February Updates: Race Planning improvements, Journalling, Secondary events, and a step towards intervals

Hi everyone!

Firstly, thanks so much to all of you that have had calls with me, or emailed with different ideas, feedback or just interesting anecdotes over the past few weeks.

It’s been honestly so fun, and I feel like I have become some kind of academic student of the Puffer-verse.

With a great little community of people in the app now, I’m really keen to keep developing it all, and see where we can take things. Adding the ability to support multiple events beyond the Puffer, seems like an opportunity to build something really quite useful (as much as it will make The Coach very angry).

I love this idea of a training tool that helps you prepare for specific events, by having a ridiculously deep knowledge of said events. Both in the sense of large technical data sets, but also qualitative insights from real human beings.

And then there is the process of actually following a training plan...

I’ve tried to act on most of the feedback people have shared over the past few weeks, and fix quite a few little bugs on the way, but if not, then please let me know.

1. Race planning: laps and breaks

The Prediction and Strategy tabs have had a big overhaul.

The goal was to allow more customisation to your race plan, and to make things work for different categories (everything has been very biased towards Solo until now).

If you've read The Slush Puffer, you'll know how dramatically conditions affect lap times. The lap-by-lap breakdown is much more flexible now:

• Weather and trail condition modelling — choose from Standard, Mud, Ice, or Heavy Snow/Slush. These are based on historical records across 16 years of Strathpuffer results. Good for managing expectations / terrifying yourself.
• Customisable breaks — define your own break schedule, set durations, and add notes to each one. "Eat soup. Change gloves. Cry briefly."
• Print it off — Useful for briefing your support crew, or just having something in your pocket in the event that you lose your mind.
• Phase-based fatigue — Some improvements to how we model lap times for different phases of the race based on having more data on this.

Team lap planning: a question — For the moment I have made it so it assumes the rest of your team will do the same lap times as you (modelled from your power & durability), and it just rotates everyone one lap after the other. This was mainly to avoid making things too complex, but is this too limited? Any other customisations you’d like to see in planning tools?

2. Journalling: A surprisingly powerful thing

This sounds quite simple (and arguably a bit cringy) but it's actually a pretty wild one from an 'AI context engineering' perspective. If you're into that.

The feature itself is really straightforward: The ability to save journal entries in the form of text notes. You can do this by going to Journal in the header dropdown.

You can also do this from the Coach chat, by typing /journal. This will summarise a recent conversation and save it to your journal. Which is where it all gets a bit... philosophical.

This process is essentially a compounding learning loop for AI, where both you and the coach are inputting into saved context. You can save journal entries, but the coach will also suggest to save important discussion points as journal entries too.

So you are continuously working together with an AI to make the same AI, and yourself more informed. Deep.

Standard AI tools try to do this automatically, but they make assumptions about what you want to save, and they also forget over time. This avoids both those issues, and gives you complete control and transparency.

You can share important things like injury history, illness, psychological notes, life challenges, FTP wins, interval fails, and new bike day.

Every time you interact with the coach, it will reference your journal as key context. This should make every conversation better than the last.

What a day to start journalling.

3. You're not ONLY training for the Puffer?!?!

I guess it was inevitable. And with 11 months to go, it's probably quite healthy to have pre-Puffer events in the calendar.

When you create a training plan, you can now choose to train for a different event — or multiple events. Enter the name, date, and any notes about the event. The AI builds event blocks and tailors your plan around what you share: if your target is a 200km gravel race, it won't bang on about night riding and 17 hours of darkness. It'll talk about what actually matters for that event.

In line with our Puffer-bias, these events will ALWAYS be considered B races to the main event. And don't expect the Coach to be very happy with you when you tell him your divergent plans.

I'll start adding AI context, and maybe some performance benchmarks etc for popular events as I see them come up. 10 Under the Ben seems to be the winner at the moment — let me know if you have others.

I’m also wondering if it would be useful to handle these as historic events for analysis and feedback? And also if it would be useful to handle prediction and planning for these? The Coach is going to be fuming that I even asked these questions.

4. At least a little bit of a welcome

A welcome improvement. I’ve completely rebuilt the onboarding process for new people signing up.

Probably not very useful to anyone reading this, but it should now be much smoother getting set-up, without having to have a call with me :)

What should be useful to everyone is the AI Training Plan creation, and the ability to easily switch between different plans (and have archived plans for different seasons etc).

It's now a totally different 10-step process that captures everything the AI needs to build something genuinely useful — current volume, available hours, life events, equipment, training preferences across nine disciplines, and your target event(s). The AI shows its reasoning at each step and asks for feedback before continuing.

With easy plan archiving now, it’s really safe to experiment, so please do share any feedback.

5. Various other tweaks

Some other little improvements:

• Export intervals to Zwift etc. — if you go to “Integrations” in the header dropdown, you can now enable intervals export. This allows you to download a .ZWO file directly from any interval session in your plan. In theory this file should open directly in Zwift etc = amazing! Sadly most of these apps don’t make it easy to simply open a file. It’s been working for me as a short term solution while I try to find an actual solution, and so watch this space!
• Training context panel — collapsible panel in the Coach chat showing your live data (FTP, training load, VO2max, durability score, race goals). See what the coach sees
• Context window tracking — shows how much of the AI's memory you've used (0-100%, colour-coded). When it fills up, use /summarize to compress the history
• Better message rendering — the coach can now show data in proper markdown tables instead of walls of text
• Mobile chat input — Enter now adds a newline on mobile (tap the send button to send). Small thing, big difference on a phone
• Training plan editing and navigation should now be more reliable — this part of the app was a bit glitchy before. It should now be less glitchy.

What's next

The main theme I plan on focussing on next is integrations, and then I’ve also been considering re-building the feedback that comes up when you complete a session. I find it a bit repetitive, and was wondering if we could explain how a session improved specific race-readiness / race-performance indicators? Any thoughts?

For integrations, starting with Garmin (update: it’s here!), I’ll likely then move on to home-trainers/turbos etc (so TrainerRoad, Zwift, MyWhoosh etc), and then also investigating Wahoo, TrainingPeaks (for people with existing plans over there) and Intervals.icu (maybe as a way to open up all of the above).

If you have any ideas of how you’d like your Garmin fitness data to be involved in the app, then please let me know! This one could get very out of hand.

Thanks again for all the feedback so far, and for encouraging this general behaviour. Genuinely. Please do keep it coming.

Cheers,
Angus