Payload.training

Privacy notice

Version: 2026-10-23

Payload is a training app for hybrid athletes and their coaches. This notice says what we keep about you, why, who else sees it, and what you can ask us to do with it. You accept it when you sign up, and again before you connect a Garmin account.

Who we are

Payload is run by a small team. Questions and requests: [email protected].

Where Payload is offered

Payload is currently offered only to people outside the EEA, UK and Switzerland. When you sign up we ask which country you live in, and Cloudflare tells us which country your connection comes from. If either is in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, we don't create an account and keep nothing about you except a note of the country code that was refused (and, as for any visit, the server's ordinary logs of the request: the connection's address and the time).

Who Payload is for

Payload is for adults 18 and over. When you create an account we ask you to confirm that you're 18 or older, and we keep when you did. If you don't, we don't create an account and keep nothing about you except a note that a sign-up was refused. A date of birth under 18 can't be saved in a profile. If you think someone under 18 has an account, tell us (see "Who we are").

What we keep

  • Your account: your email address, name, the country you live in, when you confirmed you're 18 or older, time zone, the sign-in methods you linked (Google, Microsoft or Apple give us an identifier and your email address, never your password), and the settings you choose.
  • Your training profile: goals, benchmarks and training zones, the days and time you have, away dates, equipment, and, if you have a coach, the link between you. If you're on a team: the team, your groups, when you joined and left, your attendance at its events, and your choices for that team (see "Teams" below).
  • Requests to join a team, if you use a team's join link: the email address and name you typed, seen by its head coach and team admin and deleted after 30 days.
  • Your plans and training: the plans you or your coach build, the sessions you log (with effort ratings, notes and any pain you report), your daily check-ins, and the readiness and load figures the app works out from them.
  • Health screening answers, if that screening is switched on and you answer it. Only you see your answers; your coach sees that a screening flagged only if you choose to share it.
  • Club and team enquiries, if you send the "Coaching a club or team?" form on payload.training (you don't need an account): your name and email address, your club or team's name, what kind it is, how many athletes and which sports, and your note. We use them only to reply to you, and delete them after 24 months.
  • Your subscription, if you pay for a plan (see "Payments" below): the plan, its price and how often it renews, its trial and renewal dates and status, the card's brand and last 4 digits, the billing country, any free plan we gave you, the record of your agreeing to the automatic renewal, whether a promotion code applies (Stripe's reference for it and the discount), and, if you cancel, the reason you picked from Stripe's list (never anything you type). Never your card number.
  • Garmin data, if you connect a Garmin account (see below). We no longer collect Women's Health (menstrual cycle) data from Garmin.
  • Anonymous visit counts from payload.training and the sign-up pages, which can't be linked to you (see "Analytics" below).

Why

To plan and track your training: to show you and your coach your plan, your logs and how your training load and readiness are going, and to warn about a schedule that could hurt you. We don't sell your information, show you advertising or use your information for anything else.

Who else sees it

  • Your coach, for as long as you have accepted their coaching: your plans (not a team's), logs, check-ins and the figures worked out from them, and your profile. Not your screening answers (see above).
  • Your team's staff, if you join a team: only what their role allows, which is less than a coach (see "Teams" below).
  • Garmin, when you connect a Garmin account: Garmin sends us your activities and health data, and we send your planned workouts to your Garmin calendar.
  • Anthropic, our AI provider, for AI plan drafts and the AI coach chat, only with your consent (see "AI in Payload" below).
  • Sentry, our error tracker, in the EU: when the app hits an error, it sends a technical report of the fault. It carries your account number but not your name, email address, IP address, cookies or anything you typed.
  • Stripe, our payment processor, if you pay for a plan (see "Payments" below).
  • Cloudflare, which carries the connection between your browser and the app (and our analytics, below).

The app runs on a small server at the founder's home, connected to the internet through Cloudflare. Its database and backups stay on that server.

Teams

A club or team can use Payload with several staff. You join a team only by accepting its invitation; until you accept, the team sees nothing of your training. The invitation shows the team, every staff member and their roles, and what each role sees. When you accept, everyone who holds a role on the team's staff, now or later, sees what that role allows: there is no separate approval for each person. The other athletes on the team see nothing of yours.

