I wanted to take the time to give some feedback on my experience with Athletica over the past year.
A little bit about myself. I am a 36 year old who had done triathlon for 1 year in 2010 and then wasn’t overly active for 11 years due to injuries and life getting in the way.
In 2021 I took up swimming, lost some weight and in 2024 I started Triathlon again. 2024 I used a Garmin Coach Program for 3 Sprint Triathlons.
Due to my history of knee issues I like to stick with Sprint Distance triathlon and I can only speak to athletica in regards to this.
The main reason I used a training software is that I wanted to make sure I was at my best at the Age Group Triathlon Sprint World Championships in October 2025.
I personally think that Athletica was a great tool to give me input on my workouts and to give me a good framework in regards to what to train and different options on how to train.
An error I made was to “blindly” trust athletica in the beginning.
Throughout the year I learned to question Athletica as the AI does tend to make mistakes and not work correctly at times. I wish that someone from athletica would take the time for every “new” athlete to ensure the inputs are correct and everything is set-up correctly. My understanding is that this can be done at an extra cost.
Had I blindly trusted the AI I would have ended up way over trained and over fatigued at my A Race.
I really liked the ease of the workouts loading onto my watch and following the workouts. This made following a training plan really easy.
Once I found my way around Athletica I also liked the ease of moving sessions around and adjusting my weeks as per my availability.
In addition I really liked the positive feedback from the AI coach.
I didn’t like the swim speed suggestions as I sometimes felt I couldn’t swim efficiently at the recommended speed (too slow). I told this to the AI in the feedback multiple times but it was never adjusted.
I also don’t believe the feedback was as strongly used as it could and it felt like there were no to minimal adjustments based on the feedback given.
I didn’t like the fact that you couldn’t pick a weekday for a race. I had races both on Monday and Friday during the year.
I didn’t like that it sent me to my first race way over trained and exhausted as I didn’t know how to properly question the AI and read the metrics.
I didn’t like that it wouldn’t allow me to exclude running in the training plan and it would include way more runs than requested which I had to manually remove/replace.
Towards the end I stopped listening to athletica as I believed I learned enough throughout the year to listen to my body and use what I had learned in combination with my feelings.
Overall I had a good experience with Athletica and I have recommended it to others. If I could do it all again I would question the AI a lot more from the start and adjust my training more based on my body’s input and feeling. In addition I would really pay attention to the recommendation on Fitness, Fatigue and form for your races.
I personally think it’s worth it but would make sure you spend time familiarizing yourself with all the metrics and details and question the software as it tends to make mistakes.
It’s off season for me now and I think I won’t use it for the beginning of next year and I will assess my needs as my season goes on.
I think for now I will write my own training plan and listen closely to my body and own inputs and see how that goes.
All the best to everyone using Athletica and thanks to the team for creating this software.
