Gear for the athletes who don’t have it
Not every athlete owns a GPS watch, and the ones who need structure most are often the ones without one. Loaner Gear lets your team keep its own gear on the shelf and lend it out: a Garmin or Coros watch, or now a bike trainer running Zwift or Rouvy.
Add each piece once in Team Settings → Loaner Gear → Add gear, connected through an account that belongs to the team (not yours, and not an athlete’s). Then click Lend, pick the athlete and how long: until tonight, until a date, or until it comes back. Before you confirm, Smagpie shows what will happen: which workouts go to the gear, and whose come off it.
While it’s lent, the athlete’s workouts go to that gear, and everything they record on it lands in their own log. Hand it to the next athlete and the first athlete’s workouts come off, the new athlete’s go on. Athletes need an Athlete Pass for workouts to be sent to gear, their own or borrowed.
A watch for the runner who doesn’t have one
Lend a team Forerunner or Coros watch to a freshman for the season, or to a varsity runner whose watch died the week of conference. Their workouts show up on the watch with their own paces and zones, and their runs come back into Smagpie on their own. The athlete doesn’t have to connect anything themselves.
Cross-training in the field house
A runner with shin splints can’t run this week, but they can still train. Most XC programs have a bike trainer in the field house for exactly that. Until now, getting a real workout onto it meant writing numbers on a whiteboard and hoping.
Choose A bike trainer when you add gear. The trainer runs Zwift or Rouvy, and Smagpie reaches it through a free, team-owned Intervals.icu account. The setup screen walks you through it step by step.
Assign an intensity for a time, and the trainer holds it
Build the bike session the way you’d build any workout: 10 minutes easy, then 4 × 6 minutes at 88% of FTP with 3 minutes easy between, then a cool-down. Assign it to the athlete and lend them the trainer.
When they climb on, the workout is waiting in Zwift or Rouvy, with targets in that athlete’s own watts. In ERG mode the trainer holds the power for them, so a 45 kg freshman and a 70 kg senior both get the right effort from the same session.
Nothing changes on the trainer between athletes. Lend it to the next runner, and their workouts go to it in their watts.
No FTP yet? Enter an estimate
Most runners have never done a bike FTP test. If the athlete has no cycling FTP on file, the Lend dialog asks for an estimate, so the trainer sets safe targets from the first ride. It’s saved as their cycling FTP, and you can change it later in Benchmarks. An athlete’s own FTP is never overwritten.
Every run and ride lands in the right log
Anything recorded on loaner gear goes to the athlete who had it when the activity started, even if it uploads after you’ve handed the gear to someone else.
- Unclaimed rides. If someone records an activity while the gear isn’t lent to anybody, Loaner Gear shows an amber banner. Review them, give each one to the right athlete in a click, or discard it. Unclaimed rides are kept for 30 days.
- Move a ride. If the wrong athlete had the gear, move the activity from its workout detail. Smagpie scores it again against the right athlete’s numbers and updates both athletes’ fitness.
Loaner Gear on the Coach Hub
A new strip on the Coach Hub shows every piece of loaner gear at a glance: what’s on the shelf, who has what and when it comes back. You can lend or take back gear in one click, and see how many rides are waiting to be claimed.
Intervals.icu: your targets, in watts and pace
This isn’t only for loaners. Every workout Smagpie sends to Intervals.icu now carries the athlete’s own targets from Smagpie: power in watts, pace as pace. Repeats keep every interval, and distance steps go out as real distances. Heart-rate steps still use the athlete’s heart-rate settings in Intervals.icu.
Steady power targets arrive as one number, which is what trainers in ERG mode ride best. Athletes who ride outdoors, or in resistance mode, can tick Send bike power targets as a range on their Integrations page to see the full range instead.
A help center at smagpie.com/help
There’s now a help center at smagpie.com/help: short answers to the questions coaches, athletes and parents actually ask, from inviting athletes to syncing watches to lending gear. It’s linked from Help in the app menu.
Plus
- The Workout Visibility privacy setting is gone. It never changed who could see workouts. Notes are seen by the athlete and the coaches on their team, so the note’s Team / Coach Only switch is gone too. Flagging a note still works.
- Fixed: uploading FIT workout files no longer reports a rejected file as imported. It now tells you why, for example when a workout with the same code is already in the library.
- Security improvements.
Got a spare watch in the coaches’ office or a trainer gathering dust in the field house? Put it on the shelf in Loaner Gear and tell us how the first cross-training day goes in Discord.