Questions, answered

A Strava account or an email address to sign in with. Then connect where your running lives, Garmin, COROS, Strava or intervals.icu (or several), and Taper imports your history and builds from it. Setup asks three things: what you run with, what you are training for, and a race time or a pace if you have one. No history and no times? Choose to start by feel: sessions come in minutes and effort words while Taper measures you, and paces appear once your own running has earned them.

On Android, yes: Taper is on Google Play. On an iPhone, open taperapp.co.uk in Safari, tap the share button and choose Add to Home Screen - it gets its own icon and opens full screen, the same as the Android app. There is no App Store app yet. It is one account either way, so nothing is stranded on one device.

Taper on Google Play

Taper is free. There will always be a free tier, so you will never be locked out of your own training history by not paying. Beyond that, what sits in the free tier and what sits in a paid one is still being worked out, so nothing more specific is promised here yet.

Their numbers come from fitness models that tend to be optimistic, especially at longer distances. Taper's come from your own results, and every one is labelled by how sure we are - confirmed, estimated, or not enough data yet. The plan is built the same way: every pace in it comes from your threshold, measured from your own runs, and every session says what it is there for. We would rather tell you we do not know than hand you a confident guess.

No. The plan shows its working: every session says why it is there, every run is read against what it asked, and every pace comes from your threshold, worked out from your own runs, with the runs that set it on the screen. If you connect Claude or ChatGPT to your Taper account, that assistant is the AI: it reads your plan, runs and recovery figures to answer you, and it changes anything only after you have said yes to it.

Each session explains itself where you meet it, but there is also one page covering the whole thing: what each type of run is for, how to move, swap or rewrite a session without breaking the plan, what happens after a run, what to do about illness, travel or injury, and what race week does. Five minutes, once.

How to live with your plan

Yes, and it keeps its shape when you do. Tap a session to move it to another day, skip it (to rest or to cross-training), or edit it: shorter, easier, or a variation of the same work. You can also write your own session in plain text, pick one from the Library, or photograph a club session card there and Taper reads it into steps; anything it is unsure it read comes back for you to confirm. A changed session can always go back with Restore original. The bigger levers are in Actions on the Training page (how many days you run and how many are hard) and in Profile under How plans are built (your long run day, hard days and the days you cannot run), and Training shows what changed the last time your plan was rebuilt. A weekly club night, set when you build the plan, stays where it is and the week is built around it.

A missed session is marked missed rather than quietly counted, and the plan carries on from where you actually are instead of trying to cram it back in. After a break, your running comes back in steps rather than all at once. If you know in advance, tell it: in Actions on the Training page, Going away reshapes the days you will miss, Feeling ill rests you and eases you back, and Injury stops the plan rather than reshuffling it.

Yes. In the Calendar view, pick the day and choose Add a race on this day, then say how you mean to run it, from Run it easy to Race. A race you run easy is not taken as a measure of your fitness. When your plan is built or rebuilt around a race, the days either side are set up for it: nothing hard the day before, something easy after. After a race you ran all out, or one that fell apart, the plan eases the days after it, more of them the longer the race. If the plan was built before you added the race, Taper says so, and you rebuild when you are ready. Every race is also on the Races page (Training, then Actions, then Races), where you can edit it or add another, and each goal race gets a build of its own length with steady running in the gap before it. The day after a goal race, Home offers the next block and names the races it would fit around. A race of a length that is not on the list goes in as Other length. And runs that look like races but were never entered wait in Profile, on the You tab under Races to grade: say how each one went and it joins the race calendar.

For the last seven days Home leads with the countdown and keeps your recovery figures in view. On Training, Actions then Taper shows what a shorter or longer taper would do to your predicted time, as a range, before you change anything. Open the race itself on Training for its race day plan: target splits for your goal, and if you add the course (a run of it you have done, a GPX file or a Strava route), the splits bend around the climbs, with a choice to ease them, hold an even effort or push them. If you have your own plan, Use my own pace plan takes a workout you saved that adds up to the race, draws it over the course and sends it to your watch with the race-day session. Once the race is run, Home gives your result against the target and the easy days still to come.

Yes. In Profile, under Connections, turn on Google or Apple Calendar and subscribe to the private address it gives you, in Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. Each session shows as an all-day event with what to do, and it moves when your plan moves.

Yes, in Profile on the You tab under Reminders, all off until you turn them on: a push on the morning of each session at a time you choose, a recap email as the new week starts with what your week added up to and what is coming, and, once reminders are on, a buzz when a new run syncs and when Taper has something to say about it.

From your own best efforts: Taper fits your personal fade curve across your evidenced distances and anchors it to what you have actually run. Beyond your longest evidenced effort, predictions deliberately turn conservative. Every prediction carries a confidence label, and a low label tells you what to do to firm it up.

