Vertical AI Coach: Build Your Training Partner

Everything that matters about your running is specific to you: your physiology, your injury history, the hours you can train, the race you actually care about. Almost nothing about a standard training plan is. When Zinner and colleagues had coaching experts rate running plans generated from only minimal information about the runner, the experts marked them down. Give the plan real detail about the person and the ratings rise. Ramp the load faster than the body in front of you can handle, and you get injuries, which is how most runners stop: Fokkema and colleagues followed 774 new runners for six months, and nearly a third had quit, most often because they were injured.

Vertical started from these principles because Michele Riccardo Esposito, the creator of Vertical, experienced these pain points himself. Growing up, he did a lot of hiking and skiing, but not running. When he then started running in his twenties, he kept getting injured just like the runners in Fokkema’s study.

Recently, he used Vertical to train for one of the most epic races in the world: the Patrouille des Glaciers, a 53-kilometre ski mountaineering race from Zermatt to Verbier organised by the Swiss army. When an old Achilles injury started flaring up during preparation, Vertical was able to rework his plan, shifting from running to cycling and other low-impact activities to help him prepare rather than dropping out of the race.

How Vertical Works

TL;DR: Vertical listens to what you tell it, measures what your watch records, and applies published sports science to both whenever it makes a coaching call.

It starts with a conversation. You talk to your coach the way you would talk to a person, typed or spoken, in your own language. The coach will remember your preferences, history and how you handled past training blocks.

Underneath the conversation sit physiological models built on the best available sports science. They take the raw stream from your watch and turn it into things a coach can actually reason with: paces set from your own recent bests, zones anchored to your lactate thresholds rather than a percentage of max heart rate, a live read of your fitness and fatigue. And when Vertical builds your season, it does not pull a template off a shelf: it builds the plan that best fits your race, your available time and your limits, then reworks it as those change.

Finally, Vertical is built on a library of over 500 sports science papers, and it does not keep them in the basement. When the coach makes a call, it quotes the study behind it, right there in the chat, where you can open the paper and read it yourself. Ask why no single workout may go past 110 per cent of your biggest session in the last month, and it cites the 2025 Garmin-RUNSAFE study of 5,205 runners. Most coaching, human or software, asks you to take its word for it. Vertical shows it’s working.

Setup

• Take the assessment at getvertical.ai and generate your training plan.
• Connect your watch. Garmin directly; COROS, Suunto, Polar, WHOOP and Oura through Terra
• Tell the coach your race and your week: available time, other sports, anything it should know. Vertical reads your history and builds the plan from there
• iOS and Android apps are available

What the Coaching Actually Looks Like

In-depth activity analysis. Finish a session and Vertical compares what you did to what the session was for. After an easy run, it tells you whether you actually kept it easy; after a threshold session, whether you held the pace; after a long run, whether you held on or faded near the end. You get a short, plain summary of how it went and what it changes for next time, so the run teaches you something and does not just sit in a log.

Daily check-ins. Every morning, Vertical looks at your recovery, drawn from your own sleep, resting heart rate and HRV, and gives you an indication on how to approach your day.

When life moves, the week moves. A work trip lands on Thursday. You tell the coach, and it reshuffles: it pulls the quality session forward, protects the long run, and trims the strength session. It proposes, you approve, and nothing changes behind your back.

Workout alternatives. Short on time, tired, or the weather has turned? Ask for a different version of the day’s session, and Vertical gives you one: a shorter or easier take on the same workout, or a swap that keeps the point of the day intact. Its hard sessions already come in easier and harder versions, so the alternative is chosen on purpose, not improvised.

Insights. Step back from any single run and Vertical shows you the shape of your training: how your fitness and fatigue are trending, when your paces and thresholds have shifted, whether your easy weeks are actually easy. It is the picture that usually lives in a coach’s head or a messy spreadsheet, kept up to date for you, so you understand what you are doing rather than just doing it.

Integrations

• Garmin: activities, sleep, HRV, resting heart rate and stress in; structured workouts push back to the watch
• COROS: activities and wellness in; structured workouts push back to the watch
• Suunto and Polar: activities and wellness in, read-only
• WHOOP: recovery, HRV, resting heart rate and sleep
• Oura: readiness, HRV and sleep stages
• Clue and Flo: cycle tracking
• iOS and Android apps

Your Plan

The season plan is worked backwards from your race, solved as a constrained optimisation over as much as 52 weeks, not a template with your name dropped in. The guardrails hold every week: workload ratio capped at 1.3, fitness ramping no quicker than six points, never more than five build weeks before a recovery one.

Each day has a specific session, and the hard ones come in an easier and a harder version; your morning readiness and whatever you have told the coach decide which it suggests. Strength work sits next to the running, and both push to Garmin and COROS watches as structured workouts, so the intervals are on your wrist. Miss a session and the week rearranges itself rather than going stale.

Pricing

The assessment is free and needs no card. Vertical PRO is 25 dollars, 20 pounds, or 20 euros a month, after a seven-day trial.

Summary

Vertical is for endurance athletes who train towards something and want to understand what they are doing. It is running-first and takes the rest of your athletic life seriously: the strength work, the ride and the mountain day all count, and the plan moves when your body or your calendar does. Free assessment, then $ 25 a month after a seven-day trial.

Author: Michele Riccardo Esposito, founder of Vertical, edited by the5krunner.

Quick answers

What is Vertical and how does it work?

An AI running coach you talk to. It builds a season plan for your race, adjusts it daily from your watch data and what you tell it, and explains each call by citing the research behind it. Some of what you tell it acts on the schedule directly: an active injury blocks any push, whatever your numbers say that morning.

Which watches does Vertical work with, and does it send workouts back?

Vertical connects with Garmin, COROS, Suunto, Polar, WHOOP and Oura. Structured workouts, running, and strength push back to the watch on Garmin and COROS; the others are read-only. Strava and Apple Health are not supported.

Does Vertical replace a human coach?

It takes over one job a coach does: holding your data and your passing comments in one place and making a steady, explained call every morning. It does not do race tactics, technique, or the talk you need after a race goes wrong, and it will not know the morning to throw the data out. A good coach still earns their fee.

Last Updated on 30 July 2026 by the5krunner