Designed, built, and shipped in one week.
Cadence: Run Coaching
A training and route-finding app for new runners and the coaches who guide them. It tells you what to run today, finds a loop from wherever you are, and keeps progress where you can see it.
Download on the App StoreA browser demo on a shared account with sample data, here to show how the app works. The finished product is a native iPhone app.
The problem.
Most people who take up running quit within their first few months, and getting hurt from doing too much too soon is one of the most common reasons. The big running apps don't help: they're built for veterans who want charts, not beginners who want to know what to do today. Coaches have the opposite problem: their plans live in spreadsheets, with no clean way to see what a client actually ran.
What we built.
A running app with one job: make training feel simple. A coached plan tells you each day's run in plain language. Routes answer a single question - how far do you want to run? - and turn it into loops from your front door, in your neighborhood or a city you've never set foot in. Recording and importing a run is done automatically with no setup, stats stay readable, and a coach can set the plan and follow along week by week.
Inside the app.
Decisions along the way.
Workouts are written in plain English.
Every workout reads like a text from a coach — "conversational the whole way, fuel at 45 minutes" — never pace zones or heart-rate bands. New runners don't know what zone 2 is, and an app that makes them look it up is an app they stop opening.
Route finding asks exactly one question.
How far do you want to run? Type a number, get loops that start and end where you're standing — anywhere in the world. We deliberately cut waypoints, filters, and route editors: for a beginner, distance is the whole question, and every extra control is a reason to skip the run.
Rest days share the home screen with runs.
Doing too much too soon is the main reason new runners get hurt and quit, so rest days are rendered as part of the plan — same billing as a workout — instead of empty calendar space. The design argues that recovery counts, because it does.
Stats stop where interpretation starts.
A weekly progress bar, a streak, an average pace — then we stopped. No charts, splits, or fitness scores. The goal is feeling yourself improve; the moment stats need interpreting, they've become homework.
Coaches see planned next to actual.
A coach sets the week and the app lays what the client actually ran beside it, run by run. This replaced the real workflow we found: plans in spreadsheets, results as screenshots over text.
Recording works without setup.
Starting a run is one tap, and runs recorded in other apps import on their own. There are no setup screens anywhere in the app, because setup is where beginners give up before the first mile.