Training cycles
The Training cycles screen is where a season is planned rather than a week. Instead of the day-to-day calendar, it shows one athlete's whole training year on a horizontal timeline, so you can see how the blocks you have built lead into the races that matter.
You open it from Training cycles in the main menu. Coaches plan here; athletes can open the same screen to see the plan and write their summaries.
Who the plan belongs to
A training plan belongs to the club, not to the coach who wrote it. Every coach in your club sees the same macrocycles and mesocycles for an athlete you share, and can change them. An assistant can build a block for the head coach to review, or a colleague can pick an athlete up while you are away, without anything being handed over first.
Changing a cycle needs the Publish permission. A coach with only Prepare opens the screen and reads the plan, but cannot draw, drag or save — training cycles have no draft state, so there is nothing to prepare privately before publishing.
Their cycles go with them. Your club stops seeing that athlete's macrocycles and mesocycles, and the athlete keeps them — the plan was made for them, so it stays theirs. Reconnecting the athlete later does not bring the old cycles back to the club.
Reading the timeline
Time runs left to right, one column per week, and you scroll sideways through the year. The screen opens centred on today.
Reading from the top:
- Month and Week starts — where you are in the year.
- Week — the calendar week number.
- Weeks to competition — a countdown to the athlete's next A competition (see Priority). Where no priorities are set, it counts to the next competition of any kind.
- Competitions — a marker on the day of each competition, with its name beside it.
- Macrocycle, Mesocycle and Microcycle — one track each, so a mesocycle sits directly under the macrocycle it belongs to.
A vertical line marks today. Inside every week column there are seven faint ticks, one per day, so a cycle that starts mid-week visibly starts on the right day.
The three kinds of cycle
- Macrocycle — the large block, usually a few months: a whole build towards a goal competition.
- Mesocycle — a focused phase inside it, usually a few weeks: a base period, a hill block, a taper.
- Microcycle — one training week. These are created for you automatically and always run Monday to Sunday; you can give one a name and a purpose, but not change its dates.
Macrocycles and mesocycles can start and end on any day of the week, and can be as short as a single day. A race on a Wednesday, a block that is not a whole number of weeks, a three-day taper before a B race — all of these can now be planned exactly as you would write them.
The duration shown on a cycle follows suit: whole weeks are described in weeks, anything else in days, so a fifteen-day block reads as 15 days rather than being rounded to a number of weeks.
Adding a cycle
Drag across the track you want. Draw on the Macrocycle row for a macrocycle, on the Mesocycle row for a mesocycle — the type follows the row you drew on, so you do not have to set it separately. A dashed outline shows what you are about to create.
Then fill in the form below the timeline:
- Cycle period — the exact start and end dates. The drag gives you a rough range; adjust the days here.
- Name and Purpose — at least one is required. The purpose is where the block's intent belongs: what it develops and why.
- Cycle colour — how the cycle is drawn on this screen and on the athlete's calendar.
Press Add to save it.
Two mesocycles cannot share a day, and neither can two macrocycles. A mesocycle must also sit entirely inside a macrocycle, or entirely outside it. While you drag, a range that would clash turns red, so you can see the problem before saving rather than after.
Cycles do not have to be contiguous — gaps between blocks are allowed.
Editing and removing
Editing needs the Publish permission; with only Prepare the timeline is read-only.
Click any cycle bar to load it into the form, then change what you need and press Save. Remove deletes it. Escape clears the selection and closes the form.
To change a cycle's dates on the timeline, drag either end of its bar. The new range loads into the form, and Save commits it — nothing is written until you do, so a mis-drag costs nothing. A range that would clash turns red and is not applied. Very short bars have no handles, because there would be no room to grab them; use the date fields for those.
Clicking a cycle bar on the athlete's main calendar opens this screen with that cycle already selected.
Copying cycles to another athlete
A block that worked for one athlete can be reused. Select the cycle, press Copy, and choose the athletes to copy it to.
- Tick include subcycles to bring the mesocycles and microcycles inside it along with the macrocycle.
- Choose a target date to shift the whole block: a macrocycle that started on 1 October can be copied to start on 1 January, and every date inside it moves by the same number of days.
Without subcycles you can copy to any date. With subcycles the shift must be a whole number of weeks, because microcycles always run Monday to Sunday and a shift of a few days would leave them out of step with the calendar.
Copying fails if the target athlete already has cycles in that period, so an existing plan is never overwritten.
Competitions on the timeline
Competitions are what a periodization is built around, so they sit on the timeline with the cycles. A competition is the athlete's own entry — their start in a race, with its own priority and goal — while the race is the shared event in the catalogue that many athletes can enter.
Priority
Each competition can be marked A, B or C, shown as a letter beside its marker:
- A — a goal competition. The plan peaks for it.
- B — important, but not fully tapered for.
- C — raced while training through.
Priority is set per athlete, so the same race can be an A for one athlete and a C for another. It is what the Weeks to competition countdown targets, and it is what the AI Assistant builds a generated plan around — tapering into an A, easing for a few days before a B, training through a C. A competition an athlete has proposed and you have not yet approved is left out, since it is not agreed.
Adding a competition from here
Drag across the Competitions row to pick a period, and the competition dialog opens with the races in that window listed — so you can plan a season without already knowing every race by name. Open the list with the arrow beside the race field; races in countries the athlete already competes in are listed first.
The date defaults to the Sunday of the week you picked, since most races fall on a Sunday. If the race is on another day, pick it from the list and the date follows the race, or set it yourself when adding a race that isn't in the catalogue yet.
Click an existing marker to open it — so a competition added by mistake can be corrected or removed here, without moving to the calendar.
What a marker tells you
- Filled — a competition in the plan.
- Hollow — a draft, not yet published to the athlete.
- Dashed — proposed by the athlete and waiting for your answer.
Competitions an athlete proposes
By default an athlete adds a competition to their own calendar and that is the end of it, the same as before. If you would rather agree every start first, open Preferences and turn on Require coach approval for competitions added by athletes.
With that setting on, an athlete who trains with you proposes rather than adds. They are told so when they save it, the entry appears on both calendars with a dashed outline so you can both see it is not yet agreed, and you get a notification.
You can answer it from wherever you meet it: the marker on this timeline, the tile on the calendar, or the race's own page.
- Approve adds it to the plan. You can set the priority and goal you want, whatever the athlete suggested.
- Decline removes it from their calendar and tells them why, if you write a reply.
With a large roster, tick Needs approval on the Races screen to see only what is waiting on you.
An athlete who trains without a coach always adds competitions directly, whatever the setting says — there is nobody to ask.
Summaries
A cycle can be reviewed once it is over. On the last day of a cycle or later, both of you can write a summary:
- The athlete's summary — how the block felt, with an effort rating. Visible to the coach, who gets a notification when it is added.
- The coach's summary — your own notes on the block. Not visible to the athlete.
A cycle whose athlete has written a summary is drawn with a hatched pattern, so finished blocks with feedback stand out at a glance.
Generating cycles with the AI Assistant
Rather than building a season by hand, you can have the AI Assistant draft one — see Training cycles generation.
The generated plan works in whole weeks and starts on a Monday, which is why that dialog asks for a Monday-to-Sunday period. Once the cycles exist you can adjust any of them to the exact days you want, the same as one you drew yourself.