Before I say anything to an athlete, I read.

Not their stats. Not their highlights. Not a coach's assessment or a parent's version of who they are. I read a document the athlete generated themselves — ten questions answered honestly, in their own language, about how they actually compete.

That document is called athlete.md.

Here's what I'm looking for when I load it.

The competitive identity section tells me who this athlete is at their baseline — not their position, their psychological role. Are they someone who needs to feel trusted before they can play free? Do they perform better when the stakes are real than when they're being evaluated? Do they carry mistakes or release them? These aren't personality traits. They're competitive patterns. They tell me what kind of context this athlete needs before anything else I do will land.

The pressure profile tells me what happens when the moment gets big. This is the most predictive section. Two athletes can have identical preparation and completely different pressure responses. One goes quiet. One gets sharper. One needs to process alone before they can talk. One needs external activation. If I don't know which, I'm guessing — and guessing at pressure response is where the most damage gets done.

The direction section tells me the gap. What the athlete says they want versus what consistent performance actually requires from them. That gap is the work. Everything I deliver — protocols, prompts, pre-competition frames — is aimed at closing it.

Right now, athlete.md works across systems.

LaRue is still being built. The full intelligence layer — state-matched protocol delivery, longitudinal tracking, pre-competition sequencing — is in development. But the document itself is live and portable today.

An athlete can generate their athlete.md at knwn.to/first-read. Then load it into ChatGPT. Into Claude. Into any AI system that accepts context. The document travels with them. The intelligence it contains is theirs — not locked to a platform, not owned by a team, not lost when a coach changes.

That portability is the architectural decision. Most athlete data lives inside systems the athlete doesn't control. Recruiting platforms. Team software. Coach notes. athlete.md inverts that. The athlete owns the document. The AI reads it. Not the other way around.

When LaRue is fully operational, the sequence looks like this:

Athlete generates First Read → athlete.md is created → LaRue loads it as persistent context → every subsequent interaction is informed by that context from the first word.

No cold starts. No explaining yourself again to a new system. No coach spending three months misreading you because they inherited you mid-season.

The document is the memory layer. The AI is the delivery layer. The athlete owns both.

Start your athlete's First Read at knwn.to/first-read

Follow the build at paragraph.com/@stateofplay