Your training plan has no idea you slept four hours.

The cycle

Every weekend athlete knows this loop. Most of us have run it more than once.

→ Rinse. Repeat. See you next January.

Day-by-day reality, built in

A static PDF can't know you slept badly, or that your calf is talking to you again. gpeak is built around the assumption that the plan will need to change — and that changing it on purpose is the skill, not the failure.

Planned versus actual, without the guilt trip

Every week reports what was prescribed and what you actually did, in distance and in elevation. Not as a score. As information — the thing you need in order to make next week's call well.

Illustrative weekly totals. A week at 78% because you made a smart call on Tuesday is a good week.

How a morning actually goes

About ninety seconds, most days. That's the entire ritual.

Meet Coach Jarvis

The chatbot in the corner of the day view. It isn't a general-purpose assistant with a whistle drawn on it — it reads your actual training and answers from a written, reviewed body of coaching knowledge.

• 25 skills, deliberately deterministic. Coaching knowledge lives in 25 written skills, each on one topic and each graded for how strong the evidence behind it is. Which ones load for a given question is decided by explicit matching rules — not by the model deciding what it feels like recalling today. Same question, same knowledge, every time.
• It weighs both sides against the plan. Objective (overnight metrics, recent load, pacing and cardiac drift from your activity streams) and subjective (your score, your note) — measured against what your schedule actually prescribes for today. That comparison is the whole job.
• It looks things up. When a question needs history it doesn't have, it queries your own stored data — past sessions, recovery trends, earlier assessments, your coaching notes — with read-only tools, and shows you which lookups it ran.
• Nothing ships unreviewed. Skills go through a scheduled review pass; a draft is not available to Coach Jarvis until it has been read and approved. Boring, and the whole point.

HRV, done the way the research actually says

Heart-rate variability is the single most abused number in training tech. gpeak treats it the way the sports-science literature does — as a noisy signal that means something only against your own history, and only alongside everything else.

• A week, not a night. Night-to-night HRV swings by roughly ten percent on nothing at all. Single-night readings flip between "balanced" and "unbalanced" on noise. gpeak compares a seven-day rolling mean against your own sixty-day baseline, the standard approach in athlete-monitoring research.
• Measured in your units. The threshold is the smallest worthwhile change — half your own between-day variation — rather than a number borrowed from population averages. Values are handled on a log scale, because HRV is log-normally distributed and fixed thresholds misbehave at the extremes.
• Direction is kept. Most wearables only ever flag HRV going down. But in trained athletes an unusually high reading under heavy load can indicate parasympathetic saturation — fatigue wearing the mask of freshness. gpeak keeps the sign, so that case is visible instead of quietly reported as normal.
• Stability is its own signal. A steady lower HRV and an erratic one mean different things. gpeak tracks week-to-week variability separately rather than collapsing both into one label.
• It is never the whole answer. The evidence for HRV-guided training is genuinely mixed, and a single morning number decides nothing here. It is one input Coach Jarvis weighs against sleep, resting heart rate, recent load, your own notes, and where you actually are in your training block.

A Tuesday, roughly

What the conversation actually looks like on a morning when the plan and the body disagree.

Illustrative exchange. The lookup and skills lines are shown in the real app too — you can always see what it read before it answered.

Things it deliberately doesn't do

A short list, and an important one. Most of what makes training apps stressful is optional.

The long game

Here's the part the 12-week PDF can't say out loud: you are not a 12-week project.

• Athlete development runs in years, not blocks. Aerobic base, tendon resilience, durability late in a long day — these are built over seasons. A training block is a chapter, not the book.
• gpeak keeps one continuous timeline. Plans are overlays on a single calendar rather than separate resets, so blocks stack end to end and the record carries forward. Off-plan weeks still show your actual training and recovery — because those weeks happened too, and they count.
• Consistency is the metric that survives. The unremarkable weeks are the ones that compound. gpeak is built to make them visible, so you can be proud of a boring, uninterrupted month — which is, genuinely, the hardest thing in endurance sport.

Under the hood

For the sort of person who reads this section. Deliberately unglamorous — it's a calendar that has to be right every morning, not a demo.

Questions people actually ask

Straight answers

Attribution

Garmin and Garmin Connect are trademarks of Garmin Ltd. or its subsidiaries. gpeak is an independent application and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Garmin. FinalSurge is a trademark of its respective owner.