some unknown time in the future. Fine if you have nothing better to do. No I am not about to change my refurb garmin watch.
Interesting analysis, not scare mongering. Really a vivid study of hubris where the guy was obviously pushing the envelope excessively with no regard for recovery. Your garmin watch is probably fine as long as you can manage a realistic review of your performance level. You’re probably one of those I go by feelings guys and expect others to also toe my one size fits all conclusions, aka “waffle”
There's always one !
I think it’s only scare-mongering if companies release a feature before it’s validated enough to be meaningful! Which there’s (hopefully) regulation on. No “death dates” here. 😄
In reality there is very little regulation on advertising. Tai Chi are allowed to say "Running breaks your joints" and " Over sixty's should not be running" both of which are outright lies.
I’m not sure I see the relevance here. Maybe I’m missing something.
Your mention of companies releasing a feature before it is validated set me off again. They would obviously advertise it if they were releasing it.
Even with careful analysis of the data it would have been too hard to narrow down the day or week he was going to die but maybe it would have guided him to reduce intensity and possibly live longer. Hospitals now monitor some patients remotely to allow them to wait at home but the monitoring is more detailed than we’ll get from a watch soon.
Would a defibrillator have been a good investment for him?
The fall alert is great, any senior or person living alone should consider it.
My Garmin will sound a really loud alarm if my hr drops below 40. Would this wake me if I was having a heart attack in my sleep or just wake my wife after it was too late?
Interesting article! One thing that stands out is that he had severe, symptomatic mitral regurgitation with LV enlargement a year prior. He therefore met criteria for valve repair or replacement at that time but for whatever reason chose not to. This is a red flag. Did he have some other medical problems that made him refuse valve intervention? Might these have predisposed him to sudden death? Maybe the change in HRV reflected medication changes related to his other problems, for example.
He had a complicated history (to say the least). Certainly a lot of compounding factors going on.