Their numbers come from fitness models (VO2 max estimates); ours come from your results. Fitness models tend to be optimistic, especially at long distances. Taper only claims what your running has shown.

Six bands of effort, from recovery running up to flat-out. Your own numbers are in Profile, on the Training tab, under Pace and heart-rate zones, with a note on how well each one is known. What the bands are FOR is the same for everybody: what training in each one does, what it feels like from the inside, and the way each one usually goes wrong.

What each zone is for

If your watch records them, yes: resting heart rate, HRV and sleep come in with your runs, and Home shows each one against your own normal rather than an average for everybody, so you can see whether today can take a hard session. If two watches send them, choose which one Taper reads in Profile, on the You tab under Recovery readings from. Taper never changes your plan on them without asking you.

Taper does what a good coach does with your data - the plan, the reads after each run, and the taper the app is named for. What it cannot do is know how your life feels this week, or watch you run. Plenty of people use both; Taper makes the numbers side effortless.

On Progress: your race predictions and how sure each one is, how each has moved over three, six or twelve months with the races that tested it beside the line, your weeks side by side, and the milestones you have banked with the next one to aim at. Your prediction, a personal best or your year can be saved as an image card to post anywhere, carrying the figures the app worked out and nothing added.

Garmin and COROS, yes: Taper connects to both directly, so connect either in Profile, under Connections, and planned sessions are pushed to the watch, which then guides the workout. On Garmin it is on once you allow Training on Garmin's page, and you can switch it off in the Garmin sheet, which also says how Garmin holds what Taper sends. For Suunto, Wahoo and Apple Watch, Taper cannot talk to the watch directly, so it writes to an intervals.icu calendar and your watch picks them up from there (an Apple Watch needs the intervals.icu companion app on your iPhone). Polar takes no sessions from outside its own app, so your runs come in and your plan stays in Taper, and in your phone's calendar if you turn on the calendar feed in Profile. Changing your plan updates that calendar, so a session you delete or move is taken off the watch rather than left behind. Your runs come back in through the same bridge, or through Strava if you already sync there.

How do I connect a device?

Strava, Garmin and COROS each have a row in Profile, then Connections, and you open a row to switch it on or off. intervals.icu has a row there too, for Suunto, Wahoo and Polar watches. It shows when you are connected through it, or when you have neither a Garmin nor a COROS connected. It connects by approving Taper on their site and coming straight back - there is no API key to find or paste. Each connection clears up after itself when you switch it off.

Full guide to connecting a device

Yes. In Profile, under Connections, open Claude or ChatGPT, copy Taper's address and add it as a custom connector in Claude (in ChatGPT, with developer mode on), then approve it on Taper's consent screen. Your assistant can then read what the app shows you, and make any change you could make in the app, deleting runs and races included, but only after it shows you the change and you say yes in the conversation. Every change is logged and most can be undone; filing your plan away or starting a new one, disconnecting a service, resetting your data and deleting your account cannot, and the last two also need a phrase you type. Runs that reached Taper only through Strava are passed to it without their figures, and nothing that came through Garmin's own connection is passed to it at all. Removing it in Profile ends its access at once.

If your runs come through Strava, yes: Profile, then the You tab, then Shoes and gear lists your Strava pairs with the distance on each, and says when one is near the end of its life.

Yes. Profile, then the You tab, then Preferences, then Distance and pace switches the whole app between kilometres and miles, the plan's paces and distances included.

Yes. Both connect through the watch maker's own programme: you sign in on Garmin's or COROS's own page, choose what Taper may see, and Taper never sees your password. Garmin's is being switched on, so it may not be offered to you yet; in the meantime Strava or Run files bring your runs in. Switching either off deletes the access Taper held. If a connection ever stops working, Taper tells you the sync failed rather than quietly showing stale data.

Yes. Profile, then the Connections tab, then Run files: choose the zip Garmin sent you when you asked for your data (request it at garmin.com/account/datamanagement, under Export your data; the download link arrives by email from Garmin, usually within a day or two), as it came with no unzipping, or .fit files from your watch. Taper reads the runs, skips anything that is not a run, and does not add a run it already has. A long file reads in the background, so once it says reading you can leave: Taper tells you when it is done. The file is deleted as soon as it has been read.

Yes. Profile, then the You tab, then Your data: Export my data downloads your training data as a file you can keep.

Profile, then the You tab, then Danger zone. Reset my data wipes your training data and disconnects every provider, keeping your login and taking you back to onboarding; Delete my account erases everything. You arm either one by typing RESET or DELETE in the box above them, and both are immediate. Your data is yours.

Deleting your account and data