Training for it: steadier plans, a race-first dashboard and RunPact on your phone

The race-day post covers what changed on the public race pages. This one is for the months before the race, when you are actually training with RunPact. Three things changed a lot: how plans are built, what the dashboard shows you, and how the whole thing works on a phone.

Plans that keep a steady rhythm

Plans used to decide two things on separate counters: when your recovery weeks fell, and when the key sessions like back-to-backs and race simulations came round. Nothing made the two agree, so every so often a key session landed on a recovery week and got quietly cut down into two ordinary runs.

Plans now run on one rhythm of training blocks from the first week to the last. The last week of every block is the lighter one, and key sessions are placed so they can never land on it. The taper no longer gets a recovery week on top of its own reduced volume.

Race simulations changed the most. They used to come round about every four weeks and grow to eight hours, which for a 100 km goal is two thirds of race day. They now come every second block at three to five hours, building through the build and peak phases, run easy with walking breaks the way you would on race day. The blocks in between carry a back-to-back weekend instead.

When you create a plan, the sample week in the live preview is now built from your own details: your race distance, current weekly volume, long-run day, the days you can run and the plan length you chose. So the week you see is built the way yours will be. You can also pick your race straight from the race directory while you set the plan up.

In the plan itself, every week header tells you where you are: "Build, week 2 of 4", how the volume and long run compare with last week, and whether this is a lighter week. Once the week starts, it shows what you have done against what was planned.

A dashboard that starts from your race

If your plan is linked to a race, the dashboard now leads with it: days to go, your current phase and how far through the plan you are. Underneath are the numbers that tell you whether you are ready: long runs done out of those due so far, your longest run against the longest in the plan, and your climbing over the last four weeks. The race's elevation profile fills in as you climb in training, so you can see when you've climbed 60% of the course, or the whole thing twice over. In race week it adds the forecast for the start, and there is a link to fly the course.

Fitness and form. A new chart shows your fitness (roughly your last six weeks of training), your fatigue (roughly your last week) and your form, the gap between the two. It runs forward to race day, so you can see where following the plan will leave you. Hard blocks push form below zero and the taper should bring it back up.

A morning check-in. At the bottom of your next workout you can log how you slept, how sore and how stressed you are, and whether you are ill or carrying an injury. If you are ill or injured, or tired before a hard session, it says so and offers to swap the session for something easier.

Fair comparisons. On a Monday morning your week used to read as 100% down on last week. The week now compares against the same point last week, and the plan adherence figure only counts sessions whose day has already passed.

A few more things live on the dashboard now:

• Last week in a sentence, which you can share.
• Your year as a heatmap of every day you ran, with a "Share your year" button that makes an image of it.
• Your races, with the goals you have saved from race pages and the results you have entered.
• What the field did at your race, drawn from its race page, so the numbers are in front of you while you train.
• A course of the week, with a link to fly it, if you haven't linked a race yet.

You also get an email in race week, and courses you upload yourself are now saved as "Your courses" so you can come back to the analysis and the flythrough later.

RunPact on your phone

Most of this month's last round went into phones, because that is where most of you open RunPact.

It installs. Add RunPact to your home screen and it opens straight to your dashboard like an app. On iPhone that is Share and then Add to Home Screen in Safari. On Android the dashboard offers a button.

Your plan works without signal. The dashboard and your plan are saved each time you open them, so at a trailhead with no reception you still see today's workout from your last visit. The saved copy is removed when you sign out.

A tab bar at the bottom on phones for Dashboard, Plans, Races and the rest, so everything is in reach of your thumb.

Time fields you can actually type into. iPhone number pads have no colon, which made typing a race time like 26:50 awkward. Every time field is now separate boxes for hours, minutes and seconds.

Behind those there is a long list of smaller fixes: buttons big enough to hit with a cold thumb, forms that no longer zoom the page when you tap into them, modals and the 3D view that fit the screen properly when the browser bar comes and goes, and content that keeps clear of the notch and the home indicator.

A calmer app

Across all of this the app got quieter. Every page now uses the same buttons, cards and type. Colour carries meaning instead of decoration: orange is you (your goal, your line, the thing to tap), slower stretches are warm and faster ones cool, and phases are shades of one colour rather than a rainbow. The main menu is four items: Dashboard, Training plans, Races and Tools. Settings are one place with tabs instead of three separate pages.

Where this leaves us

That is a lot of change in a short time, and the next step is to hear from people using it. If you are training for an ultra next year, pick your race, set a goal time, and build a plan for it. If something doesn't work the way you expected, tell us.