Garmin bought TrainingPeaks. Here’s what it actually means for self-coached runners.

What was announced

Garmin Ltd. announced on 22 July 2026 that it had acquired TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic. The specifics, from the announcement itself:

• Around 120 staff across the two companies join Garmin.
• Both remain headquartered in Louisville, Colorado.
• TrainingPeaks president Lee Gerakos continues to lead the company.
• Co-founder Dirk Friel stays on as a strategic advisor.
• Financial terms were not disclosed.

What did not change

This is the part worth being precise about, because precision is in short supply whenever an acquisition is announced.

No change to device compatibility was announced. If you sync a Polar, a COROS, a Suunto or a Wahoo to TrainingPeaks today, nothing in the announcement says that stops. Anyone telling you otherwise is guessing. So would we be, and we would rather say so than sell you something on a scare.

We have no inside knowledge here. We are a small independent running app with an obvious commercial interest in this story, and you should read us with that in mind. What follows is the honest version.

Should you do anything?

Probably not urgently. If TrainingPeaks works for you, it still works. Panic-migrating off a platform the week an acquisition is announced is rarely a good decision.

One thing worth doing, though — and this is true regardless of who owns your training platform: make sure you can get your data out. Know where the export button is. That is basic hygiene for any service holding years of your training history, and the best time to check is when you are not in a hurry.

The question that actually matters

Here is the thing the acquisition news obscures. The interesting question about TrainingPeaks was never who owns it. It is what it is for.

TrainingPeaks is built around a coach. A coach writes your plan, drops it into the calendar, and you execute it. Within that relationship it is superb, and a very large part of the endurance coaching world runs on it for good reason. Its charting depth is genuinely unmatched.

But if you don't have a coach, the box where the plan comes from is empty, and you are the one filling it. You are choosing your own long-run progression, deciding whether Thursday's session should still happen on four hours' sleep, and guessing at your taper. A log tells you what you did. It does not tell you what to do next.

That was true on 21 July, and it is still true now. The acquisition did not create that gap — it just got a lot of self-coached runners looking at their setup for the first time in a while.

Where we come in, briefly

PaceBrain is built for exactly that case: the runner without a coach. It writes the plan, adapts it week to week from what you actually did rather than what you intended to do, and shows its reasoning rather than handing down a number. It is device-agnostic by design — Garmin in one click, or GPX, FIT and TCX from any watch, or runs added by hand.

That is the pitch, and it is the whole pitch. We are not going to tell you your watch is about to stop working, because as far as anyone has announced, it isn't.

If the coach-shaped gap in your training is the thing you recognised while reading this, here is the honest comparison, including where TrainingPeaks is the better choice.

Common questions