I bought a titanium ring expecting another gadget that promised to make me faster. It made me faster by telling me — on the biggest day of my week — to stop.
MC — tested a pre-production HELIOS for six weeks
"The biggest win wasn't one gadget fewer to charge. It was one place where riding, sleep and fuelling finally added up to a daily call."
Quick context: Cat 3, two years coached, every number hit — and no improvement for months. Every screen I owned reported the past. None could say what today should be. So I replaced the lot and rode six weeks on a ring and my phone.*
One honest trade: no screen bolted to the bars — the phone is the head unit. In exchange, the system saw what my stack never did: I was chronically under-fuelled and paying for it in recovery. That's the quiet spiral — too little food, recovery that never lands, a heart rate drifting higher for the same watts. The ring caught it in week one. Marco had fixed it by week three.
Bit of a realization post. I've ridden with a coach for two years — structured, everything mapped out in TrainingPeaks. This morning the plan had a big threshold set on it. On paper: green light, send it.
What the plan couldn't see — my youngest's been up every night this week, so I'm running on about 4 hours' sleep, eating whatever's closest, and work has been relentless.
A few months back I'd bought the HELIOS ring from THRIVE — sold on the promise it'd make me faster. Funny thing is, this morning it made me faster by telling me to stop. Marco flagged me before I'd even kitted up: HRV stalling for days, sleep score on the floor, readiness low. It didn't just say "rest" — it rewrote my week, pushed the hard efforts back, built recovery in, and asked me to approve the change.
Safe to say I don't use TrainingPeaks anymore — THRIVE runs my entire plan now. These days I only open TP to check I'm not missing something, and I never am. Everything it did for me, THRIVE does — plus everything it never could: daily recovery and readiness, nutrition targets and logging, fuelling for each ride, all in one place that actually knows me.
Here's the part that stung: I was "on plan" for months and quietly plateaued. The plan never knew what shape I was in. The one thing that does is the reason I'm finally moving again.
Uncropped so the important HELIOS and app details stay visible.
The ring reads the night — sleep, HRV, resting heart rate — and by the time I'm at the kettle, the app has already made the call in plain words: push, hold, or back off. No interpreting graphs, no guessing off how my eyes feel. The first honest answer to "how am I actually doing?" I've ever had before 7am.
Every ride on my calendar now comes with numbers: what to eat before I roll out, grams per hour on the bike, what the recovery window needs after. Meals go in by voice — "log a banana and two espressos" — and the day's target moves with the work. It's the one part of my riding no coach ever had eyes on, and it turned out to be the part costing me the most.
A wrecked week used to mean riding a plan built for a rider who slept. Now the week reflows around reality — recovered, it pushes; cooked, it backs off; miss Tuesday and the block rebuilds instead of collapsing. The morning it told me to stop was the morning I started trusting it.
Marco doesn't hand me a PDF and wish me luck. He rewrites the week, logs the meal, builds the route, writes the dinner that hits tonight's target — in seconds, by voice — and asks for my OK before anything moves. It's the difference between advice and help.
My phone became the ride computer — turn-by-turn nav, live zones, Climbing Mode — with more on screen than the unit it replaced. Four devices sold, five subscriptions cancelled, one USB-C charger left on the desk. Everything the pile did, one ring and one phone now do — joined up. Check HELIOS.
One bad ride is noise. What I could never see was the slide — the under-slept fortnight, the under-fuelled month quietly stacking up. Now fatigue gets tracked as closely as fitness, and the slow leaks show up as chart lines instead of three flat weekends I couldn't explain. Check Availability →.
The fitness was there the whole time. It was locked behind bad sleep, missed meals and a plan that never looked up. Six weeks of being seen — and two years of work finally paid out.
One ring reads my body around the clock. The app turns my phone into the head unit. Marco turns both into the day's call — plan, fuel, adapt.
The things that break a season — big load, thin sleep, half-fuelled days — compound together. Five screens each watched one of them. Nothing watched the stack-up. Now one thing does.
If your stack tells you everything except what to do today, HELIOS replaces it — ring, app and AI coach in one. Pre-order today to lock your ship batch.
Check Availability →