Concepts
Athlete settings
Everything you configure for one athlete — profile, zones, calendar, measurement, activity processing, and workout categories.
Athlete settings hold everything you configure for one athlete workspace. Open them from that athlete in the sidebar under More → Settings, or pick the athlete under Settings → Athletes.
Each section has its own page. The athlete's settings screen is an index: open a section to change anything. Whose workspace you're in is shown above the page title, so you always know which athlete a control applies to. Changes save as you make them.
Runtool splits the two by what you're doing: the Overview is where you read how an athlete is training right now, and settings is where you change the facts behind it. Nothing about the athlete is inferred behind the scenes and hidden — you see everything your plan is based on, and you can change it.
Settings apply to one athlete at a time
Every setting here belongs to the workspace you set it in. This is deliberate: a coach's athletes differ in timezone, units, and how their devices should be interpreted, so each workspace carries its own configuration. Change a setting in one workspace and every other workspace stays untouched.
Two training settings are yours, not the athlete's: the assistant's training framework (the coaching methodology it follows) and volume periodization (the week-over-week volume curve suggestions follow). Both apply to everyone you work with, and you set them in Settings → Runtool Agent. See Runtool Agent.
Your templates are yours too — reusable plans of weeks, kept under Templates in the sidebar rather than in settings, because they are something you write rather than a switch you set. The workouts in them are offered back whenever you add a workout, for anyone. See Templates.
First day of week is yours as well. It sets where every week starts — on the calendar, in load charts, and in the weekly summaries — for every athlete you open, because it is a property of who is reading rather than of who is training. Set it in Settings → Preferences.
Connecting a watch is neither — it authorizes your provider account, so it lives in Settings → Integrations. See Integrations.
Profile
Who this athlete is.
- Avatar — a colour, and optionally an icon or an emoji instead of initials. It's how you tell workspaces apart at a glance in the sidebar, the roster, and every list. Click the avatar to pick a colour and a mark; the colour draws the mark itself, on a soft tint of the same colour. An emoji brings its own colour, so picking one drops the colour setting. Reset to initials in the same picker clears both. Leave them unset and the avatar stays initials on neutral.
- About — a short description in the athlete's own words: what kind of runner they are and what they're working toward. Up to 600 characters. Your coach sees it on the Overview, and the Runtool Agent plans with it — background, what you respond to, and any constraint worth knowing before someone writes your week.
- Date of birth and gender — these feed the physiological side of processing (heart-rate expectations and load interpretation) and nothing else.
Zones
The athlete's pace and heart-rate zones, with the method they were derived from and the inputs behind them. Update them from a race result, a prediction, a lactate test, or by hand — every change is versioned, and past workouts keep reading against the zones that were active at the time.
The full zone model — the six pace zones, LT1/LT2 anchors, and the definition history — is on the Zones page.
Calendar
- Timezone — activities are matched to planned workouts using this timezone. Changing it can move past activities to a different calendar day.
- Unit system — metric or imperial, applied across the whole workspace. See Unit system.
Where the week starts is not here. It follows you rather than the athlete, so it lives in Settings → Preferences.
Measurement
- Planning volume metric — track and plan weekly volume by duration (hours) or by distance (km/mi). Affects weekly targets and how workout volume displays.
- Training load method — the algorithm that converts heart rate data into session load. EPOC models oxygen-debt accumulation; the exponential method weights high-intensity effort more aggressively; the 50-50 blend averages both.
Activity processing
How imported activities are analysed into workout structure, and how that structure displays:
- Snap to distance (track / indoor track) — round rep distances to plausible track distances, compensating for GPS error on repeated laps. See Pace methods.
- Activity merging — experimental: combine consecutive activities (for example a workout recorded in two files) into a single workout. You control the maximum gap in minutes and whether both parts must be the same sport.
- Compound rep style — whether structured reps like
800m + 400mdisplay as one compound line or merged. - Main-set-only titles — generate workout titles from the main set, leaving warmup and cooldown out.
See Import for the processing pipeline these settings feed.
Logging
When silence means a workout didn't happen, and when Runtool asks how one felt:
- Mark unlogged workouts as skipped — how long a past workout with nothing recorded waits before it counts as skipped: the same day, after 2 days, after 7 days, or never.
- Ask how it felt — which workout categories ask for an effort rating: quality, long and races; every workout; or never.
Both start on Follow my setup, which reads the athlete's connected devices. A device that syncs their runs makes silence meaningful, so an unlogged workout is marked skipped the same day and only quality, long, and race workouts ask for an effort rating. With nothing syncing, a past workout waits a week and every category asks. Setting either one explicitly overrides that. See Log a workout.
Workout categories
The rules that classify each run as quality, long, or easy. Runtool computes these categories from a workout's structure — you don't set them per workout — so this section controls what the classification means for this athlete.
- Long run threshold — the minimum duration for a continuous run to count as a long run. The rule is time-based: a run shorter than this counts as easy no matter how far it goes. Changing it re-labels this athlete's existing runs to match, and changes how the Runtool Agent plans and describes long runs.
- Default warm-up and Default cool-down — the easy running added either side of the work when you write a quality session. Easy and long runs get none, and a warm-up you write yourself is kept instead. Choose None to add nothing. See Workout notation.
Coaching
Only present for athletes you coach, not for your own workspace. It shows when the coaching relationship started, and it's where you end it. Ending coaching removes your access to that athlete's workspace; their training data stays with them, and the action cannot be undone.