About Ultrathlete

Athlete. Coach. Technologist.

Most training apps are built by technologists who read about coaching, or by coaches who hired someone to build an app. Ultrathlete is built by someone who trains, coaches and builds, all three.

Founded by

Massimo De Marco

An endurance athlete for decades, Massimo is also a certified running, ultrarunning, endurance nutrition and strength and conditioning coach who works with endurance and ultra-endurance athletes, and has spent twenty years leading technology and product as Chief Technology Officer, Chief Product Officer and Chief Executive Officer.

Ultrathlete comes from all three. The athlete knows what the plan has to fit around, the coach decides what the product should do, and the technologist makes sure it does it every morning, for every athlete, without cutting corners.

The athlete

Decades of endurance training and racing

An endurance athlete for decades: the early mornings, the long days out, the weeks that don’t go to plan.
Knows from the inside what a training plan asks of a life with work, family and everything else.
Ultrathlete’s first athlete: the product is used for real training by the person who builds it.

The coach

Coaching endurance and ultra athletes

Coaching endurance and ultra-endurance athletes: periodised plans, training load, race strategy.
Fuelling and hydration planning for long training days and races.
Strength programming for athletes carrying high training volume, for resilience as much as performance.

The technologist

Twenty years building products people rely on

Two decades in technology, from software engineer to Chief Technology Officer, Chief Product Officer and Chief Executive Officer.
Built and led product, engineering and data science teams in fast-growing startups across health, fitness and consumer apps.
Founder and Chief Executive Officer: built companies from the first hire, with the teams and culture to make them last.

Certified by

Ultrarunning Coach
UESCA
Running Coach
UESCA
Endurance Sports Nutrition Coach
UESCA
Strength & Conditioning Coach
Accademia Italiana Fitness · CONI SNaQ qualification · recognised by ESWA and NSCA

Why it matters

Coaching you can trust, software that holds up.

Living the sport, coaching it and building software are rarely in the same room. At Ultrathlete they are, and you can feel it in the product.

The athlete

Training that fits the life you have

Built by someone who fits training around work and family too. Your plan follows the days you can actually train, and a week that falls apart gets rearranged, not abandoned. One rough session changes nothing; a run of them does, and you’re asked before your plan changes.

The method

A coach’s rules, not a model’s guesses

How the plan is built, how load climbs, when a hard week becomes a warning: every rule the AI coach follows was written by a coach who trains the same way, and is enforced in code. The AI explains and adapts; it doesn’t improvise the method.

Fuelling

Fuelling from certified expertise

The fuelling and hydration guidance in your plan comes from a certified endurance sports nutrition coach: when to start, how much to take in, and how to build it up in training. Every part of the coaching ships only when it is ready to be trusted.

The product

Built the way serious software is built

Every recording read in detail, what you’ve told your coach remembered, and everything the AI writes checked against the coaching rules. The discipline of two decades building technology products, brought to coaching.

Your data stays yours

Connect your watch or training platform and your sessions land where you already train. We use your training data to coach you, and for nothing else: no advertising, never sold, never used to train AI models. Disconnect whenever you like.

Read our privacy policy →

Humans stay in charge

Ultrathlete isn’t an AI left to work things out alone. The coaching method it follows was written by a coach who trains the same way, and the AI works inside that method, never around it. When it gets something wrong, or you tell us it did, we hear about it, and the method only changes when a person decides it should. Every message the AI writes is labelled as AI, and the big calls stay yours, or your coach’s.

How we work

In it for the long run.

Small on purpose, built patiently, the way you’d train for a hundred miles.

Athletes and coaches in the loop

Ultrathlete is shaped in a private beta with ultra runners and coaches. What they tell us decides what we build next.

Coaching reviewed like code

The methodology is written down, versioned and reviewed, the same way we treat software. When the coaching changes, we can say what changed and why.

Growing, deliberately

We’re building a team of coaches, sports scientists and engineers who care about getting people to the start line healthy. If that’s you, we’d like to hear from you.

Early access opening soon

Train with us

Whether you’re chasing your first ultra or coaching athletes who are, join the waitlist and we’ll let you in with the first waves.