If you race Cat 3 or 4, if you've got Unbound on the calendar, if you've ridden enough to know that "GREAT JOB! 🎉" is not what a coach sounds like — this letter is for you. It explains what I built, why, and what your first month with Koers will look like.
I have been racing for twenty-five years — nothing famous, just enough seasons to know the difference between a week that built something and a week I wasted. What finally got to me wasn't the training. It was the apps. The tools my friends and I were using treated us like a video game. Streaks. Badges. Notifications celebrating a 20-minute zone-1 spin. Encouragement, instead of explanation.
None of us wanted encouragement. We wanted a sentence. "Why is Wednesday hard?" "Should I race the local crit this weekend, or save it for Battenkill?" "My HRV crashed — what changes?" Those questions deserve an answer, not a leaderboard.
So I built Koers — and I built Mia to run it. Mia is the coach inside the app. She is software, not a person, and she will never pretend otherwise — but she writes like the best coach I ever rode under. Every Sunday night, you get a paragraph. Five sessions, written in sentences, with a reason next to every one. When something changes — a bad sleep, a missed workout, a race that creeps onto the calendar — Mia edits the paragraph. You see the tracked change in the morning, with a one-sentence note about why.
That's it. No streaks. No notifications. No green rings. The whole product is the paragraph.
I didn't build Koers to manage your inbox. The whole week's coaching arrives in a single Sunday-night note, plus quiet edits during the week when the body asks for them.
About a third of the riders on Koers already have a human coach. For them, Mia doesn't write the plan — their coach does. She writes the kicker line above each session, the recovery read on Monday morning, the race briefing two weeks out. Your coach sees every conversation you have with her. She's a layer, not a replacement.
For everyone else, Mia is the coach. The plan, the briefing, the daily edits, the Sunday letter — all her. I built her on Joe Friel's periodization, Stephen Seiler's polarized work, and gravel-specific intensity distributions from a panel of coaches I trust.
The whole signup is a six-minute conversation. No surveys with sliders, no "rate your motivation 1–10." Bring an FTP if you have one, a guess if you don't. Mia calibrates in week one.
Six minutes. Where you live, when you can ride, what you're aiming at, how you felt last season, the FTP you think you have.
Sunday night you get the first letter. Five sessions, three of them under an hour. Week one is calibration — Mia is measuring you before she trusts the FTP you sent.
You ride. Wahoo sends the file. By the time you're showered, Mia has read it and the next session has been adjusted. The first edit usually surprises people.
Workouts land on your head unit overnight. Files come back the second you press stop. You shouldn't have to learn the plumbing.
Koers measures the same thing a WorldTour coach measures: Training Stress Balance. It's the rolling difference between the fitness you've built over six weeks and the fatigue you've collected in seven days. It tells you when to push, when to taper, and when the smart move is a rest day even though you feel fine.
The training distribution is polarized — about 80% of your time below LT1 (easy enough to talk in sentences), 20% above LT2 (hard enough you can't). That's the model that wins races at the elite level, and the model that produces the most fitness per hour for amateur racers with eight to twelve hours a week.
And the conversation — Mia writing you a sentence — is the part the literature doesn't measure but every coached athlete knows. You will keep doing the work if you understand why the work is the work. That's what I built Koers for.
No credit card. No drip sequence. A note from Mia, every Sunday, until you don't want it.