A running coach called Ren
What’s your name?
Ren asks this first, in the app and here.
Slowcoach is a live in-ear running coach for people whose goal is body composition, not a finish time. Two to four runs a week, alongside the lifting and the walking and the eating. It is being built for iPhone and it is not out yet.
The thing that actually goes wrong
You are not lacking discipline. You are going too fast.
You run two or three times a week because you are trying to change your body, not to race anybody. You lift. You walk. You are watching what you eat, and you have been for a while now.
And every easy run goes out too hard. You finish each one feeling worse than you expected to, a little further from the person who runs than you were before you laced up, and within about three weeks you have quietly stopped going.
That reads like a character flaw. It is a pacing error. It happens in the first ninety seconds of every run, and it is the most fixable problem in the sport.
What Ren does about it
One coach, in your ear, who already knows how your week went.
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Ren knows what you did yesterday
Before it says a word it has read what you lifted in the last 48 hours and which muscle groups, last night’s sleep and the week’s trend, your resting heart rate against your own baseline, the steps you have already taken today, and every run you have ever done with it. Then it decides how long today should be, and tells you why.
Twenty-five minutes at conversational effort, because yesterday was legs and you slept six hours.
Ren, before a run
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Silence is the default
Ren speaks rarely and earns each intervention. In your first week you might hear it five or six times in half an hour. Eight weeks in you should hear it half as often, because talking less is the evidence that it is working. It is not a podcast and it is not company.
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It slows you down in the first ninety seconds
The first kilometre is the highest-risk window in the whole thing. Ren notices you have set off quicker than you can hold — judged against your own history, never against anybody else’s — and eases you back before you have spent the session. No number attached, because a number is something to chase.
That’s brisk for a first kilometre. Let your breathing come back down.
Ren, ninety seconds in
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Walking is correct execution
Ren’s last and most important move is permission: to walk, or to finish early, in approving language, because that is what keeps the session a completed thing. A twenty-minute run cut to fourteen is a fourteen-minute run that you finished. Nothing else here treats it that way.
Walk the next minute. That is the session doing its job.
Ren, on the fourth rung
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No numbers you did not ask for
Ren does not read out splits, distances, paces or heart rates while you are out. Numbers invite comparison and comparison invites judgement, and you are hard enough on yourself already. There is a button that says How am I doing. Press it and you get the number plainly, with no commentary attached.
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A rolling week, with nothing to keep up
The plan is seven days long and it is rebuilt whenever anything changes, never a twelve-week block written in advance by somebody who has not met you. A run you did not do is not a debt and is never named as one; the week simply reassembles around what is left. There is no unbroken chain to protect, because a chain is a thing that breaks, and the breaking is the moment people leave.
The first four runs
All of it is engineered around the fourth run.
The fourth run, completed within a fortnight of the first, is the point at which the habit either exists or it does not. It is the one thing Slowcoach is trying to move. Everything before it is shaped to get you there.
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Run one
Deliberately easy, and Ren says out loud that it is deliberately easy, so you do not read it as being talked down to. Walk-run is the shape for anyone without a recent base.
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Run two
Ren refers back to run one inside the first ten seconds. That is the moment a feature turns into a relationship.
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Run three
Still easy. Volume goes up only once you have shown it can, never because a calendar says week two. If the week has been heavy, Ren gives you less, and says why.
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Run four
The one that counts. Get here and you are someone who runs, which is the whole point and the only claim being made.
Who this is not for
Ren is the wrong coach for you if…
- you have a race in the calendar
- you know your threshold pace
- you want a block periodised backwards from a start line
- you would like a leaderboard, a feed, or somebody else’s numbers to sit next to yours
Those runners are already well served, and by better things than this. Slowcoach is for the person running two to four times a week inside a deficit who would like to still be running in eight weeks’ time.
The waitlist
Ren is not ready yet.
Slowcoach is being built for iPhone and it is not on the App Store. Leave a name and an address and Ren will write to you once, on the day it can hear you.
Thank you. I will write to you once, when I am ready.
Questions
The things people ask.
What do I need to use it?
An iPhone and a pair of headphones. An Apple Watch makes Ren’s picture of you better, because it can see your heart rate while you are out, but it is not required and there is no watch app to install.
Does it work without a phone signal?
Yes. Everything Ren might say is written and recorded before you set off, so the run itself needs no network at all. That is also why it never pauses to think at you mid-stride.
What does it do with my health data?
With your permission it reads sleep, resting heart rate, steps, body mass and your strength workouts from Apple Health, and it uses them to decide what today’s run should be and to explain that decision to you. It is not sold, not shared and not used for advertising. Refuse the permission and Ren still works, with a thinner picture and fewer reasons to give you.
Is there a feed, or a leaderboard?
No, and there will not be. Your effort is judged against your own history and nobody else’s. That is not a philosophical position so much as a technical one: population norms are the reason you go out too hard.
Will it make me faster?
It might, as a by-product. It is not what Ren is trying to do and it is not how the product will be judged. If getting faster is the goal, there are better tools and you should use one of them.
Do I have to be dieting?
No. Ren is designed around someone who is, because that is the harder case — running well on less food takes more care, not less — but nothing requires it. You tell it when your deficit started and how hard you are going at it, and it uses that to decide when to hold you back.
What will it cost, and is there an Android version?
Neither is decided. Slowcoach is being built for iPhone first, because that is where Apple Health is. Joining the waitlist commits you to nothing and costs nothing.
If you do go out before I am ready, go slower than you think you should. That is the whole of it.
Ren