What each role sees. Every role sees your name, your groups, when you joined, and your attendance at team events (present, absent or excused, as the staff mark it or you check in). Beyond that:

  • Head coach, assistant coach and S&C (strength and conditioning) coach:

    • Your training on the team:
      • the team's plans for you;
      • what planning needs: your goals without their notes, benchmarks, training zones and paces, the days and time you have, away dates and equipment;
      • your logs, with their notes and why you skipped a session (sick, injured or in pain included);
      • what the app works out from them: load, strength estimates and the plan checks;
      • what you send with Ask coach on a team plan;
      • your body weight where a team plan's ruck checks need it;
      • whether the team's sessions for the next 7 days are on your watch: yes, partly, no, or no Garmin Connect account connected. Never anything Garmin sends us, and never why a send failed.
    • All your Garmin activities, with heart rate, pace and the route on a map.
    • Your readiness, with the heart-rate variability, resting heart rate and sleep it comes from.
    • Your safety alerts, which say what you reported (for example a fever or chest pain) and when. They don't see the rest of your pain, illness or red-flag answers: on other days your readiness says only that a health answer counts.

    They can change your team plans.

  • Athletic trainer:

    • Your Garmin activities, your readiness and your safety alerts.
    • Your health: pain, illness, red flags (from check-ins and from logs), why you skipped a session, return to running and time off running, and your heart-rate effort calibration.

    Not your plans or the rest of your logs, and they can't change your plans.

  • Team admin: runs the team: its name and details, members, groups, who leads the staff, who may resolve safety alerts, and the team calendar, including marking attendance. They see nothing of your training, health or Garmin data.

The head coach and the team admin also invite and remove athletes, so they see the email address the team invited you with while the invitation waits.

One person may hold several roles; they then see what each of their roles allows.

Only the roles the team admin chooses (at first the head coach and the athletic trainer) can mark your safety alerts as dealt with. You always can.

What no team role sees:

  • your check-in notes (unless you share them, below);
  • your energy-availability screening and its answers;
  • cycle (menstrual) data;
  • your date of birth, sex, profile notes and goal notes;
  • the names, steps and notes of a personal coach's plans;
  • your original Garmin files.

Staff never log training for you, or send workouts to your watch with their own account. If you turn on Keep my watch up to date, their changes to your team plans reach your watch through your own Garmin connection. Being marked present at a practice never logs it: if the practice is linked to your session, you can confirm it on Today, which logs it as you.

The head coach can export the team's own records: names, the email address it invited you with, groups, when you joined and left, its calendar and who was marked present, absent or excused at each event, and the structure of its plans. The export holds no health data, no Garmin data, no logs and none of your notes.

Your choices for each team. Two switches, set separately for each team. They take effect at once and can be changed at any time; we keep a record of each change.

  • Hide my readiness from this team: its staff stop seeing your readiness, your check-in scores, and the readiness checks and suggestions on your team plans. Your safety alerts still reach them, and the athletic trainer still sees your health answers.
  • Share my check-in notes with this team (off unless you turn it on): its coaches and athletic trainer read the notes you write in your daily check-in and on your safety alerts. Never the team admin.

Neither switch can give a role more than the list above, and neither changes what a personal coach sees.

A team and a personal coach. You can have both. A team never sees the names, steps or notes of a personal coach's plans, and a personal coach can't open or change your team plans. So that the plan checks can count everything you train, each side sees that the other plans exist and, for their sessions, the date, the kind of session and its share of your week's load. A personal coach sees what "Who else sees it" says, through your coaching link, not through the team.

If you're on a team's staff:

  • the team's athletes see your name, your roles and, from the day they joined, when those changed;
  • the people it invites see your name and roles;
  • no team page shows your email address;
  • the team's export holds its staff's names and roles, and the email addresses of its current staff.

Where to see it. Me → Teams shows, for each team:

  • every staff member, their roles and what they see;
  • a dated list of staff changes (joining, a role changing, leaving);
  • your two switches;
  • what is never shown to your team.

