How to execute your Runnerly sessions

Runnerly morning readiness

The onboarding assessment records Day 1 of four recovery measurements: waking heart rate, body weight, time to bed and perceived hours slept. Baseline establishment is an explicit part of Runnerly: Day 1 is recorded during onboarding, Days 2–21 are recorded on Today, and Day 21 completes the personal baseline. Automatic readiness decisions begin on the following morning.

After establishment, Runnerly protects the baseline from normalising accumulated fatigue. A morning classified as caution, easy day or rest day can still change today’s training decision, but it is not admitted into the trusted 21-morning baseline. Only mornings inside the established normal range can gradually refresh that baseline. This protected-baseline behaviour is a Runnerly safeguard layered on top of the four recovery indicators.

If two indicators move outside the established range, Runnerly recommends an easy day. If more than two move outside the range, it recommends rest. One changed indicator is a caution signal rather than an automatic cancellation.

The morning check and the existing next-morning workout recovery check serve different purposes. Morning readiness asks whether today is an appropriate day for the planned load; workout recovery helps Runnerly decide whether a completed development session should progress, repeat or be protected.

Runnerly training priority

Plan and workout pages show a priority band such as P1–P3. P1 represents the most important training role and P7 the lowest. The band is an internal scheduling guide, not a score for how hard you should run.

When training time has to be reduced, Runnerly protects the important development work before lower-priority support sessions. The exact session mix still follows your Runnerly Capacity, Economy, Durability and Reserve needs, availability and recovery rather than copying a fixed seven-day template.

Why this session today?

Today and each workout page now explain the role of the session before showing the detailed evidence. Runnerly tells you what adaptation the session is intended to support, which current evidence constrains the dose, and why the session is being protected, progressed or repeated.

Duration and pace are deliberately explained separately. Repeatable capacity governs how much running Runnerly is prepared to prescribe; confirmed fitness evidence governs pace and race-specific references. A successful session can therefore progress one without silently increasing the other.

If a recent progression has already used the rolling seven-day progression budget, the explanation may say that the current dose is being repeated. That is deliberate consolidation rather than a failed progression.

What happens when a session is missed?

Runnerly does not automatically squeeze missed work into the remaining days. Lower-priority support sessions are dropped. Missed taper work is also dropped because freshness takes precedence.

A missed P1 or P2 running session may be deferred only when Runnerly can replace a lower-priority Restore, Aerobic or Strength slot within the next three days without creating another demanding session on the same day or placing it too close to the next P1/P2 session. No extra training day is added.

If no safe slot exists, the session is dropped and the plan continues. The Today and Progress pages show whether a missed session was safely deferred or deliberately dropped.

Dynamic fitness and pace updating

Runnerly keeps fitness/pace separate from repeatable-duration capacity. A longer tolerated run can change duration evidence without making future sessions faster. Pace changes require representative performance evidence.

You can add a race or hard time-trial result, or a measured 12-minute run/walk, from Progress. Clean stronger evidence can move the confirmed fitness level by only one step at a time. One slower result never reduces the pace prescription by itself; Runnerly requires two clean lower performances at least seven days apart before making one cautious downward step.

Performance affected by heat, wind, illness, pain, travel, poor sleep or fuelling problems can still be recorded but is held as context-limited evidence. During an A-race taper, new performance evidence is also retained without changing race-week pace prescriptions.

Reading Progress

Progress now separates four trajectories rather than collapsing them into one score: confirmed repeatable capacity, confirmed fitness/pace level, recent recovery/readiness, and the pattern of progression decisions.

The charts are intentionally based on confirmed evidence. A single exceptional long run does not redraw the capacity line and one poor race does not immediately lower the fitness line. The timelines beneath the charts explain the evidence and adaptation decisions that produced each change.

Reading a prescription

4 × 8 min Bridge, 2 min easy jog means four eight-minute Bridge efforts. Jog easily for two minutes after each of the first three repetitions and use the final easy running as the start of your cool-down.

6 × 1 km at current 10K pace, 60–75 sec easy jog means each kilometre is run at the pace your current evidence supports now, not an aspirational goal pace. The recovery is deliberately short and easy.

RPE is your whole-session rating of perceived exertion on a 1–10 scale. A planned RPE is a guide to the intended load, not a target you must force yourself to reach.

For structured Bridge and Specific sessions, use easy running before the first repetition and after the final repetition so the whole workout is close to the approximate duration shown on the workout page. The duration is a practical guide rather than a requirement to finish on an exact second.

Runnerly terminology, quantitative prescription underneath

The session families you see in the planner remain Runnerly: Restore, Aerobic, Steady, Bridge, Specific, Neuromuscular, Durability and Strength. Behind those labels, Runnerly uses a quantitative prescription layer for training-level pace bands, repeatable-duration fractions, workout-priority bands and morning recovery indicators. Runnerly's adaptation, race-priority, taper and strength logic remains in place.

The calculation roles stay behind the scenes so the athlete sees one consistent Runnerly vocabulary rather than a second set of workout labels.

Progression is organised as a repeating development rhythm rather than a simple week-number increase. Some weeks consolidate aerobic work, some extend durability and race-relevant work, and others emphasise Bridge development. Session priority also changes with the phase: as the race approaches, Specific work can rise in importance while lower-priority support work is the first to disappear when fewer running days are available. Duration, pace and repetition volume are progressed separately so Runnerly does not automatically make every variable harder at the same time.

Runnerly also applies a rolling seven-day progression budget. A successful workout can still be held at the same dose when another recent adaptation has already used the available progression budget. This is deliberate consolidation: it prevents several session families, duration and quality demands from all escalating together.

Self-correcting pace and missed-session logic

Runnerly now treats performance-derived fitness as a second adaptive state alongside repeatable capacity. A clean stronger performance can move the fitness state conservatively; a single slower result is treated as evidence to watch rather than proof that fitness has fallen. This prevents one anomalous race or time trial from rewriting the training plan.

Missed sessions are handled by priority and spacing rather than by adding lost work back into the calendar. Important work may replace a lower-priority support slot when there is sufficient recovery space; otherwise the missed session is allowed to go. The objective is to preserve the adaptation sequence, not to preserve every scheduled kilometre.

Dynamic repeatable capacity

Your assessment value is the starting repeatable maximum, not a number Runnerly assumes must stay fixed for the whole plan. Controlled Durability and Steady sessions can provide evidence that your repeatable capacity has moved on, but a single long run is not enough.

Runnerly waits for satisfactory next-morning recovery and accumulates evidence before making a small change. Durability provides stronger evidence than Steady, and each confirmed increase is deliberately limited. If recovery is poor, the last confirmed capacity is retained and only the unconfirmed candidate is cleared.

Pending capacity evidence expires after 21 days if it is not reconfirmed, while the last confirmed repeatable capacity is retained. Once the morning-readiness baseline is active, an easy/rest morning prevents capacity progression and a caution morning holds the evidence without erasing the confirmed value.