‘Race Pace’

The personalized race planning app market is getting crowded.

Race Pace is:

Your Trail Pacing and Fueling plans built around your fitness for your race goals.

This is already the third app I came across offering a similar solution to the challenge of how to prepare for your big ultra distance race. Back in 2022 I mentioned ‘ultraPacer‘, then about a year ago I found ‘Time on Trails‘. All of these apps are utilizing GPX data paired with your watch training data to predict a race plan allowing you to plan for your big race. Before AI it was fairly easy to separate the ‘home made ideas’ from the project that seem like a serious undertaking, but nowadays every marketing website feels flashy and engaging, it’s hard to get a quick feel for the product. And also, uploading my watch data to some ‘new-to-me’ and unproven website feels like a lot to ask. Are any of these apps useful and should you try them out? Not sure. I don’t feel like they can replace a relationship with a coach you can bounce your thoughts and ideas off of. But coaches are also in a complete price category, so to compare this is probably unfair. But how can you trust the data the tool spits out for you? Maybe if you race enough you can try it out on a race that isn’t your ‘A-race’ first, seeing how it does and then maybe you can learn to trust it? Feels like a lot of work?

Is this something that Strava might built into their platform at some point?

Lots of question, but one thing is certain, this too can be filed into the category of “the tech is coming for trail“. What a fun time this is right now in our sport.