Asking an assistant to build you a plan and asking it for a race-week check-in are different jobs. A plan request wants the full picture: benchmarks, constraints, months of context. A check-in wants almost none of that repeated. It wants to know what changed since the plan was made, and nothing else.
Why race week is the wrong moment for stale context
A stale number in week three of a training block is a minor inefficiency; the next session absorbs it. A stale number the day before a goal race is a different kind of mistake, because there is no next session to correct it on. If the assistant reasons from a threshold you improved on six weeks ago, or a taper structure it invented because it does not know one is already running, the bad advice lands on the one day you cannot afford it.
Athmex exists for the numbers worth keeping current between conversations, which is most of what a check-in needs before you say a word about this week.
What to update
Four things are worth stating fresh, because they are the ones most likely to have moved since you last talked about this race.
Current fitness, not starting fitness. If your threshold or PB has moved since you started the block, say the new number and when it was set. The assistant cannot tell a training adaptation from a typo; it needs the date to know which one is current.
Whether the taper is actually going to plan. Legs feeling flat, unusually fresh, or exactly as expected all call for a different answer to "should I adjust anything." State which one is true rather than asking the question in the abstract.
Any niggle, new or resolved. An old injury that has settled needs to stop being treated as live. A new one, however minor it feels, needs to be mentioned even if you are sure it is nothing; let the assistant reason with it rather than deciding for it by omission.
The exact goal, course and conditions for this specific day. Target time, elevation profile, expected temperature, start time. None of this is stored anywhere from months ago because it did not exist months ago. It is race-specific and needs to be said now.
What to say once and then leave alone
The rest of your training history does not need repeating. Sixteen weeks of sessions, the long build-up, the early setbacks: none of it changes the answer to a race-week question, and pasting it in mostly buries the four things that do matter. If it is already in a conversation the assistant can see, or in a record it reads from, let it stay there rather than retyping it.
The one instruction that matters most: do not change anything new
Race week is not the week to try a new shoe, a new gel, or a session type you have not done before, and an assistant asked an open question will sometimes suggest exactly that: a confidence-boosting workout, a nutrition tweak, a stretching routine it read was effective. Tell it directly that nothing new goes in this week, and ask it to work only with what you already do. That single instruction removes most of the risk in asking an assistant anything at all this close to the race.
A worked check-in prompt
Compare a vague check-in with a useful one.
"My marathon is Sunday, any tips for this week?"
That gives the assistant nothing to reason with beyond the day count, so it defaults to generic taper advice you could get from any article. Compare it with:
"Marathon on Sunday, targeting 3:15. Taper is going as planned, legs feel normal for this stage. No injuries. Forecast is 16°C and dry, course has one long climb around 30km. Nothing new this week: same shoes, same gels, same warm-up I've used all block. What should the last three days actually look like, and is there anything about the climb at 30km worth planning for now rather than deciding on the day?"
The second version gives the assistant a specific, current situation to reason about instead of a generic taper question, and the "nothing new" instruction closes off the riskiest kind of answer before it can be suggested.
Where Athmex fits, and where it doesn't
Athmex holds the part of this that is genuinely durable: your confirmed threshold, your PBs and when they were set, the goal race and target time you already entered, and any constraint or injury note you are tracking. Connect it, and the assistant already has that before race week starts, so a check-in only has to add what changed. See how Athmex works.
It does not hold the weather forecast, the course profile, or how your legs feel this morning. Those are genuinely fresh facts with no useful history to store, and they belong in the conversation itself, not in a record. Athmex is for the numbers worth keeping current between conversations, not a substitute for saying what is true today.