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Templates
Reusable plans of weeks. Write one once, then give it to as many athletes as you want.
A template is a plan of weeks you write once and reuse. Find them under Templates in the sidebar.
A template belongs to you, not to an athlete. No athlete ever sees one, and nothing in a template affects anyone's training until you apply it.
A template is not a calendar
| Athlete calendar | Template | |
|---|---|---|
| Belongs to | an athlete | you |
| The athlete sees | everything, immediately | nothing, ever |
| Dates | real | week 1 day 1, or a start you set |
| Changing it | changes the athlete's plan | changes nothing already applied |
That last row is the one to remember. Applying a template copies its workouts onto a calendar; the copies are ordinary workouts from then on. Editing the template later does not reach back to them.
Writing one
Create a template with a name and a length. The editor is the calendar's week grid with the dates taken out: rows read Week 1, Week 2, and the day columns follow your own first day of the week (Settings → Preferences). Give it a start date and the dates come back, as below.
- Add a workout on any day the same way you do on a calendar: click the day and type it,
10km easyor8x1km / 200m, then Enter. The dashed + slot under the day's name opens the full composer instead. Click a workout to rewrite it. - Right-click a workout for its own menu: category, time of day, Edit, Copy, Select this workout or Select this week, and Delete. Right-clicking the space around it still opens the day's menu.
- Walk the weeks from the keyboard. The arrow keys move a day left and right, a week up and down, and stop at the template's first and last day. ⌘V puts the clipboard down on the day you're on, including a week copied off an athlete's calendar, or a plan pasted straight out of a spreadsheet.
- Move a workout by dragging it to another day, or up and down within a day to reorder it. Hold Alt while dragging to leave the original where it is and drop a copy on the new day.
- Add or remove a week from the week header. Removing a week closes the gap behind it, so the weeks stay consecutive.
- ⌘Z and ⌘⇧Z (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z on Windows) undo and redo, as far back as you like. Changes save as you make them.
- A template holds up to 52 weeks and 1000 workouts.
Give it a start date
A template is a shape by default: four weeks, or twelve, applied wherever you point them. Give it a start date and it becomes a block in a particular spring.
Open Settings from the row menu on the templates list, or the gear in the editor header. Pick the day week 1 day 1 falls on. Clear takes it off again.
A template with a start date reads as the calendar it will become. The week headers carry the dates they cover, the day columns are the days they actually are, and today is marked where it falls in the block. Applying it then asks for nothing but the athletes: the start date is already filled in.
The date belongs to the template, not to any athlete. Moving it in the apply dialog is a one off for that apply and never writes back.
What the workouts say
A workout in a template is drawn as the workout it will become: the same card, from the same numbers an apply would land. Paces, distances and load only exist against an athlete, though, and a template belongs to none, so a card shows an estimated duration and nothing else until you name someone.
Preview for an athlete in the editor header does that naming. Pick one of your athletes and every workout re-prices against their zones: what a @ Z2 hour costs them, how far their 8x3min covers. The header then reads Previewing for them, because that is all it is: a way of reading the template, not part of it. Nothing is changed, nothing is written to their calendar, and nobody else sees the choice.
Hover a workout to read its notation.
Write in zones, not in paces
A template given to seven athletes should mean seven different things for them. Zone targets like @ Z2 and time-based work like 8x3min re-price themselves for whoever receives them. An absolute pace like @ 3:45/km and a fixed rep distance do not. They mean the same thing for everyone, which is sometimes what you want and usually not.
Nothing stops you writing an absolute pace. It is worth knowing which kind you wrote.
Copying between a template and a calendar
The clipboard crosses the two, both ways, with the same gesture.
- Out of a template: Copy on a week header, then open any athlete's calendar and paste.
- Into a template: copy on a calendar (⌘C, or Copy week on the week header), then open a template and either right-click the day you want it on, or click that day and press ⌘V.
To take some of a week rather than all of it, ⌘-click (Ctrl-click on Windows) each workout, or Shift-click to take a range, then Copy in the bar that appears at the bottom. ⌘C does the same. Esc drops the selection. Put them down on the day you want them on: right-click it, or click it and press ⌘V.
A week keeps its weekdays: Tuesday's workout lands on Tuesday, the long run on Sunday, whichever day of the target week you click. Workouts you picked out by hand land on the day you put them down on instead, keeping the gaps between them: two sessions three days apart land three days apart. A plan that runs past the end of a template lengthens it.
See Calendar for how copying works on the calendar side.
Giving a template to athletes
Apply to athletes: from the row menu on the templates list, or the button in the editor. Pick the athletes and one start date.
A template with a start date opens on its own date, and that is the whole question answered. A template without one asks how to read the date you pick:
| Start | Week 1 day 1 lands on |
|---|---|
| Align to the week (default) | the start of the week containing the date you picked |
| Exact date | the date you picked |
Aligning is the default because a training week is weekday-shaped: the long run is at the weekend because that is when people have time, and weekly summaries are measured on real week boundaries. Start a plan on a Wednesday without aligning and every workout moves two days off the weekday you wrote it on. Use the exact date when the plan genuinely starts mid-week, such as a taper beginning the day after a camp ends.
Applying adds. Nothing already on the athlete's calendar is replaced, and a workout that lands on a day that already holds one goes below it.
Applying only ever lands ahead
No workout lands on a day that is already over. A plan is a claim about days that have not happened yet, so an apply reaching back into the past drops those workouts and lands the rest. Today itself still counts: a plan for today is still a plan.
This is what keeps a block whose start has slipped from writing sessions onto days the athlete has already trained, where they would sit as duplicates and count against compliance.
The dialog says so before you apply. It names how many workouts fall before today, and where the plan actually starts. If every day of the plan is behind you, Apply is off until you move the start date forward. Afterwards the report says it again, athlete by athlete, because an athlete a timezone ahead of you can have one more day behind them than you do.
The result reports per athlete, because a run of seven can partly fail. An athlete with no pace zones cannot receive a plan that paces by zone. They are flagged in the list before you apply, and refused whole rather than given half a plan.
Writing one with the agent
Open the assistant while you have a template open and it works on that block instead of on an athlete. Ask for weeks and it writes them: "draft four base weeks, long run on Sunday", "make week 3 a down week", "add strides to the easy days".
It writes a week at a time, and each write replaces that week whole. In preview mode you get one card per week and confirm the ones you want: take week 3, leave week 8. In auto mode the weeks land directly, and undo is in the editor as always.
It reads the block's shape, not anyone's risk
On a calendar the agent checks every change against the athlete's recent load: their acute-to-chronic ratio, how far a race is, whether the week jumps too far. None of that exists here. A template belongs to nobody and often has no dates at all, so there is no history to measure against and no answer that would still be right for the next athlete you gave it to.
What it checks instead is the block itself, which is true whoever runs it:
- how each week compares to the week before it, against the 10% guideline
- whether a down week arrives at the right cadence
- how much of each week is quality work, against 80/20
- whether hard days sit next to each other
- how much of a week its longest run is
- whether the block eases into a race it contains
Those are all proportions, so that is how the agent reports them: "week 4 is 118% of week 3", not "week 4 is 62 km". A template has no athlete to turn a proportion into a distance. Pick one in Previewing for to see real numbers on the grid; the agent's reading does not change when you do, and that is deliberate.
The load, the risk and the real dates all get decided at the apply, on the athlete's own calendar.
Your own workouts
The workouts in your templates are offered back to you whenever you add a workout, above the framework ones and grouped under the template each came from. See Workouts.