Six months after I won the Critérium du Dauphiné, my heart started skipping beats on a training ride. I told no one. Not for a year. Not for two.
The trigger, in plain language, was this. People I had considered my closest friends did something I experienced as a deep injustice. There were lies told. There were things done I had no way to answer. I felt completely powerless — in a way an athlete who has spent fifteen years training for control is not built to feel. I could not say what I felt to the people involved, and I could not say it to anyone else. I carried on.
The next morning, on the bike, my heart started doing something new. Premature ventricular contractions. Extra beats I could feel in my chest — irregular, occasional at first, more frequent later.
PVCs happen in healthy hearts. There are many ordinary causes — caffeine, poor sleep, hard training, low electrolytes, sometimes nothing identifiable. If your heart does this, the move is to see a doctor first, properly, and get it characterized. I am describing what happened in my body during a specific period of unexpressed powerlessness. I am not claiming a skipping heart is a feeling.
I was willing to die for a role
I told no one for years. Not my team. Not my doctors. Not the people closest to me. The body was sending a clear signal — and I rode through it, on training rides and at the start line of races.
I had built myself, layer on layer since I was a child, into one sentence. I am a professional cyclist. The role was not what I did. It had become what I was. So when the body started signaling, the question my system asked was not am I in danger. It was can this end my career. If a doctor said the word no, the only self I had was gone.
I would rather have something happen to me on the bike than hear that sentence in a clinic. That is the calculation I was running, even though I would never have written it down.
That tells you something about how a high performer collapses into their function. It is not about being brave or being tough. It is about a nervous system that learned, somewhere along the way, that performance was the only thing that made it safe. And once performance and survival are the same thing in the wiring, the body’s signals become an enemy. You hide them, even from yourself.
When the two overlap completely, the body’s signals read as a threat to survival.
Fig. 01 — Performance and survival, wired into one.
The baseline you want to return to is the baseline that produced the symptom
This is where the word baseline starts to lie. For most athletes it means: the state I was in before this happened. You train, you race, you stress the system, and you return to your normal. HRV comes back. Sleep returns. Morning resting heart rate settles. You are back to baseline.
But the baseline I was returning to in 2011 was a body in chronic sympathetic load, wearing my identity as armor. Morning pulse elevated. HRV suppressed. Breathing high and shallow. Belly locked. None of it registered as a problem — because I had never felt anything else. That was my baseline. The body I had built. And it was the body that produced the PVC under enough pressure.
Going back to it was not recovery. It was returning to the system that broke.
Morning pulse elevated · HRV suppressed
First breath shallow, plucked off the top of the chest
This is not recovery. It is returning to the system that broke.
Fig. 02 — The word “baseline” hides which body you are returning to.
A new baseline is built, not recovered to
The work I have done since then — with my own body and with the athletes I now coach — has changed what I mean when I use the word. A new baseline is not the place you started. It is the state your system reorganizes into after you stop holding what you were holding.
The morning pulse that drops not because you got fitter but because you stopped bracing in your sleep. The HRV that climbs not because you slept eight hours but because the diaphragm has room to move. The first breath of the day that arrives soft and full instead of plucked off the top of the chest.
A new baseline is built. The old one was a containment field.
Three markers that tell you which one you are in
You can tell the difference between the old and the new without any technology. Three markers, every morning, for thirty days. The first is the depth of your first breath after waking — do not control it, simply notice where it lands. The second is whether your pulse moves with your breath: speeding slightly on the inhale, slowing on the exhale. That is respiratory sinus arrhythmia, one of the cleanest signs the parasympathetic branch is online.
The third is the hardest, and the one I would have failed every day from twenty-two to thirty-five. Sit, alone, five minutes. No phone, no music, no plan. Notice the impulse to reach for stimulation. The strength of that impulse is the strength of the sympathetic charge you are still carrying. These three will outperform any device, because they read what the device is trying to reverse-engineer.
Do not control it. Where does the first full breath land?
Hand on the chest, five minutes, no input. Does the rhythm move?
Sit alone, no phone, no plan. What happens inside?
Fig. 03 — Three markers. No device required. A status report, not a verdict.
The pattern under the symptoms
If you have followed this series, you have noticed something. Sympathetic hangover, breath restriction, the spiral, holding it together. Different signals on the surface. One body underneath. Each piece a face of the same shape: a system organized around an old threat that was never digested.
Different signals on the surface. One system underneath.
Fig. 04 — Each piece a face of the same shape.
A new baseline is not a wellness goal. It is the byproduct of the threat finally moving through. You build it by giving the body what it has been asking for — the room and the safety to put down the load.
The baseline you fight to return to is not always the one worth returning to. Sometimes the work is to build a new one the old you never knew was possible.
I rode for years with a heart that skipped, certain that stopping would cost me everything. It took me far longer to see what it was actually telling me.
Reliable under pressure is not the body that holds.
It is the body that has nothing left to hide.
The doors are always open.
— Jani