North East Running

Create your own user interface This is the second of two posts looking at Strava and AI. To read the introduction - see  https://northeastrunning.blogspot.com/2026/10/analyse-your-running-using-ai.html Why download an App? When you can create your own? Claude has the ability to create 'Artefacts' which are basically clickable visualisations/presentations of data. So for the second part of my Strava MCP Claude experiments I thought I'd build my own visualisation interface into my running history. I decided I'd prioritise two views - (1) A world explorer and (2) a summary of my marathons. The first view below summarises all of my runs since 2017. A mix of work trips and family holidays means I have been fortunate to explore the world a bit - and having a clickable map which groups runs into areas looks so cool. World explorer view Most of this is generated from me just typing into Strava - " Create an artefact - impress me with what you can do - and use the data from...

Strava Athlete Intelligence About a year ago Strava announced Athlete Intelligence. Every tool out there had an AI feature, so Strava needed one too. The launch promised 'personalised feedback' and 'performance insight'.  https://stories.strava.com/articles/meet-athlete-intelligence-personalized-ai-insights-that-help-you-reach-your I didn't love it and turned it off. It stated the obvious, it was overly complimentary and didn't recognise the difference between recovery easy runs and runs where you'd obviously put the effort in. And this was even though I tagged training sessions as 'workouts' and races as 'races'. I noticed negative feedback on forums - and an unscientific search of forums as shown below seems to lean towards a 'not very good'/'how do you switch it off' type of vibe. Do it yourself with Google Meanwhile, the out of the box AI tools were getting better and better. Google Gemini side bar 'Ask Gemini' wi...

For a number of years now I have ran seven days a week most weeks. Very roughly following: Monday = 10k easy Tuesday = Effort (either intervals or tempo) Wednesday = 10k easy Thursday = Effort (either intervals or tempo) Friday = 8k extra easy Sat + Sun = either parkrun + long run OR 5k easy + race day A typical week is 74-80km per week. For someone who has ran competitively for less than 10 years... My theory (hope!) is that if you put consistent effort in, and run smart having recovery days, then your times slowly get better.  (My first sub-20 parkrun was 2016, my first proper race 2018) However, by the middle of this year I ran a couple of races well off the pace. May, June and July were not good months for running. Two examples below. The first was Riverside parkrun - a run I have done many times before and in the 12 months prior had kept all of the splits below 3:30km to put in times in the low 17s. However, the run below, was relatively poor. In particularly km4 which at 3:49...

When using a running watch (I use a Garmin) the Lap feature is pretty useful. It allows you to break your run into set distances (a Lap). Then when analysing on the Garmin or Strava website/app you can see your Splits, which are an analysis of your performance for each Lap. For example, ' For the 8th km of the race my average pace was 3:40/km, my heartbeat was 178bpm, and the elevation difference was +6m giving me a grade adjusted pace (gap) of 3:38/km '.  1. Auto lap Out of the box, most running watches automatically record a lap at 1.00 km (or 1.00 miles if you want to be old school ). The image below shows the default setting on my watch. Auto laps - the default option The screenshot below shows the automatic analysis of a recent race I did (Jarrow 10k) - I knew I needed 3:33/km average for a PB. I very nearly got it - but the laps/splits into the breeze where the pace was slipping to 3:40/km meant I just missed out. During the race by watch notified me every km so I knew wh...