Why this is newsworthy
No mainstream training platform treats vertical gain as a first-class planning target. TrainingPeaks' Annual Training Plan can only plan by training load — elevation is a free-text field. Uphill Athlete's published methodology has athletes adding TSS by hand for every 300 m of climb.
Trail runners plan in vertical metres and hours on feet. Their tools plan in road miles. TrailForge closes that gap — and does it entirely on the phone, which is the other thing the incumbents won't do: building a structured workout, or authoring a multi-week plan for yourself, is still a desktop job and usually a coach's job.
TrailForge ships into a platform layer that is consolidating fast — Garmin acquired TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic on 22 July 2026 — as an independent tool built by one developer in Norway.
Fact sheet
| App name | TrailForge |
| Category | Health & Fitness |
| Platform | iPhone · Home Screen widget. No iPad, Mac, Android or web version. |
| Minimum OS | iOS 26.0 |
| Price | Free to download. TrailForge Pro $129/year or $14.99/month, with a 2-week free trial. |
| Release date | Early September 2026 |
| Languages | English |
| Accessibility | Dynamic Type throughout, including accessibility text sizes — layouts reflow rather than truncate. VoiceOver labels on controls and summary values; charts are not yet fully described. |
| Integrations | Garmin Connect (routes + scheduled workouts) · Strava (activity import) · Apple WeatherKit · Mapbox |
| Developer | Mats Braa · Byte-Sized Systems · Norway |
| App Store | apps.apple.com/app/id6743963491 — live early September |
| Press contact | contact@trailforge.run |
Descriptions
Click to copy. Use whichever length fits.
TrailForge is an iPhone app that lets trail and ultra runners build their own training plans and push them straight to a Garmin.
TrailForge is a training-plan app for experienced trail and ultra runners. Build a structured plan on your phone in the units the sport actually uses — vertical gain and time on feet — push it to your Garmin as scheduled workouts, and watch each session check itself off when you run it.
TrailForge is an iPhone app for experienced trail and ultra runners who already know what training they want to do and need somewhere to put it.
Most training platforms were built for road running and treat elevation as an afterthought. TrainingPeaks can only plan by training load; its annual planner has no elevation unit at all. TrailForge plans in the units trail runners actually use: vertical gain and time on feet.
The loop is closed. You author a structured plan on your phone — no desktop, and no coach required. It pushes to your Garmin calendar as scheduled workouts and lands on the watch. You run it. The activity returns via Garmin or Strava, and TrailForge matches it back to the planned session automatically, scoring on date, distance and route proximity rather than guessing.
When the goal race arrives, the same plan becomes a race-day plan: terrain-aware pacing that accounts for the climbing, weather forecast for where you'll actually be when you get there rather than at the start line, and a fuelling plan that learns what your gut tolerated last time.
TrailForge is built by one developer in Norway. The training log, fuelling, aid-station plans and the gut-training loop are free, along with training plans up to six weeks. Pro adds plans beyond six weeks, unlimited route creation, race and backyard-ultra planning, and side-by-side activity comparison.
Key features
- Vert and time on feet as first-class planning targets — weekly and block-level goals in metres climbed and hours on feet, not road mileage.
- Author structured workouts on the phone — a full interval builder on iOS, not a desktop-only feature.
- Push to Garmin — routes and scheduled workouts land on the watch via Garmin's Training API.
- Plan-to-actual matching — completed activities link themselves back to planned sessions automatically.
- Race-day plans — terrain-aware pacing, weather projected to where you'll be when you arrive there, per-checkpoint fuelling. Backyard ultras get their own yard-by-yard schedule.
- A fuel loop that learns — plan, execute, three-tap check-in after the run, adjusted targets next time.
Screenshots & assets
Free to use in editorial coverage. Screenshots are real app UI, not mockups.
App icon
Training plan
Plan vs actual
Workout builder
Race-day plan
Fuel plan
Route builder
Activity detail
Banner
Need something else? Device-framed versions, a specific screen, a 1920 × 1080 banner or a headshot — email contact@trailforge.run and say what you need. Usually same day.
Review access
TrailForge releases early September 2026. It will be free to download — the training log, plan authoring up to six weeks, fuelling and the check-in loop all work without paying anything.
TrailForge is on the App Store and free to download — the training log, plan authoring up to six weeks, fuelling and the check-in loop all work without paying anything.
For a build ahead of release, or to review the Pro features — plans beyond six weeks, unlimited route creation, race and backyard-ultra planning, side-by-side activity comparison — email contact@trailforge.run and I'll set you up.
To review the Pro features — plans beyond six weeks, unlimited route creation, race and backyard-ultra planning, side-by-side activity comparison — email contact@trailforge.run and I'll send a promo code.
A meaningful review needs more than one session: the plan-to-actual matching and the fuel loop only show what they do once you've run a few sessions against a real plan. Worth taking the app a couple of weeks before you write.
About the developer
TrailForge is built by Mats Braa, a software developer in Norway, alongside a full-time job. He started it because the tools he was using to plan his own training were built for road running — they measured his weeks in kilometres, when the thing that actually determined whether a session was hard was how much of it went uphill.
Available for interview, and happy to walk through how the terrain-aware pacing model works or what it costs to run this solo.
Quotes
“Trail runners plan their weeks in vertical metres and hours on feet. Every tool I tried made me translate that into road miles first. TrailForge just uses the real units.”
“The plan shouldn't live in a different place from the run. You build it on your phone, it lands on your watch, and when you've run it, it ticks itself off. That round trip is the whole product.”
Common questions
How is this different from Strava?
Strava discontinued its own running training plans on 10 July 2025 and points users to Runna. It has no forward planning at all. TrailForge is where the plan lives before the run happens.
How is this different from TrainingPeaks?
Plan authoring on TrainingPeaks is coach-only — athletes can't save a reusable multi-week plan. Its structured workout builder doesn't exist on mobile. And it has no race-day planner.
Why not just use COROS or Final Surge, which are free?
COROS pushes only to COROS watches. Final Surge is coach-shaped and doesn't plan in vert. Neither has a race-day plan.
Does TrailForge record runs?
No, and that's deliberate. It never uses the phone's GPS to track you. Finished activities come in from Garmin or Strava, so you run with the watch you already own and the phone stays in your pocket.
Is this another AI-generated app?
No. The pacing, fuelling and plan-matching engines are hand-written deterministic logic with unit tests, not a wrapper around a language model.
Asset licensing
All assets on this page may be used freely in editorial coverage of TrailForge. No permission needed. Please don't alter the icon.