The Story.

Hello!

First of all, I really want to thank you for checking out Loam in its earliest form. I'm not sure how you found yourself here today, but I'm really glad you did! I'd like to tell you a little story about who I am, how Loam came to be, what it aims to be, what it isn't, and what the future holds.

My name is Mike, and I'm an active person who does a little bit of everything. I love a good, long trail run, jumping on my gravel bike and riding around the Front Range in Colorado, stretching out with some yoga, or going for a hike. I like lifting weights less, but I'm told it's one of those things we should do anyway!

The problem I was faced with is that, with the busy lives we all maintain, it's pretty easy to let your training become sloppy, or take a back seat to everything else we have going on. I'd remember thinking through my plan for the week, having all these ambitious ideas about some great runs I wanted to hit. Then suddenly I'd find myself at the next weekend after life happened and I didn't accomplish half of it.

Along similar lines, my girlfriend decided she wanted to train up for an Ultra (50k) with me a little over a year ago. She had very little experience with running, so she wanted my help building a training plan. We used one of the currently available apps to do this, and while it worked, it was overly complicated. Just learning and keeping up with the app was a job, so it didn't stick. The apps we looked at were also really expensive, really restrictive in the kinds of plans you could create, or so laden with AI features that it just wasn't a pleasant experience.

Enter Loam.

Loam is kind of a weird name for a training app. If you search for training apps, their names are usually really on the nose. I could have named it "ThisWeeksTrainingPlan" or something. I guess that's good for discoverability, but I wanted something a little more relatable, and something that would ultimately become the app's personality. Loam refers to that perfectly balanced soil that's great for growing things, and great for building things on. At the end of the day, that's what our training is all about. Maybe we're training to become an elite athlete, or just invest in ourselves and our fitness, or maybe we're just having fun. Either way, having a plan that you can get excited about and be accountable to is at the center of all that.

So what does this thing do?

Well, right now it's in its infancy. I'm launching with a web app, but I plan on launching iOS and Android apps later this year. The core features are already here, though. You can:

Create a multi-sport calendar made up of different workout types with planned goals (distance, duration, etc)
Import completed workout files (.fit, .gpx, .tcx) to match up what you did to your plan (or just manually mark the workout as done)
See basic reports about how you're tracking to your plan, and how your weekly mileage/time is stacking up in your different disciplines.
Export your data at any time to move to another platform, or to take offline for additional analysis. Your data is always yours, and it always remains private. It will never be shared with anyone else.
Leverage AI on your terms with our MCP server and coaching skill - connect to Claude or ChatGPT so that it can pull in your training history, discuss your goals, and design a plan for you. It can then upload that plan straight into Loam so you can get going.

Creating a training calendar can mean a lot of time rationalizing a plan and doing data entry, so I wanted to make those processes as low-friction as possible. In the future I'll be expanding on that goal by:

Creating mobile apps so you can manage your plan on the go, get notifications about upcoming planned workouts, etc
Connecting with hardware providers (Coros, Suunto, Garmin, and Apple are the initial focus) to automatically sync your completed workouts
Building compatibility with Strava's recently announced MCP Server to access your full workout history from Loam
And doing everything I can to keep Loam as affordable, fast, and easy to use as possible

Loam will NOT be:

A super data-heavy platform to manage all of your body stats (your watch probably already does a great job of this for you)
Expensive - I'm hoping I can keep the cost at half or less vs other apps in this space
Overly complicated
AI-heavy - you'll never see AI popping up and interrupting your flow. You also won't get useless feedback like, "Looks like you did a hard 6 mile run today. Your heart rate averaged 150bpm. Now your best option is to take a rest!" - what is this? Who finds that kind of thing valuable?

So all that said, thank you for your interest, and for reading! I hope you'll sign up for the wait list (link below), and provide lots of feedback so I can continue making Loam an app you want to use to support your fitness journey.

Have a great day out there!

-Mike