Built by a runner, for runners

Hey, I'm George

I started running about three years ago after a dad at my son's nursery convinced me to try parkrun. I'd never really run in my life but it completely changed everything and I'm so much healthier now. My five year old even runs with me at junior parkrun which is probably my favourite thing about the whole journey.

I'm also an iOS developer and I've been building apps for over eight years, some with millions of users. Paicer is what happens when a runner who writes code gets frustrated enough to build something about it.

Why I built Paicer

When I decided to train seriously I used Ben Parkes' plan for a half marathon and then moved on to Pfitzinger's Advanced Marathoning for the London Marathon. Both are brilliant but every week I'd sit down and spend ages manually building each workout in Garmin Connect step by step. The intervals were tedious enough but the pace zones were what really got to me. I might have an 8km easy run on Tuesday, a 10km easy run on Thursday, and an 11km easy run on Sunday and each time I'd have to manually input the same target pace zones from scratch. I kept thinking there should be a way to just define your pace zones once and have them applied everywhere automatically.

I looked at apps like Runna which was really convenient but it felt quite expensive as a monthly subscription when I'd already paid for my plan as a one off cost. I wanted to follow my own plan but without the tedious data entry. So I thought why not just build the tool myself.

How it works

That's how Paicer started. You upload a photo of your workout from whatever book or plan you're following and AI extracts all the steps, maps your pace zones, and syncs it to your Garmin in seconds. The whole thing that used to take me 10 to 15 minutes per workout now takes about 30 seconds. I built Paicer for runners like me who follow their own plans and just want an easy way to get those workouts onto their watch without the hassle.