Every run you do lands in the same place: a grey row in an app. Distance, pace, a heart-rate trace, a map. Strava is a near-perfect logbook and an almost useless coach — it records everything and interprets nothing. A good coach does the opposite. They glance at your week and tell you the one thing that matters: you jumped your volume too fast, you spent the whole week in the grey zone, that “easy” run was secretly a threshold effort. Most of us never get that read. So I handed the job to Claude.
The setup is three moves
The mechanics are almost boringly simple. In Claude you connect the tools it needs, give it a standing instruction, and let it run on a schedule — that’s what the connectors and recurring tasks are for. Mine fires every Sunday evening and lands in my inbox before I’ve finished stretching.
- Connect Strava (read-only) so it can pull the week’s activities — distance, moving time, pace, elevation, heart rate, and which shoes you wore.
- Connect email so it can send the finished report as a clean HTML summary rather than a wall of chat.
- Write the brief and schedule it — a recurring task, in my case Sunday at 19:00, covering the week just gone.
The brief is the whole game
“Summarise my week” gets you a summary. A coaching brief gets you a coach. The entire difference is in what you ask for, and it pays to be demanding. Mine tells Claude to read the week the way an experienced endurance coach would, and to stay specific to the actual numbers:
- Lead with the headline totals — distance, elevation, moving time, number of runs — and a week-over-week comparison, flagging any jump beyond roughly 10%.
- Judge the intensity distribution — the easy / moderate / hard split — and say whether it’s sensibly polarised or stuck in the moderate grey zone.
- Check pacing within key sessions — did the effort hold, drift, or fall apart, and did that match the point of the session?
- Look for fatigue and progression — heart-rate drift at a steady pace, pace decaying at constant effort, or gains over comparable past efforts.
- Place the week in a block — base, build, peak, taper or recovery — and flag overreaching, or any run whose execution betrays its intent, like intervals run too timidly.
It asks for tight prose over bullet spam, metric units, British English, and no motivational filler. What comes back reads like a note from someone who actually watched your week.
The part that makes it trustworthy
Here’s what surprised me most, and it’s why I keep it: the brief tells Claude to admit what it can’t see. Training load is only half the picture. Readiness and recovery live in sleep, HRV and resting heart rate — none of which are in Strava — so a good report says “I can’t assess recovery from this data” rather than inventing a verdict from mileage alone. When a run has no heart-rate data it estimates zones from pace, and says it’s estimating. That honesty is the whole difference between a useful assistant and a confident fabricator.
A coach who tells you what they can’t see is worth more than one who cheerfully guesses.
It isn’t a replacement for a human coach who knows your body, your life and your goal race. But as a weekly sanity check — did I overcook it, am I drifting into the grey zone, is this week actually building anything — it’s fast, direct, and free of flattery.
Two ways to make the numbers mean something
A Sunday-night email is one way to make your training data matter — the cold, honest, analytical read that keeps you healthy and pointed in the right direction. The other half is warmer, and it arrives at the end. When the block is done and the race is run, the same numbers behind this week’s report deserve to become something you can hold, not an email you archive. That’s the part we build: when your season’s finished, turn the whole thing into a book — the grey-zone weeks and breakthrough sessions and all. Let Claude read your training; let Skoma keep it.