Here is my review after using this app for about 4 months for a marathon training block which I completed in early May.
Pros
-
Mostly user-friendly interface and software
-
Although the program only seems to generate either intervals or easy runs, the intervals that it generates are fun to do. And sometimes it spits out progression runs which are also fun (if the thresholds have not been recalculated and rendered useless)
-
Ai as a coach that gives you feedback is a nice feature that actually feels like a support system.
Cons
-
Injuries and Threshold Zones: If you’re injured, and have to take time off training, it totally disrupts your training zones and recalculates them and brings them down to the point that they are totally not reflective of your actual thresholds and thus useless. The only way to get around this is to manually insert your threshold time again, or do a test week - which is like why would you do a test week coming off of an injury?
-
Strength-training: Only generates one set of stability and mobility exercises, and one set of lower body and upper body exercises - that’s it for the whole duration of the whole program.
-
Race Predictions: This software is seriously flawed. Based on its calculations, it had me at 4:30-4:40/km for my race pace. My actual marathon pace was 4:09, which means that it was between 21-30 mins off, which shows that’s there’s something seriously wrong with their race prediction software, and with their data collection and interpretation in general.
-
Unnecessarily heavy volume weeks: At peak points it had me running almost 100 kms per week, and this was at the normal ramp rate. There should be a better way to tweak volumes before it generates the program so that you’re not manually deleting runs or not hitting the targets. For example the volume on race week had me at a “running form” of 3-9, while its own description of running form says that peak form is 15-25. Why would I be given this much volume to be at a sub-par running form on race day?
-
No long runs or Marathon Pace Runs: No runs longer than 25 kms in the whole program, and this was for a marathon build. Maybe that would be fine if I was prescribed some runs at marathon pace, but runs at race pace or any sort of marathon simulations did not come up at all in the whole program. I had no idea what my race pace could be a month before the marathon because the runs were either V02 threshold interval runs (2 per week, sometimes totalling 18 kms per session) or easy runs. Honestly not much variety between those two parameters.
-
Data it collects is pretty useless: It has all these bells and whistles like “Running form”, “fitness”, “ramp” rate which are all pretty but useless metrics for most users of the software. It’s kind of a black box as to where it gets these numbers from, and how it interprets these metrics is flawed in any case, as I talked about above, re:race prediction, running form.
Conclusion: Unless I hear about serious upgrades to the software and data interpretation, I would not use it again. I did get a PR in the marathon (2 mins faster), but I would not credit it to the program because in the last month before the race I actually ended up going back to a previous marathon program and just ignoring Athletica.ai’s suggestions all together to try to come up with a race pace because in following its suggestions I would have very little confidence in my race pace and capabilities going into the race. Ultimately I don’t think that there was a huge difference in my experience of copy and pasting marathon programs online onto my calendar and just listening to my body compared to using Athletica.ai other than the time it takes to copy and paste the program onto my calendar - which is still less than the 30 CAD price tag for the monthly sub.