The state of AI in running
In short Most AI in running is now owned by the companies that make the watches and hold your data. Strava bought Runna, and Garmin bought TrainingPeaks. Google, Samsung and Apple have added coaching to their wearables, and COROS now lets ChatGPT and Claude read your training history. What has not kept pace is evidence. No peer-reviewed study shows whether app-adapted plans injure runners more or less often than a static plan or a human coach. The best new research suggests that the weekly load ratios many tools rely on predict injury less well than a simple check of each run against your longest recent run. The Big Tech coaches are mostly still in preview, scaled back or thin. For now, checking whether a plan's progression is safe is still your job.
What it found
- Platform owners now control the leading running-coaching products: Strava bought Runna in April 2025, and Garmin bought TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic in July 2026.
- No peer-reviewed study has yet compared injury rates on adaptive app plans with traditional plans, and Runna's own lower injury-rate claim is self-reported and has not been checked against a published benchmark.
- In a 5,205-runner Garmin cohort, a single run more than 10% longer than the longest run of the previous 30 days was linked to higher injury risk, while the week-to-week load ratio showed no relationship.
- Machine-learning models trained on Strava logs and surveys predicted injury poorly in runners who were not already injured (AUPRC 8%), so software 'injury risk' warnings should be treated as rough guides.
- The general-purpose AI health coaches from Google, Apple and Garmin are still in preview, scaled back, or described by reviewers as thin, more than a year after launch.
- US regulators loosened, rather than tightened, oversight of wellness wearables in January 2026, so no regulator checks whether an AI training plan's progression is safe.
How it was made
Every development in the report comes from a public source dated from April 2025 to September 2026: trade press, regulators, journals and company announcements. Each one is dated and names its source, so you can read the original, and every link was checked when this edition was put together. It is a record of what happened, not advice.
A new edition replaces this one as things move. The latest is always on this page.