The Vertical Blog
Running, training science, and the tools we wish existed
Honest, technical guides written runner-to-runner. The tutorials are real: the coach we built is what happens when you want them to be automatic.
The $1/M Frontier: What Comes After the AI Benchmark Race
The median AI model now costs exactly $1 per million tokens. OpenRouter usage data shows builders splitting around that line, and speed is the next war.
Garmin Bought TrainingPeaks to Own the Athlete Relationship
Garmin's acquisition of TrainingPeaks is a defensive move. It protects Garmin's highest-spending athletes from Coros, Amazfit, and a pre-IPO Strava, and buys the services pivot that Connect+ failed to deliver.
The Gamification of Recovery
Heart rate variability is the real science under Whoop's recovery score, Oura's readiness and Garmin's HRV Status. But the evidence says HRV is a modest, noisy trend, not the precise daily verdict your watch sells.
The Gamification of VO2 Max
VO2 Max became running's hero metric because it's easy to estimate and satisfying to watch climb. But it's only one of 3 factors that determine performance.
How to Connect ChatGPT to Strava in 2026 (and What Just Changed)
Strava rewrote its API rules on June 1, 2026, aimed squarely at AI tools. Here are the three ways to get your Strava data into ChatGPT today, what each costs you, and which ones the new policy actually allows.
How to Connect ChatGPT to Garmin Data (2026 Guide)
Garmin has no personal API, the unofficial libraries broke in March 2026, and FIT files are binary. What actually works for getting Garmin data into ChatGPT, route by route, and what each one loses along the way.
ChatGPT as a Running Coach: The Best Prompt We Could Build (and Where It Breaks)
A copy-paste coaching prompt that gets the most out of ChatGPT, plus what peer-reviewed research, expert coach ratings, and OpenAI's own postmortems say about where AI training advice goes wrong.
No sponsored placements, no affiliate links. We cite real studies by name, and if you'd rather run the numbers yourself first, we keep a set of free training calculators.
Want a coach that does all of this automatically instead of stitching it together yourself? See how Vertical compares to ChatGPT, Runna, and TrainingPeaks Coach Edition.