Why I'm Building Runsense, Part 1

By Raph · July 6, 2026

Want help achieving a running goal, be it your first 5k or your tenth marathon? You have two options, but sadly neither works for most people.

The first option is a human coach. Good ones are worth every penny, but the economics only work one way: to make a living, a coach either needs a huge roster of athletes, or to charge extremely high prices.

The second option is an app, like Runna. Affordable, available instantly, but for the most part, not much better than a static PDF plan you can download for free.

Runsense exists to fill the gap between generic plan-apps and prohibitively expensive human coaches.

The real cost of a human coach

Real, responsive coaching starts at $150 and goes up from there: TrainingPeaks' Coach Match tops out at $359/month. Go looking for an experienced coach and the price climbs well past that: ultrarunning coach Jason Koop's company CTS charges $1,295/month or more for a "Premier Coach"!

For non-elite, non-rich athletes, the math just doesn't pencil out. Most people can't afford even the lower-tier coaching price of $150/month. But on the other side of it, a coach earning $150/month per athlete (actually $127/month, after TrainingPeaks' 15% cut) needs a roster of ~42 athletes just to match the median US salary of $63,180/year!

On the coach's side, it's nearly impossible to make a living unless you're elite. On the athlete's side, it's nearly impossible to get the quality and attention you want, unless you are elite and/or rich. In economic terms, this is a "Missing Market": eager but priced-out buyers, underpaid providers.

The app that calls itself personal

The other option is an app, and the most popular one, Runna, costs about $20 a month. It markets itself as personalized. In practice, it's a plan generator: tell it your race and your goal time, and it hands you a periodized template with paces attached.

The gap between that promise and the experience shows up constantly. Runna's pace guidance ignores heat and humidity: the workout comes at a fixed pace no matter the forecast, so users manually flag "conditions are not ideal," or ask outright whether there's a setting to dial back a workout in the heat. It can misread good performance as a problem, too: one runner who beat every interval target by a wide, consistent margin got a "Variable pace detected" card telling him to slow down and be more consistent, not to speed up. Its AI-generated post-run feedback praised one runner for pushing through "the rain" and warned him to expect "similar wet conditions" again, on a day that was actually 25°C and sunny, the hottest of the year. It's also mixed up what a run even is: one user opened Strava to find a new marathon personal best, credited to a 45-minute stair-master session that had synced in as a "run." And a "personalized" message once went out with the merge field unfilled, opening with "Hey, <NAME>!"

Many athletes use Runna and get value out of it. But the reality is that Runna is a plan-generator app, dressed up as a coach. And a plan, however well-built, leaves the labor to you. You have to interpret your completed workouts. You have to figure out how to adapt if you miss a run. You have to manually move workouts to fit your schedule. And if your goals or schedule change enough that you need a new plan, Runna doesn't carry your training history forward either, so users report the switch feels like starting from zero.

What runners actually want

Runsense grew out of a research study of 165 running-community Reddit threads with more than 1,800 comments, plus direct feedback from people who registered for our beta. The pattern is consistent: when runners describe their frustration with both coaches and apps, communication (64%), personalization (61%), relationship (55%), and adaptability (52%) are the top gaps.

Two lines from that research stuck with us. One person, describing a popular training platform: "I needed a data science degree to understand it. I just want an app with built-in sick days." Another, describing what they actually wanted: "Someone to explain it in plain language. A coach running with you."

That's not a request for a better chart. It's a request for a coach who notices what's actually happening in your training and says something useful about it.

Closing the gap

Here's why we think this gap is closable now: the expensive part of coaching was never the plan. It was the labor of a person paying attention to you, communicating with you, adapting to you. That's the part AI is now genuinely good at, if it's built to actually listen to what you say and look at your data.

That's the difference we're building toward. Not a plan with a chat window attached to it, but a coach whose whole job is paying attention: to your training, your recovery, your feedback, your questions, your schedule.

What this looks like in Runsense

Runsense reads your training from Apple Health, with your permission, so it sees your runs, your sleep, and your resting heart rate the way a coach paying attention would. It builds you a real, periodized plan toward your goal, around your given schedule. It adapts the plan when life happens: a missed run, a rough night, a head cold. Have a question? Just ask. The coaching interface is text messages, so you just talk to Runsense, like you would to a human coach.

If that's the coach you've been missing, try Runsense free for 14 days.