If you don’t know, I LOVE bikes. It’s not only great exercise it’s a great way to see the world (yes I ride the same two routes every week). What I don’t love is being someone aimless when it comes to indoor training. I want to improve. I want to gain strength and endurance. So, what better way to do it then go way to deep on my hobbies and integrate AI into more parts of my life!
Enter n8n. If you aren’t familiar, n8n is an automation workflow tool like Zapier or IFTTT. The biggest difference is that you can self host it. I am running it on an EC2 instance that had a few extra CPU cycles to spare but I could also run it in my home lab. I also put out a re-usable n8n module for ECS that I need to migrate to.
Anyway, back to my cycling coach. The purpose of this workflow is pretty straight forward. Find ways to determine what workouts I should be doing on what days given the input of the previous week. I also gave the some basic stats about myself like weight, current FTP, and my goals.
Scheduler (Every Sunday Night) > Strava (Get past workout data) > Google Sheets (Check previous plan) > Consolidate > Analyze with Claude Sonnet > Output > Google Sheets & Slack
The end result looks like this:
n8n provides this nice drag and drop interface for building out these workflows. The purpose of Google Sheets is to store my expected workout and then also compare it with the workouts that I actually did. The AI then provides an adherence score. Here is a sample of the Slack message:
This is the first week of sticking to its workout plan! Hopefully I get a good score and I begin to see improvement.
If you haven’t utilized n8n and you are new to automated workflows its a great place to start!
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