Running analysis
Running analysis that explains the day
Sync your runs from Strava or upload GPX files, and Relic scores every session the same way, so you can see what actually built your fitness and when it started to slip. All of it is free.
Load: Relic Effort and Relic Stress
Relic Stress measures what a session cost you, anchored to Banister's heart-rate training impulse and expressed in threshold-hour equivalents. Relic Effort turns that into a 0–100 score against what Relic runners actually do, so one huge long run can't outscore a week of quality sessions.
Fitness, fatigue and form
Your daily stress feeds a fitness (long-term load), fatigue (short-term load) and form (fitness minus fatigue) chart over the last year. It shows whether you're building, tapering or digging a hole, and when you're fresh enough to race.
Relic VDOT from real races
VDOT is a race-performance number from Jack Daniels' running formula. Relic only computes it from genuine race efforts, so easy days never pull it down, and plots how it moves over time. Want to see what a VDOT means for other distances? Try the race time predictor.
Durability: decoupling and pace fade
- Aerobic decoupling: how far your heart rate drifts against your pace in the second half of a steady run. Under about 5% usually means the run was within your aerobic base. More on decoupling.
- Pace fade: the minute your grade-adjusted pace started to slip against your early-run baseline.
- Aerobic efficiency: grade-adjusted pace per heartbeat on steady runs, tracked over 12 weeks.
Zones, bests and a plan
Time in heart-rate zones over 28 days, best efforts at standard distances, a year-in-review heat calendar, and a training plan generated from your own last 90 days and built to a race date.
Questions
A 0–100 score for how big a run was, compared with what Relic runners actually do. It's built from Relic Stress, a heart-rate-based session load, so a hard 10K and an easy long run can be compared on one scale. Your 28-day total gives you an anonymous rank among Relic runners once you have enough reliable data.
Relic VDOT uses the Daniels–Gilbert formula on race efforts only: runs Strava marks as races, or hard efforts you confirm were all-out. Easy runs never drag it down, and it shows how your race fitness trends over time.
It helps. Relic Effort, decoupling and zones are most accurate with heart rate. Without it, Relic falls back to duration and sport-based estimates and labels them as lower confidence.