n1athlete / Method
The method
One subject, written down
In research notation, n=1 is a single-subject experiment. It is the weakest study design there is for proving something about people in general, and the strongest one available for finding out what works for a specific person. Every athlete running their own measured, documented training system is conducting one, usually without writing any of it down.
n1athlete writes it down.
Process
How a protocol gets built
Start from a failure, not a theory
Every protocol begins with something that went wrong repeatedly and had no written procedure attached to it. Not an interesting idea, not a trend — a specific recurring failure in a specific part of the sport. The question is always the same: which parts of this are actually controllable, and which are noise being mistaken for signal?
Read before writing
Published research is read first and logged in a sources library before anything is drafted. Claims that rest on evidence are cited to a source you can find and read yourself. Claims that rest on personal experience are labelled as personal experience. Where a study is often quoted for more than it actually says, the protocol says what it actually says.
Run it on one subject
The protocol is tested across a training block rather than validated on a single good race. Measurement uses instruments that produce numbers rather than impressions: running power, continuous glucose monitoring, sleep duration and timing, and morning stress markers. A protocol that only works when everything else goes well has not been tested.
Publish the reasoning, not just the steps
The document explains why each step is there, in what order, and what it depends on. That is deliberate: a protocol you understand is one you can adapt when your race, your gut or your schedule does not match the assumptions. A list of instructions is not.
Limits
What one subject cannot tell you
This matters more than the method itself, so it is stated plainly rather than buried.
It does not generalise
A result from one athlete is a hypothesis about you, not a finding about you. Endurance responses to nutrition, heat, sleep loss and training load vary enormously between individuals. Treat every protocol here as a structured starting point to test, never as a prescription.
It is not blinded
The subject knows what protocol he is running and wants it to work. That is an unavoidable bias in any self-experiment, and it is why the protocols lean on instrument readings rather than on how a session felt.
It is not clinical
None of this is medical, dietary or clinical advice, and it is not written by a clinician. If you have a medical condition, are pregnant, are recovering from illness, or take prescribed medication, talk to a doctor before changing how you eat or train.
One rule
Never on race day
Nothing published here should be attempted for the first time at a race. Every protocol is designed to be rehearsed in training, on long runs, under conditions you can afford to have go badly. This appears on the first page of every document and it is a feature of the method rather than a disclaimer attached to it: a protocol you have not trained is not a protocol, it is a gamble with better formatting.
The subject
Who is running the experiment
n1athlete is written by Piotr Jasinski, an amateur endurance runner based in Switzerland. He is not a coach, a dietitian or a sports scientist, and the protocols do not claim otherwise. What he brings is a working discipline from a different field entirely: building planning systems, where the whole job is separating the signal you can act on from the noise you cannot, and writing the procedure down so it survives being handed to someone else.
The brand is deliberately built around the method rather than the person. If a protocol is sound, it should hold up whoever tested it. If it is not, no amount of biography fixes it.
Questions, corrections and disagreements: hello@n1athlete.io. Corrections to published protocols are made and reissued free to everyone who bought them.