One Excel per athlete and a team with no life of its own
Lucho Pilatti Team coaches trail running remotely, with runners spread all over the world. For years every athlete had their own Excel sheet: one file per person, one plan per file, and every session written by hand.
With ten or twenty runners the system works. With fifty, every week means opening fifty files, writing fifty plans and answering the same question fifty times. Preparing each workout took a long time, and scaling it to another runner, another week or another goal took almost as long, because Excel has no idea that two sessions look alike: you write them again.
The team was, in its own words, making plans every day at every hour. There was no point at which the work was finished, because there was always one more file to update. At around 50 athletes the system became unsustainable, and not for lack of runners who wanted to train with them, but for lack of hours to look after them.
"We ended up working 24/7. We were saturated and had no life of our own."
A tool that lets you scale
With TrainerPlan the team started to win back the hours the spreadsheets had been eating. The difference is not writing a session faster; it is not having to write it fifty times.
- Plan once, scale to many — a session is built once and adapted to each runner without rewriting it from scratch. What used to be one file per athlete is now one plan that gets adjusted.
- The plan travels by itself — every runner sees their week in the app, wherever they are, without waiting for an email or an attachment. For a team with athletes in several countries and time zones, that removes a chunk of work nobody used to count.
- The data comes back to the same place — completed workouts land in the coach's calendar, next to what was planned. Reviewing a runner is no longer opening their file and asking what they did.
- Everything measurable — with the workouts and the data on one platform, each runner's progress is quantified instead of guessed.
"I was surprised at how much more time I could gain, because it's a tool that lets you scale and evolve."
What a week looks like now
The team works in TrainerPlan every day, but not every day is the same. Some are given over entirely to reviewing workout data: what each runner did, how they responded to the load, who needs an adjustment. Others are kept for generating new plans, in batches, for the runners starting a cycle or changing goal.
That split between data days and planning days was impossible with one Excel per athlete, where every task meant going file by file. Now the coach decides which mode each day runs in, and work that used to be spread across every hour fits into a schedule.
What changed
The team reckons it saves at least five hours a day. With Excel the practical ceiling was around 50 athletes; with TrainerPlan it has had more than 200 active at once, and today works with 146. That jump did not come from hiring more coaches or sleeping less: it came from the same team being able to look after four times as many runners in fewer hours than before.
And the results, Lucho says, are better, because everything is now more measurable and quantifiable. When the plan and what the runner actually did sit in the same place, decisions are made on data, not on the memory of a conversation.
For a team that had reached the point of working 24/7, the biggest change may not be in any number: it is getting a life back while the business grows.
"It was a huge relief in workload, and it let us scale the business."