Trail running and brick workouts as first-class sports

If you train for trail races or you stack a run onto your long ride to feel race-day legs, the workouts you actually need have always been a little out of reach in IntervalCoach. You could get there — describe it to Coach+, build a custom workout in TrainNow — but the planner didn't know that "Trail Run" or "Brick" were things you wanted to do on a given Saturday. So your weekly plan kept giving you flat-equivalent running paces and standalone rides, and you adapted around it.

Two updates this week change that. Trail running is now its own sport everywhere it matters — TrainNow, the catalog, race-event handling, post-workout analysis, and the schedule editor. And brick workouts move from "ask TrainNow each time" to a sport you mark on your weekly schedule, with the daily cron picking the pattern for you.

Trail running, end to end

Until now, picking Trail Run in IntervalCoach quietly downgraded to Run. You'd put down a mountain race on your calendar and the engine would file it as a road run, your pace plan would pretend the course was flat, and the catalog would offer you 400m repeats for a 2,500-vert event. Workable, not right.

It's right now. Trail Run is a separate sport in:

• The race-event editor. When you tell Coach+ "I have a trail race in eight weeks" or pick Trail Run in the in-app editor, the event is created with Intervals.icu type TrailRun instead of plain Run. That keeps elevation-aware pacing and trail-specific recovery curves alive for the rest of your plan.
• TrainNow. Trail Run sits next to Road Run in the sport picker. Picking it shows the running workout catalog plus only your Intervals.icu library workouts you've tagged as TrailRun — no road runs mixed in.
• The schedule editor. A new Trail Run chip in Training Plan → Edit Schedule so you can mark Saturday as a trail day without coaching-instructions gymnastics.
• Post-workout analysis. Trail runs now read like trail-run analysis. The AI prompt carries elevation gain, average vertical (m/km), distance category (sub-half / half-to-marathon / marathon-to-ultra / ultra), and a long-effort fueling cue for >2h sessions. So the analysis talks about vert gained, downhill quad load, climbing efficiency, and ultra fueling instead of treating a 1,200m-vert mountain run like a flat track session. There's also a heuristic fallback that flags mis-tagged trail runs (Run with ≥40m elevation per km) so athletes who forget to set the Intervals.icu sport tag still get trail-aware analysis.

The most fun piece of the work was five new catalog templates built specifically for trail and ultra athletes:

• Long Climb — 25-50 min sustained uphill at threshold. The VK / mountain-climb specificity workout.
• Downhill Repeats — tempo-effort descents with walk-up recovery. Eccentric quad conditioning, critical for ultras because descent damage is what blows up most athletes at km 60+.
• Power-Hike Intervals — alternate steep hike + run on grades >12%. The muscular endurance and walk-run rhythm an ultra runner needs in the second half.
• Technical Trail Intervals — VO2max efforts where pace targets are meaningless because the terrain dominates. Effort-driven, with technical-footing cues in the description.
• Ultra Time-on-Feet — 4-8h explicit easy aerobic effort. Fueling, GI, and mental durability practice for 50k+ events. Different in intent from a Trail Long Run (which is 90-180 min with elevation focus); this is the "what does six hours on feet feel like" session.

Athletes with a trail goal now see these picked preferentially in their weekly plan instead of road-running defaults. Hill Sprints, Hill Repeats, and Trail Long Run are also marked trail-specific so the same boost applies.

The last piece: race pace plans for trail events are now terrain-aware. When the event has elevation data on Intervals.icu, the pace-plan prompt receives total vert, distance, average vertical (m/km), terrain bucket (rolling / hilly / mountainous), and a power-hike threshold (~13% grade). So the advice talks about distinct effort bands for climbs, flats, and descents instead of a single flat-equivalent pace. Applies to A/B race-day pacing and C-event tactical advice.

Brick workouts in your weekly plan

Brick workouts — bike → run, back-to-back — have been available on TrainNow for a while. You'd open it on Saturday morning, pick a pattern, set the durations, and the engine would build both legs and upload them as a pair. The promise from that launch was that the daily cron and weekly plan would learn to do this on their own. That's now shipped.

In the same schedule editor where you mark Ride or Run on a day, there's a Brick chip. Switch it on for, say, every Saturday, and the daily cron handles the rest:

• It picks one of three patterns based on where you are in your training block.
• It splits the day's slot duration ~65/35 between ride and run.
• It uploads both legs to your calendar with a 3-minute T2 transition between them.

The patterns:

• Transition — sweet-spot ride into a short Z2 run. Fires in your Build phase or on any explicitly intensity-tagged day. The ride is hard, the run is intentionally short so you train the off-the-bike feel without compounding fatigue.
• Long endurance — Z2 ride into a steady Z2 run. The default for Base, Peak, Recovery, and Race Week. Pure aerobic durability work for 70.3/IM-style athletes.
• Race-sim — race-pace ride into a race-pace run. Fires automatically in the 2-3 weeks before your A-race if your primary sport is multi (triathlon). Both legs go at race intensity so the final brick stimulus before race day actually rehearses how race intensity feels. Race Week itself stays out of this window — race-pace bricks 3-7 days out compete with openers for taper recovery — so the last week falls back to long endurance.

And the part that took the most thought: bricks adapt to rough readiness. If today's recovery signals cap your intensity to Z2-or-below, or pull your daily TSS back by 30% or more, the brick collapses into a single easy ride. Stacking a run on top of legs that are already in a cap zone would compound fatigue you can't afford — the second leg punishes the body you're trying to protect. The downgrade is surfaced in the coaching note so you can see why the plan changed.

What's still in flight

iOS got the Trail Run + Brick chips this week too, so the schedule editor in the app matches the web. The bits I haven't shipped yet:

• Bricks render on the calendar and dashboard as two adjacent events. They'll group visually into one card in a follow-up — the underlying pair is already linked, the cosmetic work just hasn't landed.
• Trail-running's race-pace plans don't yet feed power-hike-zone targets back into the weekly catalog selection. Right now the trail boost is binary; making it terrain-specific (more power-hike intervals for steep-vert events, more downhill repeats for descent-heavy ones) is the next thing.

Both first-class now. If you've got a trail race on the calendar or a Saturday brick you do every week, open Training Plan → Edit Schedule and let the planner do the work it should have been doing all along.

— Martijn