Content Without Context

I’m sitting at breakfast here in sunny Marbella, with less than 24h to go until the gun goes off for another world championship. Trevor Noah said something recently that won't leave me alone: "We have more and more content and less and less context."

He was talking about the news cycle, and how nobody has time to explain themselves, but he might as well have been describing the conversation I overheard in Marbella this past morning, my Instagram Feed or any of the news summaries I flew over fist thing this morning.

Athletes making last-minute bike adjustments that made absolutely no sense, chasing some detail they saw in someone else's race report, convinced they'd found the missing piece. I know this move intimately.

My first Kona, I found myself at a friends condo at 8pm the night before the race. Not for new tires, which in hindsight I actually needed. Not for a final mechanical check. For chain lube. Special chain lube that I'd somehow convinced myself everyone was racing on, based on... a theory at best.

I applied it the morning of the race. Which is, mechanically speaking, the worst possible time to apply chain lube regardless of how magical it supposedly is. The stuff needs to settle, to penetrate. Morning-of application is basically expensive decoration that collects dirt of the road. I punctured. Got a penalty slotting back into the field. And no, the chain lube did not make a difference to my day.

A few years later I recognise: I probably needed that chain lube chase to sleep well. After months of preparation, after doing all the important things right, I needed one more small ritual to convince myself I'd left nothing undone. The joke being that the thing I needed to sleep well was the exact thing that cost me a good night's sleep.

This seems a constant now. We see a snippet- someone's morning routine, their training protocol, their pre-race ritual- and somehow we think that's their whole life. That the highlight is the system. That the headline is the truth.

The gap between what we share and what we live has never been wider. We post the tactic that worked. We don't post the three months of boring, unsexy consistency that made the tactic relevant. We share the result. We skip the context that made the result possible.

This isn't new, exactly. We've always had a version of "never meet your heroes"- the understanding that the public version and the private reality are different things. But now we're swimming in everyone's public version, 24/7, and we've lost the ability to distinguish between a moment and a method.

Athletes are especially vulnerable to this because we're trained to find edges. To optimize. To believe that the difference between winning and losing lives in the details. Which is sometimes true- but only when the foundation is already solid. The problem is we now see hundreds of details every day, ripped from their foundation, presented as universal truth.

Someone posts their race nutrition. We don't see the years of gut training, the trial and error, the fact that their physiology might be completely different from ours. We just see "X grams per hour" and assume we've found the answer. There's a reason good coaches don't hand you someone else's training plan. Because context is everything. Your history, your limiters, your schedule, your genetics, your goals- none of that fits in a headline or a social media post.

The truth is harder to package: what works for them might be poison for you. What failed for them might be exactly what you need. And most of what actually matters- the seemingly uneventful consistency, the quality sleep, the trust in your preparation- doesn't make for compelling content.

So here's what I’d  try to tell the rookie before my first Kona: the work you've already done is probably enough. The preparation that felt too simple, too obvious, too boring- that's the thing. Not the special lube. Not the hack you saw online. Not the last-minute adjustment that makes you feel like you're doing something.

Your foundation matters more than anyone else's optimization. Your context is more relevant than their content. And the discipline to ignore most of what you see? That might be the most valuable skill you develop.

This doesn't mean stop learning. It means get better at recognizing when you're collecting tactics without understanding, when you're chasing headlines without context, when you're trying to copy someone's highlight without knowing their full story.

Trust your boring preparation. Trust the work nobody sees. Trust that you don't need to know what everyone else is doing to know what you should do.

The chain lube didn't matter. The tires did. But I had to learn that the expensive way.

Jan