Groundwork is a conversational running coach operated by Groundwork Run LLC. This policy explains what we collect, what we do with it, what we do not do with it, and what control you have over it.
Groundwork is in invite-only beta. It is offered in the United States only, and it is not offered to residents of Connecticut, Nevada or Washington State. Groundwork is intended for runners aged 18 and older. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe someone under 18 has provided information to us, write to hello@groundworkrun.com and we will delete it.
Account information. You sign in with Google. From that sign-in we receive your email address and basic Google profile information. We store your email address to identify your account. We never see or receive your Google password.
Your timezone. Your browser reports its timezone when you use Groundwork, and we store it so Groundwork can reason correctly about dates, days of the week and the timing of your training.
Your conversations. We store the messages you send to Groundwork and the responses Groundwork sends back. We also store a short running summary of each conversation, so Groundwork can pick up where you left off, and short notes recording things that mattered in your training history.
Files you upload. You can upload activity files (for example GPX, TCX, FIT or CSV exports), images and PDFs. Their contents are read and sent to our AI provider so that Groundwork can respond to them. We do not store the contents of the file itself in your conversation record. What we store is the file name and, where it is a run, the training information Groundwork took from it.
Training information you give us. When you describe a run, paste workout details, answer an onboarding question or tell Groundwork how you felt, that becomes part of your conversation record and informs Groundwork's reading of your training.
Training metrics Groundwork derives. As you use Groundwork, the system maintains a training profile for you. It includes things you tell it (your name, age, goal, weekly volume, devices, units preference) and things it works out from your data: a working aerobic ceiling, which is a heart rate, an efficiency measure at that ceiling, heart rate drift, a resting heart rate trend, a trend direction, and a governance state that decides whether your training should hold, build or back off. We keep a dated history of these so your progress can be shown over time.
Bug reports. If you report a bug from inside the app, we store your note, your email address and the time you sent it.
Diagnostics. When Groundwork fails to read something correctly, we log the failure so it can be fixed. Those logs can contain the text that failed to parse and the training profile that was being written at the time.
Heart rate is health information, and much of what Groundwork does is built on it. Your working aerobic ceiling, your efficiency measure, your drift readings and your resting heart rate trend are all heart rate data or derived from it. Under California law this is sensitive personal information. We treat it that way. We use it to run Groundwork for you and for the purposes listed below, and we do not use or disclose it for any other purpose.
Activity files can contain the precise route you ran. We do not store your GPS coordinates. When you upload a file with location points in it, those points are read in memory to work out distance and are not written to our database.
We do not take payment, and we hold no card or bank details. We do not run advertising trackers, third party analytics, or a third party error reporting service. We do not buy information about you from anyone.
Groundwork uses your information for these purposes and no others: to run the service and answer you; to interpret your training and maintain a coaching relationship that persists across sessions; to review how the product is performing during the beta, and to fix it when it is wrong; to troubleshoot problems, including problems you report; to monitor the safety and quality of what Groundwork says; and because our providers monitor their own services for abuse, as described below.
Beta review. During the beta, the founder can read individual conversations through an internal admin view. This is how a one person team finds out that Groundwork said something wrong. It is limited to the Groundwork team, which is currently one person.
Safety and quality monitoring. An automated check runs over Groundwork's responses and flags certain phrases for review. When it flags one, the flagged text and a conversation identifier are written to our server logs. This is a safety and quality signal, not a profile of you.
We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We do not disclose it to advertisers, marketers or data brokers. We do not use your data to train AI models, and our AI provider's own published terms state that it does not train its models on our customers' content either. See Who processes your data below for where that commitment comes from. We do not build profiles that compare one runner to another.
We do keep minimal aggregate operational figures, such as uptime, error counts and how many accounts are active. These do not identify you.
Groundwork is built on a small number of providers. Each one is bound by its own agreement with us and by its own published privacy practices.
Anthropic. Your messages, your uploaded file contents and your training profile are sent to Anthropic's Claude API to generate Groundwork's responses and to read your training profile out of the conversation.
Supabase. Stores your account, conversations, training profile, history and bug reports.
Vercel. Hosts and runs the application, and holds the server logs it produces.
Google. Provides sign-in. Google identifies you to us and never gives us your password.
Anthropic, our AI provider, states in its own published terms that it does not train its models on our customers' content, and separately that data it retains is never used for model training without the customer's express permission. This is Anthropic's own stated commitment to every customer using its API, not a special arrangement Groundwork negotiated.