When the staff change, Today tells you until you open that page.

Leaving. You can leave a team at any time in Me → Teams, and the head coach or the team admin can remove you. Either way:

  • its staff stop seeing your training at once;
  • your plans from the team are archived and stay yours to read;
  • your logs, check-ins and Garmin data stay yours;
  • the team keeps a record that you were on it and when, and your attendance at its events, which only the head coach's export shows.

A team that is closed ends everyone's access the same way.

Analytics

We count visits to payload.training and two steps of signing up (asking for a sign-up link, and creating the account) to learn whether the site works for the people who find it. We do it with Umami, open-source analytics that we run ourselves on the same server as the app, at stats.payload.training: nothing goes to an analytics company, and it sets no cookies.

What it records: the page (its address without anything after a "?" or "#"; in the app, only the name of the screen, such as "signup"), the site that linked to it, the plan buttons and pricing switches you pressed (athlete or coach, the plan, yearly or monthly), that a club or team enquiry was sent (never what it said), whether a new account came from a sign-up link or a coach's invitation, and your browser, operating system, type of device, screen size, language and country. To tell one visitor's steps from another's without a cookie, it works out a code from your connection's address and your browser that changes every month; it doesn't keep the address.

What it never records: your name, email address or account, anything you type, and nothing about your training, health, check-ins, plans, AI drafts or Garmin data. It can't be linked to your account, so there is nothing of yours in it to copy or erase.

Opting out: if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, nothing is recorded and the analytics script isn't loaded.

How long we keep it: 13 months, then it's deleted; its backups are kept like the database's (see "How long we keep it").

AI in Payload (AI transparency statement)

What it does. Payload can use AI to draft a training plan, to re-plan a week, and to answer in the AI coach chat, when you or your coach ask for it. The AI is Claude, a large language model run by Anthropic, our AI provider. What it produces is a suggestion: nothing changes in your plan until you or your coach accept it, and its answers are training advice, not medical advice.

What we send. Only what the request needs: your goals, the days and time you have, your equipment, your benchmarks and training zones, your age range, and summaries of your recent training and readiness. Some of these summaries are derived in part from your Garmin data: your recent training load (sessions your watch recorded, with their duration and effort), your readiness state (from heart-rate variability, resting heart rate and sleep) and, after a break from running, how far you ran each week before it. For the coach chat we also send what you or your coach wrote. We never send raw Garmin recordings (heart-rate samples, routes or location), your name, email address, date of birth, sex or health screening answers. We send your body weight only when your goal is a ruck event (rounded to the nearest 5 kg, to set the pack's weight), and your free-text notes only if you choose to include them.

What it is used for. Only to produce the draft or the answer you asked for (inference). Your information, and anything derived from it, is never used to train, test or evaluate an AI model, by us or by Anthropic.

Your consent. We ask for your explicit consent before any of your information is processed by the AI, and that includes when your coach asks for a draft for you. You can withdraw it at any time in Me → Account: from then on, neither you nor your coach can use AI drafts or the AI coach chat with your information, and nothing more is sent. A draft still being made stops before its next step. Drafts already made and the coach-chat thread stay readable by you and the coach who asked until they are deleted after 90 days, and withdrawing doesn't undo a plan you already accepted.

How long we keep it. We keep what was sent and what came back (the inputs and outputs of each request) for 90 days, then delete them; when you accept a draft, its final version stays with your plan.

Payments

Payments are handled by Stripe, our payment processor. You enter your card on Stripe's own pages: your card details go to Stripe, never to Payload. Stripe keeps them under the Stripe privacy policy.

What Stripe gets from us: your email address and name, your billing address, the plan you chose, and your Payload account number (so the two records can be matched). Nothing about your training, health or check-ins, and never your Garmin data.

