Setting up the tracker

The Workout Tracker builds your season from your goal races, then corrects it week by week from what you actually did. Before it can do either, it needs three things from you: when you can train, what you can currently absorb, and what you are training for.

This is the first run, start to finish. Budget twenty minutes — most of it goes into two numbers. At the end you have a full season on the calendar and your watch feeding it on its own.

Before you start

1. Create the account

Go to tracker.montagneur.com and open Sign up. Three fields: your email, a password of at least eight characters, and your invitation code.

The tracker holds heart rate, heart-rate variability, sleep and weight. The privacy policy says exactly what is stored, where, and how to erase all of it — worth two minutes before you type anything.

2. Find the settings

You land on This week, with a welcome banner and no plan. That is the expected order: the plan comes last, once the tracker knows who it is planning for.

Open Settings — the gear button in the top bar, between your account name and Log out. Four blocks, best filled in the order they appear, then a Save button underneath them. (Your password and account deletion live further down still, below Save.)

Three things to know before you start typing:

3. About me

Date of birth. Used to estimate your thresholds if you tick Thresholds unknown further down (180 − age). Tick that box without filling this field and nothing is estimated, so fill it in now even if you plan to enter tested values.

Weekly availability is the setting that shapes your week more than any other. Seven dropdowns, one per day, three types:

Describe the week you have, not the week you would like. Sessions are only placed on the days you declare, so an optimistic availability produces a plan you will quietly stop following in three weeks. At least one day must be something other than Family / rest, or the save is refused.

4. Physiology

Past year weekly Training Load is the most consequential number in the whole setup. Your first week starts at 50 % of it, and the entire progression is built from there. Enter the median week of your last twelve months — not your best one.

If you have no idea, open Estimate this value under the field: it asks for your weekly hours and how hard those hours usually are, then proposes a figure. For calibration, one hour at threshold is roughly 100 TL, one hour of easy conversational endurance 50 to 60. Base it on your last two or three consistent months and ignore peak weeks — a season built on your best fortnight ever will bury you by week six.

Thresholds unknown. Tick this if you have never tested: the aerobic threshold becomes 180 − age and the anaerobic threshold AeT + 11 bpm. Rough, but enough to start, and you can replace them the day you do test. It needs your date of birth to work.

If you do know them, leave the box unticked and fill in:

AeT must come out below AnT, or the save is refused with an explanation.

AeT last tested and AnT last tested are optional. Left empty, the date of your last edit is used instead.

Under the fields sits a read-only table of running zones derived from AeT and AnT. You never edit it — move a threshold and it follows. A matching table of cycling zones appears once your profile carries bike data, so on a brand-new account it is normal to see only the running one.

5. Objectives

The objectives table starts empty. Use Add an objective and give one line per race: name, date, sport, distance and vertical gain. A date and a sport are mandatory on every line, or the whole save fails. Distance and vertical gain are what let the tracker estimate how long you will be out there, so give them even when they are approximate. Races whose date has passed are dropped automatically, so do not bother entering last year's.

The priority letter decides what the season does around each race:

At least one dated A race is required. Without one the generator refuses to build anything, and says so.

Cardio sports included — tick the disciplines you actually practise. A session prescribed in an unticked sport is converted into one you kept, at equal duration, zone and load. One sport minimum.

6. Tracking equipment

The sensor boxes change how sessions are read and prescribed:

Then the connections, all optional and all leaving you free to skip them:

Get this one right: connect your watch directly to intervals.icu — Garmin, COROS, Suunto, Polar and Wahoo all connect natively. Do not route it through Strava: activities that arrive from Strava are deliberately skipped, because Strava's terms do not allow their data to be reused elsewhere.

7. Save, then generate the season

Press Save. A timestamp appears beside the button. If something is inconsistent, the save is refused as a whole and tells you what to fix.

Go back to This week and click Generate the first training plan. The season is laid out from next Monday through your last A race and past it — recovery, then a two-week transition to close the year. In between: phases sized from the time you actually have (preparation, base, construction, specialisation), weekly load, the three-weeks-on one-week-easy rhythm, and the taper and recovery around each objective. Book a race eight weeks out and you will simply not see most of those phases — there is no room for them, and the tracker will not pretend otherwise.

If it refuses, it is almost always one of three things:

After the first plan

Changing a setting later never rewrites your plan behind your back. Touch something the plan depends on and a banner offers to regenerate the next four weeks, telling you that completed workouts and notes are preserved. The connections — Oura, Withings, intervals.icu — and the two sensor boxes that only affect analysis take effect straight away, with nothing to regenerate.

The adaptation baselines set themselves. Your resting heart rate and heart-rate variability references are computed from a rolling 60-day window of your own nights: nothing to enter, nothing to maintain. Below about two weeks of data the tracker falls back on generic defaults, so the weekly adjustment only becomes yours once the history exists — which is the real argument for connecting a night-data source on day one rather than in a month.

Then train. Sessions arrive from the watch, the week fills in, and the weeks ahead move with what you actually did rather than what was planned in January.

The tracker plans training and follows training load. It is not a medical device, and it is no substitute for medical advice. If something misbehaves — a session that will not import, a figure that reads wrong — write to contact@montagneur.com with the date of the session and the watch it came from.