If you want to understand what edited honesty actually costs, start with Sue Reynolds. World aqua bike champion. Age group triathlete. Someone who came out of the swim at a world championship with a three-minute lead on the entire field. And someone who then spent almost three years recovering from overtraining syndrome.

Her new book, Across the Line, documents the whole journey. At the end of one chapter she poses a question that stopped me in my tracks.

"How honest are you when reporting fatigue or stress to your coach, employer, teacher, or family? What tends to get edited out, and why?"

Edited honesty. I had not heard it put that way before, but I recognised it immediately. And the more I sat with it, the more I realised how many athletes I coach are doing exactly this, every single week, often without knowing it.

What edited honesty actually looks like

At no point did Sue set out to mislead anyone. It does not look like lying. That is the point. It looks like this.

You finish a session that nearly broke you and write in your training log that it felt tough but manageable. You tell your coach you are a bit tired but add that you think you are handling it fine. You mention to your partner that things are a bit full-on at the moment, but you are okay. You tell yourself that feeling this exhausted is normal at this point in the training block.

None of it is untrue exactly. It is just a carefully filtered version of the truth, and the filtering happens so automatically that most people do not even notice they are doing it.

Sue describes telling her coach regularly that she was fatigued. But in the same message, she would write about how happy she was to have completed the session, how excited she was about her progress, how committed she was to the next block. The coach was getting mixed signals. The joy of finishing was drowning out the signal that something was seriously wrong. And because Sue had the mental capacity to keep completing the work, the data never quite flagged what was actually happening until it was far too late.

Listen to the full podcast conversation HERE:

​What would happen if an age group triathlete trained like an Olympian​

Why we do it

Sue spent a long time after her diagnosis trying to understand why she had not asked for rest when she knew she needed it. What she found was not one reason but several layered on top of each other.

There was the cultural messaging around toughness. Shut up legs. Death before DNF. The celebration of athletes who push through. None of it is malicious but all of it creates an environment where admitting you are struggling feels like a character flaw rather than useful information.

There was the sense of partnership with her coach. She felt that completing every session was her side of the bargain. If she did not do the work, she was not holding up her end of the deal. So she held up her end of the deal long past the point where it was doing her any good.

And there was the identity piece. For ten years her life had revolved around turning boxes green in TrainingPeaks. When her coach finally told her to stop and just do whatever she felt like doing, she felt lost. Training was not just something she did. It was who she was. Admitting she could not do it felt like admitting something much bigger.

I see all three of these in athletes I coach, particularly those over 50. High achievers who have applied the same drive to sport that got them where they are in every other area of life. People who are genuinely excellent at pushing through. The irony is that the very quality that made them successful is the one making them most vulnerable.

The four audiences we edit ourselves for

Sue's question names four. Your coach. Your employer. Your teacher. Your family. In my experience the order of honesty tends to run roughly in reverse. Most athletes are most honest with family and least honest with their coach, because the coach is the person whose opinion of their commitment matters most to them.

But the editing starts with yourself. Before you give your coach a filtered version of how you are feeling, you have usually already given yourself one. The internal negotiation happens first. You are meant to feel tired, you are training for an Ironman. You are not that tired, not really. You have felt worse than this. That voice is the first editor and it is the hardest one to argue with.

What I ask athletes I work with to consider is this. What would you tell me if there were no consequences? If I was not going to judge your commitment, not going to think less of your dedication, not going to change the programme in a way you did not want. What would you actually say?

Usually the honest answer is quite different from the one I received.

What it costs

Sue's overtraining syndrome took almost three years to recover from. That is the extreme end. But the cost of edited honesty does not have to be that dramatic to be significant.

It shows up as the training block that produces less than it should because the athlete was carrying more fatigue than anyone knew. The race that underdelivers because the build-up looked fine on paper but felt awful in practice. The niggle that became an injury because the early signals were not reported or were minimised when they were. The slow accumulation of a pattern where the athlete is always working slightly harder than is wise and never quite recovering as well as the data suggests they should be.

The antidote is not dramatic. It is just more complete honesty, with yourself first and then with the people around you. Asking for rest is not weakness. Reporting that a session felt harder than it should have is not letting your coach down. It is giving them the information they need to do their job properly.

Sue put it simply at the end of our conversation. She said she wished she had known she was stronger than she thought she was. Because that was what kept her editing. She thought she was being a weenie. She was not. She was running on empty and filing the wrong reports.

What are you editing out right now?

In SWAT, one of the things we work on consistently is building the kind of trust where athletes tell me what is actually going on, not the edited version. That honesty is what makes the programme work. If you want coaching built around the whole picture, find out more at.

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