Garmin Buys TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic

Triathlon Forum
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Garmin today announced that it has acquired both TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic, bringing together the technology wearables company with the high-powered analytics, athlete relationship, and training platform.

Terms of the acquisition were not released.

In a post on LinkedIn, co-founder of TrainingPeaks Dirk Friel wrote, “Today marks a monumental milestone in the evolution of TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic. After founding TrainingPeaks 26 years ago along with my father, Joe Friel, and dear friend, Gear Fisher, I am thrilled to announce that TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic have been acquired by Garmin.

I am incredibly proud of how our team has shaped the strength and endurance coaching industries from the very beginning. As we look ahead, joining forces with an iconic, industry-leading brand like Garmin is the ultimate catalyst for our next era of innovation. Their commitment to building the best-in-class ecosystem will allow us to accelerate product development, expand our reach, and deliver even greater value to our employees, coaches, and athletes worldwide.”

Friel also wrote that he will remain on as a strategic adviser going forward. Peaksware (TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic parent company) President Lee Gerakos will also remain onboard following the acquisition. According to company representatives, for the foreseeable future TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic are to be operated as a separate business unit under the Garmin umbrella. This means that the respective platforms will remain brand-agnostic for wearables and smart trainers that tie into their ecosystems. TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic’s approximately 120 employees will become Garmin associates, adding to the roughly 23,000 employees Garmin has globally.

Garmin Co-Chief Operating Officer Brad Trenkle said in a release announcing the deal, “TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic share Garmin’s passion for empowering athletes and coaches around the world with world-class training tools, performance metrics and actionable insights. The addition of these highly successful platforms to the Garmin ecosystem will expand access to more authentic coaching experiences—connecting athletes with professional coaches who guide, motivate and inspire them to reach their goals.”

Garmin is by far the largest sports-specific wearables brand in the marketplace, only outpaced by general electronics brands such as Apple in terms of overall market share. In its Q1 2026 financial results, Garmin announced that the fitness division saw a 42% increase in revenue to $547 million USD, driven by wearables demand. Total revenue for the company in the quarter was $1.75 billion, outpacing analysts expectations.

The deal sees Garmin expand its presence on the analytics and athlete relationship side of the space. Though Garmin has success with its Connect tool, it is primarily a closed-loop ecosystem. That works well for an individual athlete who might wish to review their data, but it is more difficult for those athletes who might be working with a coach to pass that information over.

It also brings TrainingPeaks Virtual under the Garmin banner. TrainingPeaks Virtual has seen continual investment in the cycling platform, with rapid world expansion, a revised graphics interface, and the option to upload your own real-world routes to preview courses on. Garmin has its own line of smart trainers, with the Tacx series of direct-drive and wheel-on trainers. It also has its own app, but most users flock to one of the other dedicated indoor training platforms.

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Garmin acquires TrainingPeaks and TrainHeroic
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Now that’s interesting.

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Interesting acquisition from Garmin, I wonder what will become of the garmin+ subscriptions, if it will look like strava and the Runna acquisition.

Although garmin already had training plans and daily suggested workouts, this will probably allow them to actually build on that and put some good basic plans together for athletes.

I am not sure how they are not disclosing financial terms. Its a public company, I would expect this to come out at some point.

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I wonder how much TrainingPeaks’ virtual environment plays into the strategy also. I didn’t see that mentioned in the article but I would imagine the acquisition includes that platform.

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Sheds light on why TPv doesn’t upload to garmin connect. They must want to change the pathway or process and didn’t want to invest money in it before today.

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Would be hilarious if the first thing they did was cut off Strava, now that they own a popular platform for training logs.

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I think this spells the end of WKO5 for those of us using that to analyze power files and prescribing training from what is shown. Training peaks already stopped support. I just don’t see garmin spending $ on something that only about 20% of the training peaks user base used.

My guess is they some how fold garmin connect and training peaks together. Hopefully training peaks gets a facelift, the UI looks like it’s from the late 90s/early 2000s. Oh wait.

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While I agree on the needed update, I doubt batching them together will happen. Totally different markets, use cases and requirements.

This is quite big. I wonder if TP SLT will stay on for earn out?

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Garmin also just released the Cirqa. I’m a Whoop user but would have considered the Cirqa had my Whoop not just renewed in June (I was waiting on the Cirqa announcement but got tired of waiting). I’m also a TrainingPeaks user though, so long term depending on the integrations that may be enough for me to switch from Whoop to the full Garmin ecosystem since I use a Garmin Edge for cycling, and my Whoop for running (cycling is my primary sport).

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Would be hilarious if the first thing they did was cut off Strava

i don’t understand. surely people want to be able to upload their data wherever they choose?

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Customers do, yes. But shareholders would prefer it if all users used the Connect social features.

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What we tracked down is that pretty much everybody stays on board, they’re being treated as its own entity, and no, you probably won’t see (for now, anyways) much of a merger between TP and Connect (or other).

Could I see it eventually maybe becoming a closed-loop ecosystem? I think that’s probably a bridge too far, even for Garmin. Too many coaches. Too many athletes. Maybe see some TP analysis within Connect…but that’s where I think the limit likely is.

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I am still synced to Strava, but only use the desktop environment. No app…and christ is it completely unusable.

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i am really curious about the general direction of travel. it turns out that claude has access to strava - so all my data - so i can write queries that help me. i wonder what the impact is of AI having direct access to individuals training data

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I just got off the phone with what is now a new to me athlete.

He had been doing just this, uploading all his data to AI and asking for training plans based on what he was doing and his key events. Turns out, AI seemed really good at generating plans but not so good, for him at least, in creating something that worked with his life, stress, and other things going on. He was spending a lot of time having AI revamp it when his schedule was fubar’d.

I think there is a place for AI integration, I don’t think AI is there, not yet anyway, at designing a training plan that goes from where you are to where you want to be & that can take in all the nuances of life.

It’s for sure interesting to watch it develop and see where it goes. I know at least 1 coaching platform that released AI integration today around synopsising the daily notes and athlete leaves into a weekly synopsis.

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I think that’s the big direction: AI to help guide a coach in the loop (or knowledgeable athlete), but not AI on its own writing plans.

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so I have spent a probably very inappropriate amount of time on AI since last sept

my prompts at the moment were HR / Power over a rolling 3 and 6 month period - not incorporating HRV or RHR values

I am less interested in “a” plan than the ability to interogate data and adapt - i think (and i work in profesional services - a sector being decimated in terms of domain knowledge) that if it can get me to 99% of a coach with the right prompts and interogation based on publically available info - there are people in trouble

coaches add different value - but I am not sure in the short to medium term programming is going to be it

we live in interesting times

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I’m more just making fun of the fact that Strava has tried to play hardball in the past with Garmin despite having no leverage, and now they have even less.

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AI is really dumb, like really dumb, you have to train the model to become predictive enough to literally not KILL you. Don’t build training plans on your own for yourself using AI, you will die. 100% serious. The error rate on the models today are enough that they are bad. Otherwise, Peakers.AI wouldn’t have human coaches still. Are they still around?

AI is really good at analyzing numbers of course. But we’re not there yet and you’d have to spend an inordinate amount of time with claude or gemini to get to what I would call safe. Probably wouldn’t be what the people who built Smartabase would call safe, but you get my point.

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Part of what they get is every preplanned workout, every change to a workout, feelings about how the next 14 workouts went after a change, adherence, ftp changes etc

Some will have hrv etc

This is a killer (partially labeled) data set with millions of planned workout blocks, and outcomes. If they wanted to fine tune their own model, only for training… they totally could