What’s tomorrow’s plan?
Last month, Today’s Plan, an endurance training platform, was shut down by its parent company, Specialized Bicycle Components. About ten years ago, Today’s Plan began life as an Australian sports tech start-up based in Canberra. Specialized acquired it in 2019. I joined the company a year later as a technical writer tasked with writing their API documentation from scratch.
It was one of the happiest times of my professional life. The people were fantastic, and the work was exciting and varied. Because the team was small, we were agile and mucked in where we could. I learned a lot and spent as much time doing DevOps in AWS and writing integration code for elite cycling teams as I did writing docs.
Sadly, my time there ended when Specialized downsized drastically in January 2023 and made me redundant. Although I’ve moved on professionally and now work at Canva, I continued to use Today’s Plan to track my fitness activities, so its closure has left another hole in my life.
Today’s Plan — built for cyclists and triathletes — was never a tight fit for me. Although I cycled a lot in my 20s when I lived in the UK, I stopped riding when I came home to Melbourne and switched to bodybuilding and running. Now I’m up to my neck in martial arts after a 22-year absense. Of all these activities, Today’s Plan only suited running, which I’ve admittedly ditched in favour of walking and skipping (jumping rope). But I stuck with them because it was convenient, and I knew the platform’s API intimately.
With Today’s Plan gone, I find myself in need of a new fitness platform. For now, I’ve fallen back to synchronising activity from my Apple Watch to Google Sheets using the HealthFit app and creating offline weekly summaries in Apple Numbers. For now, that’s enough, but I wonder if I should build something more tailored to the types of training I do now.
I’ll let the idea ferment a bit. I don’t have time to develop something now, nor should I lament the demise of Today’s Plan — it was great while it lasted, but it’s time I moved on.
