Is there a hill repeats app? What exists today

Search for a hill repeats app and you will find training plans that tell you to run hills, interval timers that beep on a schedule, and nothing that actually does the job: noticing that you ran the same climb five times and telling you what each rep took. It is a strange gap. Hill repeats are one of the oldest workouts in running, half the sport swears by them, and the tracking is still largely a thumb on a lap button.

Here is what a real hill repeats app would need to do, what the current tools offer, and how to get most of the value today.

What the job actually is

Strip the workout to its data and a hill session is simple: one climb with a fixed start and end, several timed ascents, recoveries in between. The app's job would be equally simple to state:

• Detect that several stretches of the run were the same climb, without being told in advance.
• Time each rep between the same two points, every time.
• Keep a history per hill, so this Tuesday lines up against every other Tuesday on that hill.
• Stay out of the way during the workout. No button choreography at the bottom of a hard effort.

The essential word is afterwards. The value is not mid-run guidance; it is a clean, comparable record produced from a run where you did nothing but run.

What the tools do today

The lap button remains the state of the art, and it is exactly as graceful as it sounds. Press at the bottom, press at the top, do not lose count while your heart rate is at threshold. Miss one press and the session's laps are misaligned, with rest labeled as work.

Watch climb features are real but aimed at a different job. Garmin's ClimbPro, for example, shows gradient and remaining ascent for climbs on a course you are following; its own manual describes it as a feature for courses, so it guides you along a route you loaded in advance rather than discovering the hill you decided to repeat this morning. Climb screens on other platforms are similar: useful mid-climb dashboards, not rep histories.

Homemade segments get closest. Runners create a private Strava segment for their hill, run the session and read the efforts afterwards. This genuinely works, and its limits are practical: you set up each hill by hand, and matching depends on clean GPS. Strava's own documentation on segment matching notes that recording issues and GPS drift can make efforts fail to match. On an open hillside that is rare; under heavy tree cover, in the terrain where trail runners actually do repeats, it is common enough to leave holes in exactly the history you were trying to build.

Interval timer apps deserve a mention only to set them aside: they time a schedule, not a hill. If your rep takes 3:26 on a tired day, a 3:00 timer does not care, and the record shows a tidy fiction.

Covering the gap today

The honest current answer to "what is the best hill repeats app" is a method, not an app: fix a physical start and end mark, capture times with whichever tool annoys you least, and keep the per-hill history yourself in a note. We wrote up that whole system in how to track hill repeats properly. If you want to know what a rep is worth in flat-ground terms, our free grade-adjusted pace calculator will price the grade for you.

It is not much bookkeeping, fifteen minutes a week, and it produces the thing every tool above fails to produce: rep times on identical ground, stretching back months.

The app we are building

That gap is one of the reasons Trailbuddy exists. It is being built to do the job as described above: detect the climb you repeated without a course or a segment set up in advance, time every rep between the same points, and keep the history per hill alongside the conditions, so a muddy session reads as a muddy session. It is in development, with a waitlist below for one email when it is ready.

Until then, the lap button and a good note remain undefeated. The hill does not care which tool you use. It only asks that you keep showing up, and that you write down what it said.