What an app does well
An app does one thing really well: it gives someone who's short on motivation a schedule to get out the door, at a low price. And ChatGPT knows the textbook. Build the long run gradually, mostly easy miles with a couple of quality days, a cutback week every few weeks, a taper at the end. If you squint, it looks like a real plan.
Where it falls short
What's missing is the athlete. The paces are usually built off the goal time, not current fitness, so every workout is a little too fast and people end up forcing it instead of building. The mileage often starts too high or jumps too fast for someone coming off a break.
And it's static. It doesn't know you got sick in week 6, that your calf has been tight for ten days, or that your long runs fall apart because you're under-fueling. The plan is maybe 30% of coaching. The other 70% is adjusting it when real life hits.
An app can't keep the motivation going. It won't follow up. It's not an actual person on the other end. It misses the nuance and the experience that come with coaching, and with being a runner for decades. When a runner comes to me after about a year on an app, they're usually experiencing a little bit of burnout.
Plans written by ChatGPT
AI tools can hallucinate, or over-focus on something you mentioned once. That's where I see plans get way too aggressive, leading to injury or to being too tired on race day. Never trust one on pain or injury: it can't tell shin splints from a stress reaction, and "should I run through this" is a question for a PT or doctor. And don't trust it to tell you to back off. It tends to go along with whatever you ask, so if you ask for an aggressive plan, you'll get one. If you're going to use it anyway, here's what to give it and what to ask it for.
What changes when you switch
When an athlete switches from an app, they're no longer trying to hit whatever the schedule says while wondering if they're doing the right thing, or if the AI was right. We talk it through and make adjustments that actually make sense. After a few weeks, once they get past feeling a little shy about sharing feedback, they realize what was holding them back: they had a plan built for the "general runner," not for them.
Brad had run five marathons, three of them on an app. The app was solid at giving him a plan and a structure to follow. But after he got hurt, he didn't feel like it was remembering his feedback, and he couldn't talk through what he was experiencing or his situation in life, so the plan couldn't be built around it. In the first few weeks he noticed the difference: we moved his workout days around his work schedule, week to week. Sixteen weeks later, he ran 3:04 to qualify for Boston, a PR by almost 12 minutes.
Training the runner, not the watch
We've all had our GPS watch record wrong. GPS watches often aren't accurate in a marathon like Chicago or New York, and it's too easy to get caught up in what your splits are saying, especially on a hilly course. So I train my athletes to get in touch with what their body is telling them. I schedule specific sessions for it, so on race day, if the watch can't give them the feedback they want, they can rely on the things they can actually control.
A listen-to-your-body session is usually a fartlek, or a run over rolling hills. We're not focused on a specific pace, but on effort, so you can really lock in to how your body is feeling. I'm less concerned about the pace than about the effort, and about building through the workout. That can mean covering the watch face and not checking it, just listening for the beeps that tell you when a rep starts and ends, since the workouts download to your watch from the training platform I use.
Who should stay on an app
Someone who should stay on an app wants a low price point and something easy to get them out the door, and isn't too concerned about performance. The runners who get the most from a coach want a little bit more: they want to be the best they can be, and they're excited about their goals. This is much more than a stock static plan, or an AI-written plan. We look at who you are and what's going on in your life, and build the plan around that.
What it costs
Two tiers, billed monthly: Core at $159 (a hand-written plan adjusted every week, one call a month, zones and VDOT set properly, strength guidance, race-week pacing) and Premium at $199 (two calls a month with same-day replies, nutrition, sleep and mental coaching, video gait analysis, HRV and zone reviews). A two-month commitment to start, then month-to-month. Before any of that, a free 20-minute intro call, and no payment until we both say yes. The program page has the full comparison.
The coach behind the plan
I'm a former professional marathoner with a 2:12 personal best: 4x US Olympic Trials qualifier, 4x NCAA national champion and 4x NCAA runner-up, and I coached at the University of Oklahoma. In more than ten years of coaching I've coached more than 500 Boston-qualifying performances. I coach every athlete personally. I don't run an agency, and I don't hand your training off to an assistant.