Everything published so far
Numbered in the order it was written. The series builds, so the early ones are the place to start.
- The Four Numbers Worth Checking Every Sunday Night 1,467 words Most runners drown in watch metrics; argues that weekly volume, weekly volume trend, hard-session count and a subjective fatigue note are enough to judge whether any plan is progressing you safely, and everything else is optional detail.
- What the 'AI' in Your Running App Is Actually Doing 1,476 words Separates genuine adaptive modelling from rule-based templates with a marketing label, and gives readers three questions to ask of any app to work out which one they've bought.
- Acute:Chronic Workload Ratio, Explained Without the Jargon 1,697 words Defines ACWR as 'this week versus your recent normal' and argues its value is as a direction-of-travel check, not a precise injury predictor with a magic 1.5 cliff.
- Garmin Training Readiness: What Actually Goes Into the Score 1,387 words Breaks the composite score into its inputs — sleep, recovery time, HRV status, acute load, stress — and shows which input is usually driving a surprising number so you can judge it rather than obey it.
- Your First ChatGPT Training Plan Prompt, Line by Line 2,185 words Builds one complete prompt from scratch, explaining why each element (current weekly mileage, recent race, constraints, injury history, goal date) changes the output, with before-and-after plans showing the difference.
- What AI Form Analysis Can See From a Phone Video — And What It Can't 1,752 words Sets honest expectations: 2D video apps can estimate cadence, overstride and trunk lean reasonably, but cannot measure forces, rotation or anything that maps cleanly onto injury risk.
- The First Two Weeks Back: Ground Rules Before Any Plan 1,863 words Argues that no AI plan should be started until you can pass simple load tests pain-free, and gives the criteria-based gates that matter more than any calendar date an app offers.
- Adaptive or Just Rescheduled? How Coaching Apps Handle a Missed Run 1,633 words Tests what several apps do when you skip a key session or a whole week — some genuinely rebuild the block, most just shuffle tiles — and explains why that distinction decides how much you can trust the plan.
- Is the 10% Rule Real, or Just Convenient? 1,428 words Compares the flat 10% weekly-increase heuristic against a rolling-average approach, showing that 10% of a small base is trivially safe while 10% of a big base can be a genuine spike.
- Your HRV Dropped. Here's What That Does and Doesn't Mean 1,722 words Distinguishes a single overnight dip (usually noise, alcohol or a late meal) from a multi-day downward trend against baseline, and only treats the second as a reason to change the week.
- Feeding the Model Your Strava History Without Feeding It Junk 1,979 words Shows how to export and condense twelve weeks of running into a short structured summary the model can reason over, and why pasting raw activity dumps produces worse plans than a tidy ten-line table.
- Cadence Is the One Form Metric Worth Changing First 1,871 words Debunks 180 as a universal target, then argues that a modest 5% cadence increase is the single form change with decent evidence behind it and the easiest to self-coach with watch feedback.
- Miles, Minutes or Load Points: Which Unit Should You Track? 1,557 words Compares distance, duration, sRPE and Garmin/TrainingPeaks load scores, and recommends duration-based load for most recreational runners because it doesn't punish hills, heat or easy weeks.
- Why Your App's Easy Pace Feels Hard 1,589 words Explains how apps derive paces from a race result or VO2max estimate, why that overstates fitness for under-trained or heat-affected runners, and how to sanity-check prescribed paces against your own heart rate data.
- Resting Heart Rate Is the Slow, Boring Metric That Actually Works 1,465 words Argues RHR trend over weeks is a more reliable fitness-and-fatigue signal for recreational runners than any daily readiness score, because it's simple, stable and hard to game.
- Five Things AI Gets Wrong When It Writes a Running Plan 1,996 words Catalogues the recurring failure modes — impossible mileage jumps, too many quality days, no down weeks, invented paces, taper that starts too late — with a checklist for spotting each in a generated plan.
- The Pain Rules: When to Keep Running and When to Stop 1,669 words Sets out the traffic-light framework — pain level during the run, and how it behaves in the 24 hours after — as the decision rule that overrides whatever the comeback plan says.
- Down Weeks: How Much to Drop and How Often 1,462 words Argues for fatigue-triggered rather than calendar-fixed recovery weeks, and shows how to check whether your AI plan's 3:1 pattern actually reduces load or just reshuffles it.
- Overstriding: What It Really Looks Like on Video 1,674 words Teaches readers to judge foot-strike position relative to the knee and centre of mass from their own slow-motion footage, rather than trusting an app's red-flag label.
- Why Garmin Keeps Telling You Your Training Is 'Unproductive' 1,735 words Explains the load-versus-VO2max-trend logic behind the label, why it misfires during base building, heat and taper, and the two cases where it genuinely deserves attention.
- Which App Would You Trust With a 16-Week Marathon Build? 1,557 words Judges the major AI coaching apps on the things that decide a marathon — long-run progression, quality-session balance, taper design and how they handle a missed fortnight — rather than on UI polish.
- Making AI Build a Long Run Progression That Holds Up 1,917 words Gives the constraints to write into your prompt — cap as a share of weekly volume, alternate step-back weeks, add quality inside the long run late — and shows an unconstrained plan failing against them.
- Audit Your Plan's Load Curve Before You Run a Step of It 1,504 words A practical walkthrough of plotting a generated 16-week plan's weekly load and looking for spikes, plateaus and a taper that starts on time — the single highest-value hour you can spend on an AI plan.
- Body Battery, Whoop Recovery and the Number That Disagrees With You 1,741 words Compares how different recovery scores are constructed and argues that when the score and your legs disagree, the score is the one that should lose — with the exception cases spelled out.
- Ground Contact Time and Vertical Oscillation: Useful or Noise? 1,857 words Shows these watch metrics track speed more than technique, so they're only informative when compared against yourself at matched pace — and mostly useless as cross-runner benchmarks.
- Rebuilding Chronic Load From Zero Without Overshooting 1,889 words Explains why ratio-based load rules break down at low baselines and proposes absolute weekly increments for the first six weeks back instead, with worked numbers.
- Garmin Daily Suggested Workouts: Three Weeks of Following Them Exactly 1,464 words A logged test of obeying the watch's daily suggestions, showing where the reactive day-to-day model conflicts with the structure a race build actually needs.