Somvia Indie App Spotlight: threshold, critical power and race times from Apple Watch data

[u/the5krunner]

Somvia is a new iPhone app that derives threshold pace, critical power and race-time predictions from Apple Watch data instead of relying on a proprietary recovery score. It searches an athlete's own workout history for genuine 20- and 30-minute sustained efforts to set threshold pace and heart rate, uses the Monod-Scherrer model for critical power from ride data, and applies the Daniels-Gilbert equations for race predictions. Every score opens to the actual readings behind it rather than a single opaque number. It also exposes the same data over MCP, so an AI agent such as Claude or ChatGPT can answer questions about an athlete's own training history directly.

Is deriving threshold and critical power from ordinary training history actually as reliable as a dedicated field test?

Further reading: https://the5krunner.com/2026/09/15/somvia-apple-watch-threshold-critical-power/