Why Azimuth

I built this for myself first.

Berlin Marathon 2026, sub-3:30, with two kids under two and a job that puts me on a plane most weeks. Every plan I tried was either too rigid to survive a real life, or too generic to take seriously. The off-the-shelf plans assumed I’d run on the days they said. The premium platforms wanted a coach in the loop, but a coach can’t fly with me to Atlanta and adjust Wednesday’s tempo because the baby was up at 3am. And paying for a personalised plan meant paying for someone to tell me what I already knew — that I’d missed three workouts and needed to cut something to recover.

So I started using AI to build a plan that flexed with my week. It worked. But the more I trained, the more I realised the plan was the easy part. The hard part was knowing whether I was actually on track.

There’s a mountain of marathon physiology research that the elite world has been quietly using for years — critical speed, lactate threshold dynamics, fractional utilisation, acute-to-chronic workload ratios, aerobic decoupling, the durability of pace at hour three of a long run. Decades of peer-reviewed work that genuinely predicts marathon performance, and almost none of it surfaces in the apps amateurs actually use. We get pace zones and weekly mileage and a vague “you’re trending up.” Meanwhile the science has answers to the questions we’re actually asking: am I really ready? What’s the highest-leverage thing to do this week? When should I worry?

I went deep on the literature — every paper I could find on what predicts marathon performance for runners like me. Then I built a 13-component readiness score that operationalises it. Not a black box, not a vibes-based estimate. A number you can break down to its inputs and trace back to the studies it came from. And critically, a number that’s honest about what it doesn’t yet know. If you haven’t run a tune-up race, the framework tells you. If your wellness data hasn’t synced for two weeks, it tells you that too. The score earns its confidence.

Once I had it working, I knew I wasn’t the only one who needed it.

This is for the runners who started a plan and quit because life happened and the plan couldn’t bend. It’s for the ones who tried to push through and ended up injured, because nothing in their app told them their workload had spiked into the danger zone. It’s for the ones who followed the plan to the letter, did everything asked of them, and still missed their goal — because the data that actually matters was never put in front of them. It’s for the runners who are passionate, committed, and ambitious, and who deserve more than a printed PDF and a hope.

Azimuth means a bearing — a direction of travel. Not where you’re pointed, not where the wind is blowing. Where you’re actually going, given everything acting on you right now. That word does the work this app does. Your goal is fixed. Your conditions aren’t. The job of the dashboard is to read the conditions honestly and tell you what bearing you’re on, so you can adjust before you drift.

The science is there. The plan is there. The translation from one to the other — taking acute-to-chronic workload ratio and saying “ease off this week, you’re spiking” — that’s the part most apps don’t do, and that’s the part Azimuth is built around. You don’t have to learn what decoupling means. You have to know that the run you did yesterday told us something about your aerobic durability, and here’s what to do with that information.

You bring the running. The ambition, the discipline, the early alarms, the long miles. We bring the read on it. The science, the daily recompute, the honest signal when conditions change. The plan that adjusts when it needs to and holds the line when it doesn’t.

You run. We navigate.