A coach that starts the conversation
YOUB came in from its makers, and it is a genuinely different shape from the AI coaches that filled up July. There is no plan grid to open every morning. The coach — it goes by Ben — messages you in the app or over WhatsApp: how did that ride feel, you slept badly again, Thursday looks unrealistic. The plan gets built in that conversation in the first place.
The reason it can say Thursday looks unrealistic is Google Calendar. YOUB reads your actual week alongside training from Garmin, Strava, WHOOP, Oura, Polar, Suunto or Wahoo, so meetings and travel are inputs rather than excuses you have to type in. When it wants to change a session it weighs planned load against sleep, HRV, recovery and what you actually completed, then tells you whether to keep, move, shorten or replace it — with the reasoning attached instead of a silent edit to your week.
Worth knowing before you connect: the Strava side is read-only. It pulls your completed sessions — sport, duration, distance, elevation, intensity — to understand your history, and writes nothing back. Sleep and recovery do not come from Strava either, and onboarding is built around Garmin, so Strava works best here as one source among several rather than the only one. It is Austrian, the app landed on iOS in May, and the race calendar is DACH-heavy — 80+ regional events with course profiles — which makes it a useful entry for German-speaking athletes in particular. Two weeks free, then €29/month billed yearly or €35 monthly, with no free tier.
Let the weather do some of the work
KOM Hunter also came in from its maker, and the premise is refreshingly narrow: instead of training harder for a segment, turn up on the day the wind is behind you. Connect Strava, search a location, and it ranks the public segments around you by how much effective tailwind they will have — hour by hour, up to three days ahead, so you can pick the window rather than react to it. Segments only appear at all once there is at least 5 km/h of tailwind going your way.
If you ride with a power meter it goes further: a Windfall Score per segment, combining the forecast, the segment's history and current KOM or QOM time, and your own power data into one number for whether today is actually the day. Without a power meter you still get live tailwind speeds everywhere, just not personalised. Star a segment and it stars on Strava too, which is how it reaches your Garmin or Wahoo; premium adds a route builder that chains your picks into a loop and hands you a GPX. Free forever for three searches a day, with premium at €9.99 for a three-month season pass or €23.99 a year — and it is worth knowing that descents go unscored on purpose rather than getting a number the physics cannot support.
Your runs, on the wall
RunInk is the third maker submission of the month, and it turns Strava history into map posters. One mode does what you would expect — a single run drawn on its own with its stats. The other is the reason to look: pick a city and it layers every run you have ever logged there into one heat-map artwork, so the poster is not a route but the shape of where you actually go.
Ten themes, switchable while you design, and the editor is free with no card. Prints start at $25 for a 30x40cm matte and top out at $75 framed, with printing and shipping included in the price. One thing the homepage does not spell out: their terms describe the free download as watermarked, with a clean digital file sold separately. Worth knowing before you get attached to what is on screen.
Which upgrade is actually worth buying
Marginal Watts asks the question in the right order. Not “how much faster are these wheels” but “of everything I could change, which buys the most time per pound spent” — and then it ranks them. Tyre pressure and riding position sit in the same list as a £2,000 wheelset, which is the point, because the free things keep winning. Underneath it solves the Martin et al. (1998) power model for your ride, then re-solves it once per change.
What lifts it above the usual calculator is the sourcing. The figures come from 1,383 published measurements across 230 sources, two thirds of them peer-reviewed or independent lab work, and every figure in the tool carries its source and grade. Anything not derived from a test is labelled an estimate rather than dressed up as a measurement, 209 measurements are flagged where the publisher now sells the thing it measured, and the dataset documents 17 ways a published cycling number can be misread. One caveat: its Strava connection is capped while the site is in beta and waiting on Strava's API approval, so you may not be able to connect yet — uploading a GPX works for everyone.
Where your fuel actually went
FuelStint rebuilds each Strava session second by second and models two things across it: how far your muscle glycogen fell, and how much you sweated out. Intensity comes from the Karvonen method against your own max and resting heart rate, or from power if you have it, and sweat loss is estimated from your weight, the intensity and the weather actually on your route. The value is the pattern over weeks — where you keep running dry.
It also runs forward: hand the simulator a GPX of a course you are targeting and it projects glycogen and hydration over it, which turns into a carbohydrate and fluid plan for that specific race rather than a rule of thumb. You can try that part without an account. It reads Strava and writes nothing back unless you switch on an option that adds a nutrition summary to your activity description. Free during early access, data hosted in France — and worth knowing it is French-language only, with no English version yet.
That was August. If you built something that connects to Strava, or you use something that should be on here, send it over.