Your training plan, built from the runs you already did.
For 5k, 10k, half and marathon runners. And the parkrun in between.
Connect Garmin, Strava or intervals.icu, and keep the watch you have. Taper reads your history, builds the plan, predicts your races and tells you what each session bought. Not an AI guessing from a template: a coaching method you can read, applied to your own running, with every number saying where it came from.
Free to try, example athlete shown. Works with Garmin and Strava directly. Through a free intervals.icu account your sessions land on a COROS as full workouts - warm-up, reps and pace targets - and on a Suunto 3, 5 or 9, and on an Apple Watch with a free companion app. A Polar cannot take sessions from outside Polar, but your runs, sleep and resting heart rate come back from it.
How it works
Four steps, then it runs itself
Connect your watch
Garmin, Strava or intervals.icu. Your history syncs in - nothing to fill in.
It reads your running
Thresholds, zones and a race prediction, fit to your own data.
It builds your plan
Around your goal race, rebalanced when life happens.
It reads every run
A coach's read after each session - what happened, what to change.
And since August
The parts that are not the plan
A plan is what you came for. These are what make the week around it work, and they all read the same running.
- Recovery and readinessSleep and resting heart rate from your watch, read against your own baseline, so a hard session lands on a day that can take it.
- Club nightsTell Taper which night you run with the club and the plan builds around it, instead of asking you to choose.
- MilestonesWhat you have actually banked, off your own history - and the next barrier, with how far off it you are.
- ShoesYour Strava pairs, the distance on each, and a nudge when one is near the end of its life.
- A Monday recapOne email: what the week held, what it added up to, and what is coming. It says only what it counted.
- RemindersAn optional push the evening before a session, on the phone, with nothing to install beyond the app.
- Screenshot importA photo of a club session card reads straight into a workout, in the browser, without the image leaving your phone.
One session, start to finish
Did you do the run you were asked to do?
Any app can chart a run. Taper knows which run it was meant to be. Twelve 400s off one example athlete's plan, matched rep by rep against the target they were given. Tap through.
The plan prescribes the session and the pace, and syncs it to your watch.
Taper | Training
400m Reps
12 x 400m at 4:00/km, 1:15 jog between. Warm up and cool down either side.
Every prescribed pace in the plan comes off your own threshold, so it moves when your running does.
Sent to Garmin as a structured workout, so the reps and recoveries are already on your wrist when you get there.
Your shape, measured
The curve your own running draws
Every fast stretch you have run, plotted against how far it was. Taper fits your curve rather than a textbook one, and stops it where your evidence stops. Tap a point.
And the quieter one that matters more day to day: how fast you run at the same easy effort. Same heart rate, seven weeks apart.
Thirteen seconds a kilometre at an unchanged heart rate. That is fitness arriving, and it is invisible on a page that shows only race times. These charts are one example athlete's, not yours.
Honest numbers
Every number says where it came from
A race you ran, a modelled estimate and a guess are three different things, and Taper labels them differently:
Predictions you can argue with
It shows its working
There is no black box here and no AI deciding for you. Every pace in your plan comes from one number, your threshold, and the app shows you which of your own runs set it and when. The method is fixed, drawn from the coaching literature, and every input it used is on the screen. The same runner looks different depending on how far back you are willing to look, and an app that hides the window is hiding the caveat.
| Distance | Predicted | Best |
|---|---|---|
| 5K | 20:01 4:00/km | 20:01 |
| 10K | 41:05 4:07/km | 41:26 |
| 10 miles | 1:08:02 4:13/km | 1:12:05 |
| Half | 1:31:42 4:20/km | 1:34:23 |
Six efforts inside 90 days. Beyond 10 km, the distance those efforts actually corroborate, the curve turns conservative rather than optimistic.
Your season
The whole block, through to the taper
Your plan is generated around your goal race from your training history, then rebalanced when life happens, and the long run grows only as fast as your evidence does. Then the part the app is named for: the taper, built from the coaching literature and scaled to your race and your recent training. Tap a week.
Peak. The biggest week, and the one most often overcooked.
After every run
A coach's read, not a grade
Each session gets a short, honest read: what was asked, what happened, and the one thing to change next time. When a run costs you the next session, Taper says so and offers the swap that fixes it.
5k to marathon, and the parkrun in between
From your Saturday parkrun to race day
Taper coaches every road distance - 5k, 10k, half and marathon - off the same honest reading of your running. And it speaks parkrun: connect your results and a parkrun becomes a session in the plan, your 5k clock a checkpoint on the way to the goal. The one run most UK runners already do, put to work.
Get Taper
On your phone, or in any browser
Taper is an Android app on Google Play, and the same Taper runs in the browser. Your account and your training are the same either way, so you can sign in on a laptop and carry it in your pocket.
On an iPhone, open taperapp.co.uk in Safari, tap the share button, then Add to Home Screen. It opens full screen with its own icon, the same as an app.
There is no App Store app yet.
Start with the running you already have
Sign in with Strava or your email, connect your watch, and your history does the rest. Setup takes a few minutes.