Some updates come from us. Others come from you.
Walter, our 24/7 sounding board in the app, analyses thousands of conversations. About 12.1% contain explicit critical feedback. Those are the conversations we learn the most from.
When we analysed those chats, two recurring themes stood out. Both were related to our current calibration process:
Calibration feels too complicated.
Training paces are no longer accurate if someone hasn't calibrated for a while.
Fair criticism.
Our current approach relies on an all-out 10K performance. The problem? Most runners don't regularly run an all-out 10K. Usually, it happens during a race, and races are influenced by the course, the weather, or simply having an off day. On top of that, the race may no longer reflect your current fitness because it happened weeks or even months ago. As a result, the data we use to estimate your fitness isn't always as reliable as we'd like.
We've offered an alternative for quite some time. You could run an all-out 3K, use the calculator on our website to convert it into a predicted 10K time, and then use that as your calibration. From a physiological point of view, it worked. From a user experience point of view, it didn't. As Trenara continues to grow, so does our responsibility to make this process easier.
An in-app testing protocol
With version 3.39, we're introducing a real fitness test directly inside the app. No race. No calculations. No workarounds. Just six minutes, all out.
This test, also known as the Billat test, replaces one of your planned hard training sessions. The distance you cover in six minutes tells us an incredible amount about your current fitness and physiology.
Behind the scenes, we've actually been doing something similar for over a year. We've been converting 5K and 10K performances into a theoretical six-minute performance to determine your physiological thresholds.
From now on, we no longer have to estimate those six minutes. We can measure them. And that's a much bigger step than it may seem.
Everybody wins
For you, calibration becomes much simpler. For me as a coach, it becomes even more valuable.
From now on, we'll have a direct measurement of your current physiological capacity. We can compare your fitness test to your race performances. Maybe you're physiologically stronger than your latest race suggests. That tells me something about where you can still improve, insights we simply didn't have before.
You can schedule a six-minute fitness test whenever you feel it's needed. I wouldn't recommend doing one every week, but three times a year is a great benchmark. We'll also check in from time to time to ask whether you're still happy with our current predictions.
