Yes. And I say that as a guy Intervals.icu once saved from himself. It's free, it's deep, and it's the real thing. It's also a lot. If you've opened it, stared at the charts, and closed the tab no wiser about whether you're getting fitter, there's a simpler way to get the same answer.
Last fall I was getting ready for a race and feeling awful. Tired, hungry, lazy. I figured I was coming down with something. Then I hooked Intervals.icu up to my Wahoo and there it was. My weekly load had gone from about 100 in July to 200 after the Rattler, and the last week was 400. I wasn't sick. I'd beaten myself into the ground and called it training. (My wife had been telling me this for weeks. She gets the credit.) I wrote the whole thing up at the time.
So I'm not going to tell you Intervals is bad. It's free, with an optional $4 a month to support the guy who builds it. Fitness, fatigue, and form charts, power curves, interval detection, a workout builder, a training calendar, custom charts with your own formulas. It syncs with nearly everything. If you race, follow a plan, or have a coach, use it.
Here's the embarrassing part. I've built data systems for thirty years. Data is the day job. And I still spent that fall squinting at Intervals trying to work out what it was telling me. CTL, ATL, TSB, ramp rate, a threshold you set yourself and have to keep right. If the data guy can't read it, then, dude.
I'm not the only one. There's a thread on their forum called "Who is intervals.icu for?" started by a 51-year-old rider who found the whole thing overwhelming. The developer gave him a straight answer: "Intervals.icu is for people who want to improve and like looking at the data." The second half of that sentence is the catch. I like the answer. I don't always like the looking.
Then I wrecked my knee and spent weeks on the couch with a laptop. RideTool is what came out. It runs the same science Intervals does, the training-load model coaches have used for decades. What's different is what you see.
No workout builder. No planned workouts on your head unit. No custom charts, no power curve, no coach view. If that's why you use Intervals, stay put. It's the right tool and it's free.
RideTool is $29 a year after a 14-day trial. That covers hosting your rides and your original files. No ads, nothing to upsell.
Go open the Intervals fitness page. If you enjoy it, you're done, and good on you. If you close the tab and still can't say whether you're getting better or digging a hole, you're the rider I built this for. Intervals hands you the whole workshop. I just wanted the gauge.
Connect Strava, Garmin, or Wahoo and RideTool turns every ride into a plain-English read on your fitness. It comes to you by email, as often as you choose, so there's no dashboard to remember. $29 a year, no ads, your data stays yours.
Start with your next ride