What we keep from Stripe: the plan, its price and renewal, its status and dates, the card's brand and last 4 digits and Stripe's code for the card (to allow one trial per card), the billing country, a promotion code's reference and discount if one applies, the reason you picked from Stripe's list if you cancel (never anything you type in Stripe's cancel form), and the reference numbers of the payment messages Stripe sends us (not their content). When a card starts a free trial we also note Stripe's code for that card on a list of cards that have had one, which names no person or account, so a card gets one free trial even across accounts; a card on the list starts a subscription without a trial. When you agree to the automatic renewal we keep a record of it: the plan, price and renewal terms you were shown, the Terms version, when you agreed, and the network your connection came from (the first part of its address only).

Garmin

When you connect a Garmin account, you choose in Garmin Connect what Payload may read and write. Garmin then sends us your activities (with their heart rate, pace, route and other recordings) and your daily health data (such as sleep, resting heart rate, heart-rate variability and stress), and we put your planned workouts on your Garmin calendar. When the app shows an activity's route on a map, the map comes from our own server, so no map company learns where you trained.

What we send to Garmin. When you send workouts to your watch, the workouts from your plan (their names, steps, targets and notes, such as a ruck's pack weight) go to your Garmin Connect account. If you turn on Keep my watch up to date (Me → Connected apps; off unless you turn it on), we also send them for you: the next 7 days of your active plans, a few minutes after one of them changes (including a change your coach or team makes) and once a day, always through your own Garmin connection, until you turn it off or disconnect. Once there, Garmin handles them under the Garmin Connect privacy notice, not this one, and Garmin may keep and use what it receives. Don't connect Payload or send workouts to your Garmin Connect account, by hand or automatically, if you're restricted from doing so.

We keep Garmin's messages to us as they arrived, as well as what we take from them, so we can process them again if something went wrong. You can disconnect at any time in the app (Me → Connected apps): we then ask Garmin to stop sending us data. What we already received stays with your history unless you ask us to erase it.

How long we keep it

As long as you have an account, unless this notice says otherwise (AI and analytics: see above; club and team enquiries: 24 months; the records of payments: below). Once paid plans start, an account nobody uses is erased 30 days after it was made: one that never started a plan, was never invited by a coach and holds nothing but the sign-up itself. The raw messages Garmin sends us are kept for now; we'll set a time limit if they grow too large. Backups of the database are kept for up to one year: the nightly backups on our server for 14 days, and a weekly copy kept off the server for up to a year. When we erase your data, it goes from those backups as they age out; we never restore a backup without first checking the record of erasures (see "What you can ask"), so erased data isn't brought back.

Payment records outlive an erasure, as the law requires. Stripe keeps your customer record (email, name, billing address) and your invoices for as long as tax law requires us to keep them (in Pennsylvania at least 3 years), with your Payload account number removed from the customer record and your subscriptions. We keep the record of your agreeing to the automatic renewal for 3 years after your subscription ends, so we can show you agreed if a payment is disputed: after an erasure it no longer names you or your account, only Stripe's customer reference. Then we delete it. The list of cards that have had a free trial (above) is not erased with your account, as it names nobody: each card's code is deleted 2 years after the card last started a free trial or was refused one.

What you can ask

  • A copy of everything we keep about you, in a file you can read and take elsewhere.
  • Erasure: we delete your account and everything we keep about you, including the raw Garmin messages, and ask Garmin to stop sending us data. Your plans and what you logged go with it, even a plan a coach wrote for you; if you're a coach, the plans you wrote for your athletes stay with them. If you pay for a plan, we first cancel your subscription at once, so you're never charged again (a refund follows our refund rules); the payment records the law makes us keep stay, as above. We keep a pseudonymous record of each erasure (the time, a keyed code made from your email address, and your Garmin user id, never your name or email; and, in the rare case Stripe couldn't be reached to cancel your subscription, Stripe's customer reference, so we cancel it by hand) for one year, so that restoring a backup can't bring your data back. If you're the only admin of a team, we first ask you to name another admin or close the team; then we erase as above.
  • Corrections, and to stop your coach seeing your training, by ending the coaching link, or a team, by leaving it.

Write to us (see "Who we are") and we'll act within a month.

Changes

When this notice changes in a way that matters, the app shows you the new version and asks you to accept it before you carry on.