A free Claude skill that reads your Strava history and builds your personal running board in about five minutes. It draws the one chart Strava, Garmin and Apple Watch don't: your heart rate at the same pace, month by month. Then it answers the questions runners actually ask — how many days a week is enough, is my easy pace too fast, is my goal time realistic, does the gym count — with your own numbers.
No spreadsheets, no coding, nothing to configure. Install the skill, connect Strava, type "Analyze my running".
All charts and numbers on this page come from a synthetic runner generated for the demo, not from a real Strava account.
One page (plus every chart as an image) that answers, from your runs:
| Question | What SamePace shows |
|---|---|
| Am I actually getting fitter? | Your heart rate at one fixed pace, month by month, with hills removed. Lower is fitter. |
| How many days a week is enough? | What 0–3, 4–6, 7–9 and 10+ runs per six weeks did to that heart rate, and where you are right now. |
| How much should I run? How long should the long run be? | Weekly distance, longest run, and whether the long run before each race was at least two-thirds of the race. |
| Is a sub-2 half (or any goal) realistic? | The gap to your next milestone split into speed and endurance — so you know whether to do intervals or long runs. |
| Does strength training make me a faster runner? | Whether gym-heavy stretches changed your running heart rate (if you log gym sessions in Strava). |
| Is my easy pace too fast? | Your real easy pace, what you typically run, and how much of your time is spent in zones 4–5. |
| What should I do next? | Two to four lines your own numbers point at. |
Strava's Fitness score is training load. Garmin's VO2max and Apple's Cardio Fitness are estimates you can't see inside. This line is simpler and more honest: at the same pace, is your heart rate going down or up? Every dip in the demo runner's line matches a stretch of one run a week.
Open the full demo board: docs/sample-board.html (download and open in a browser).
You need a Claude account (custom skills work on the free plan too) and a Strava account with your runs in it, ideally with heart rate from any watch or chest strap.
- Download
samepace.zipfrom the latest release. - In Claude, open Customize → Skills, click +, choose Create skill → Upload a skill, and pick the zip. If Claude says code execution is off, switch on Code execution and file creation under Settings → Capabilities.
- Open Customize → Connectors, click +, find Strava, click Connect, log in to Strava and click Authorize. (From a chat, the same list is behind the + button → Connectors → Manage connectors.)
Menu names are from Claude's help centre as of September 2026; if yours differ, search Settings for "Skills".
Start a new chat (connections only show up in new chats) and write:
Analyze my running.
Claude reads your last 18 months of activities, builds the board and explains it in plain words. That is the whole workflow. Reading a year of runs takes a few minutes; you get one message when it's done.
Afterwards you can ask, in plain words:
- "My goal is a sub-1:45 half" (or any time) — the speed-versus-endurance chart is redrawn for it.
- "Compare my last two 10Ks" or any two runs.
- "Add my Whoop" — Claude tells you how to get your Whoop data export and reads it in: recovery in the morning versus heart rate on the run. Optional; nothing else needs it.
- "How did you compute this?" — every number has a short explanation.
Strava's Claude connection may require a Strava subscription. If you don't have one: on the Strava website go to Settings → My Account → Download or Delete Your Account → Get Started → Request Your Archive. A zip arrives by e-mail, usually within a few hours. Start a new chat, upload the zip and write "Analyze my running from this export". Runs recorded as FIT files (most watches) need a small extra package that Claude will try to install; if that isn't possible in your environment you still get the distance, frequency and race parts and a rougher heart-rate picture.
Any watch or app that syncs to Strava: Garmin, Apple Watch, Coros, Polar, Suunto, Wahoo, chest straps. Heart rate is what makes the board interesting; without it you still get distance, frequency and race analysis.
This repository is also a plugin marketplace, so it installs with two commands:
/plugin marketplace add ArturPososhko/samepace
/plugin install samepace@samepace
Or clone it straight into your skills folder:
git clone https://github.com/ArturPososhko/samepace ~/.claude/skills/samepace
Then ask Claude to "analyze my running with the samepace skill". The scripts need only pandas, numpy and matplotlib.
Heart rate is compared at one pace after removing the effect of hills, using samples after the first five minutes of each run (wrist sensors lag). "Recent training" means the six weeks before a run. Race predictions use the Riegel formula. The full method, including every threshold, is in reference/method.md.
Your data moves from Strava into your own Claude conversation and nowhere else. The skill sends nothing to its author or any other service; the analysis runs inside Claude's file sandbox with no internet access. Delete the chat and the data is gone.
- Wrist heart rate is noisy. Read every number as a direction, not a verdict.
- Weather is not corrected for: a hot month can look like a "less fit" month.
- Strava sometimes credits a best effort to a bike ride saved as a run. If a best time looks impossible, tell Claude your real one.
- Tested on a small number of accounts. If something breaks, open an issue with what you saw.
Why am I not getting faster even though I run every week? For most hobby runners the answer is frequency, not effort: fitness built at one run a week doesn't survive the week. SamePace shows this directly — your heart rate at the same pace, grouped by how many runs you did in the previous six weeks.
How many days a week should I run? The board tells you where your threshold is. For many runners the line only starts to drop at two runs a week and keeps dropping at three; the swing between one and three can be several beats per minute at the same pace.
Is my easy pace too fast? Almost always, if you run by feel. SamePace finds the pace you actually held under your zone-2 ceiling and compares it with what you typically run.
Is a sub-2 half marathon realistic for me? SamePace takes your best shorter race (a 10K, say), predicts the half it allows, and splits the gap to your goal into minutes of speed and minutes of endurance. If your real half is much slower than the prediction, the missing piece is long runs, not intervals.
Does strength training make me a faster runner? If you log gym sessions in Strava, SamePace compares your running heart rate after gym-heavy and gym-light stretches. Often the honest answer is "no effect we could see" — which is an argument against counting the gym as running, not against the gym.
Does Strava show heart rate at the same pace over time? No. Strava shows pace and heart rate per run and a Fitness & Freshness score based on training load. Garmin and Apple show estimated VO2max. None of them draws a fixed-pace heart-rate line over months, which is why this skill exists.
Do I need a Strava subscription? Only for the Strava-to-Claude connection. The free route is Strava's data export (see above).
SKILL.md— the instructions Claude follows.scripts/analyze.py— builds the board from your Strava data (pandas, numpy, matplotlib; no network).scripts/archive_import.py— reads a Strava data export instead of the connection.scripts/whoop.py— the optional Whoop add-on.reference/method.md— how every number is computed.docs/— the demo board and charts (synthetic data)..claude-plugin/— plugin and marketplace manifests for Claude Code and Cowork.
MIT licence. Author: Artur Pososhko. Use it, change it, share it.