Learns from every run. Paces every climb.
Grade turns the runs you’re already logging in Garmin, Intervals.icu, or TrainingPeaks into a real model of how you climb, descend, hold up over hours, and even how you respond to heat. Whether it’s a vertical K or a hundred-mile ultra, that same model plans your pace, fueling, and effort for the actual course, and keeps adjusting while you run it.
Works with
The problem
A grade-adjusted formula isn’t the same as a model of you.
Elevation-aware pacing tools, including the one already built into your watch, apply one published cost curve to every runner: the same penalty for a 9% climb whether you power-hike it efficiently or grind it flat-footed. Grade throws that shared curve out. It fits your own curve from your actual climb and descent splits, so two runners on the same course get different plans, because they’re different runners.
Most platforms need a number you type in, or a maximal test, to set your zones. Manual numbers go stale fast, and max-effort tests are rare, they don’t say much about how you’re doing this week. Meanwhile most of your training, the easy runs and long climbs sitting below threshold, gets treated as noise.
Grade uses that history instead. It fits your thresholds directly from how your heart rate responds to pace and power across everyday runs, tuned for the terrain you ran them on. Near-max efforts help when you have them, but they’re not required. Recovery jogs, run-walk long days, even hikes with the poles out, all count as data.
Fit from 46 runs over 10 weeks
That climb-and-descent model doesn’t stop at pace. The same profile carries through vertical speed, surface underfoot, and heat load, from sessions you’ve actually run in it. A treadmill session at 12% incline and a technical descent on singletrack both feed the same athlete profile, kept in context.
Pair a compatible Bluetooth treadmill and Grade drives the speed and incline through a structured session for you, including built-in tests like an LT1 heart-rate drift protocol at a fixed grade. Your watch keeps recording as usual, Grade just runs the workout.
It’s the same model that estimates your thresholds from training history, just running live. Your targets come from what your body is doing that day, not a plan you typed in a month ago.
Next: 2:00 recovery at 9% incline, then interval 5 at 15%
Most platforms either publish a formula and leave the inputs to you, or estimate everything behind a sealed model you can’t inspect. Grade keeps a record for every estimate: which runs it came from, how much weight each one carried, and the rule that produced it. When a threshold moves, you can see the runs that moved it. When Grade isn’t confident, it says so instead of guessing quietly.
Driven by
Grade isn’t another place to log your runs. It reads history from Garmin, Intervals.icu, and TrainingPeaks, learns from it, and hands back thresholds, baselines, and race plans you can act on or sync back to your calendar. Outdoor trail runs and indoor treadmill sessions feed the same athlete model; your watch stays the recording authority.
Reads history from
One athlete model
Hands back
Your watch stays the recording authority
On race day
The same model, live on the course.
Load a race’s GPX and Grade turns your training model into a plan for the climbs, the descents, and the long middle, not a flat-pace calculator. Once you’re moving, it watches your effort and re-plans what’s ahead: what you planned (Baseline), what you should do right now (Adjusted), and what you’re actually doing (You). As you fatigue and conditions change, like heat, Grade adjusts the plan instead of leaving you to guess.
Before the start, Grade pulls the race-day forecast, checks it against how you’ve handled heat in training, and hands you a fueling plan, carbs, sodium, fluids, timed to the course, plus a finish-time range instead of a single flat-pace guess.
The same numbers push straight to a Garmin data field, so the plan is on your wrist even when your phone stays in the drop bag.
Sable Ridge Climb
Structural differentiation
How Grade differs
The result
One model. Every run makes it sharper.
Thresholds, baselines, and pacing targets update as you train, not on a schedule you manage yourself. On a compatible treadmill, the same model runs your workout live. On race day, it paces your climbs and adjusts when the day doesn’t go to plan. Grade doesn’t replace your watch or your training log, it reads what they already know and puts it to work.
UTMB course elevation. Refit after every run.