Anthropic does not retain your conversation content by default. There is one exception, and it is outside our control. Regardless of any retention arrangement, Anthropic states that it may retain data where required by law or where a chat or session has been flagged by its own automated trust and safety systems, for up to two years. Deleting your data from Groundwork, or waiting out our backup rotation, removes our own copy, described under How long we keep it below, but it does not reach a copy Anthropic itself retained under that exception, and we have no way to make it do so.
Groundwork sets only the cookies it needs to work. These keep you signed in and protect sign in against cross-site request forgery. We set no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies, and we send no email containing a tracking pixel.
Do Not Track. Some browsers send a Do Not Track signal. Because we run no advertising, no third party analytics and no tracking cookies to begin with, there is nothing on Groundwork for that signal to turn off, and we do not track your activity in a way a Do Not Track signal would change. We do not program a specific response to the signal, because there is no tracking for it to disable.
Cross-site collection. No other party collects personal information about your online activity across other websites or services through your use of Groundwork.
While your account is active, we keep your conversations, your training profile and its history, and your bug reports.
Conversations you delete in the app stop being shown to you immediately and are removed from the database on a deletion sweep. During the beta that sweep is run by hand rather than on a schedule, so a conversation you deleted may still exist in the database for a period afterwards. Deleting your account removes it at once, whether or not the sweep has run.
Server logs are held by our hosting and database providers on their own retention schedules.
Backups. Our database provider keeps daily backups for a short rotation. Your data is gone from the live database immediately, and the backup copies age out within that window.
Dormant accounts. We do not want to hold health related information about people who have stopped using Groundwork. If you have not signed in for 24 months, we will contact you at your account email address, give you a grace period to sign in or export your data, and then delete the account. During the beta we do this by hand rather than automatically. If the beta ends, we will tell you and either delete your data or move you to whatever comes next, at your choice.
Export. You can download everything Groundwork holds for you as a single file, from the account page, at any time. The export is built from a fixed list of fields. It contains your words, your runs, your numbers and the coaching record you experienced. It does not contain Groundwork's internal machinery: our internal state labels, the inference structures behind the coaching, what triggers a re-evaluation, and our own diagnostics. That is the boundary between your data, which is yours, and how Groundwork works, which is ours. Conversations you have deleted are not in the export.
Deletion. You can delete your account yourself, from the account page, without contacting anyone. You type DELETE to confirm. When you do, we revoke any third party connection, delete your sign-in record, and every table holding your data is cleared. The system then counts the rows in each of those tables and will not report success unless every count is zero. There is no recovery window and no restore. If you want your data, export it first.
Three things outlive that. We would rather say so here than have you find out later.
Backups. Our database provider keeps daily backups for a short rotation. Your data is gone from the live database immediately, and the backup copies age out within that window.
Anthropic. Your conversations are sent to Anthropic to generate Groundwork's responses. Anthropic does not keep them by default, but it can retain a session its own safety systems flagged for up to two years. Deleting your account does not reach that copy and we have no way to make it.
Your acceptance record. When you agreed to the Terms of Use and this Privacy Policy, we recorded that you did and which version of each document you agreed to. That record stays after your account is gone. It holds an account identifier and two version numbers. It holds nothing about your running.
Access and correction. Most of what Groundwork knows about you is visible in your conversations and on your progress and account pages, and you can correct it by telling Groundwork. If you want anything else, write to hello@groundworkrun.com.
If you are in California. You have the right to know what personal information we collect and why, the right to delete it, the right to correct it, the right to opt out of sale or sharing, and the right to limit our use of sensitive personal information. As stated above, we do not sell or share personal information, and we do not use sensitive personal information for any purpose beyond running Groundwork for you, so there is nothing to opt out of. We will not treat you differently for exercising any of these rights. You can exercise them yourself through the account page, or by writing to hello@groundworkrun.com. You can use an authorized agent. We honor these requests whether or not the law currently requires us to.
We protect your data with encrypted connections, database level access rules that scope every query to your own account, encryption of any third party access tokens, and limited access to production systems. No system is perfectly secure and we cannot promise absolute protection.
If we learn of a security incident affecting your personal information, we will notify affected users without undue delay, and in any case no later than 60 calendar days after we discover it. We will make whatever additional notifications the law requires of us.
You bring your training data by uploading files that you export yourself from whatever platform you already use. Your data reaches Groundwork because you handed it over, not because we reached into another account.
If you connected a third party service to Groundwork during an earlier beta, deleting your account revokes that connection and removes everything sourced from it.
If we make a material change, we will change the effective date at the top and tell you inside the app before it takes effect.
Questions about this policy, or requests about your data: hello@groundworkrun.com
Groundwork Run LLC · Atlanta, Georgia, USA