About Runaid

Runaid exists because there is a meaningful gap between what training apps deliver and what good coaching looks like.

Most apps give you a plan. A schedule of sessions built from a template, adjusted for your current fitness level, handed over for you to execute. There is value in that — a structured plan is better than no structure. But it is not coaching.

Coaching is responsive. It reads what happened this week and adjusts what happens next week. It connects the fatigue from Tuesday to the decision about Thursday. It notices when the prescribed threshold pace is consistently too fast or too slow and recalibrates, rather than leaving you to guess. It asks about your sleep and your job and your life, because the body does not distinguish between training stress and life stress.

The coaching philosophy

Runaid's coaching is built on three foundations: sports science, coaching tradition, and the individual.

Sports science gives us a detailed and well-evidenced understanding of how the body adapts to training: the physiological determinants of running performance, the mechanisms of adaptation, the relationship between training load and tissue capacity. This knowledge is real and it matters.

But sports science has structural limits. Research isolates variables; coaching integrates them. Studies report group averages; coaching addresses one person. Short-duration trials cannot describe the compound effect of years of consistent training. The move from a general physiological principle to a specific session on a specific day for a specific person requires judgment that the research does not — and is not designed to — provide.

That judgment is where coaching tradition comes in. Decades of empirical knowledge from coaches working with real athletes over real timeframes — how to periodise, how to progress, how to balance the competing demands of volume, intensity, recovery, and life. This knowledge is not less real than laboratory research. It is a different kind of real.

And then there is the individual. Two runners with identical goal times may need fundamentally different training, because their limiters are different. The science and the tradition provide the menu of options. The individual determines the order.

What makes it different

Runaid is not a plan generator with a chat interface layered on top. The coaching relationship is the product. The plan is the starting point and the diagnostic tool. What matters is what the coaching team does with the information that comes back from your training.

We are honest about what we know and what we don't. When we make a judgment call — and we make them constantly, because coaching individuals under real-world conditions is an exercise in informed judgment under uncertainty — we say so. When the evidence for something is mixed, we say so. When we change our mind based on how your training is going, we explain why.

Trust is built not by claiming certainty but by being honest about the basis for every recommendation. That is how Runaid coaches.

Who built this

Runaid is built by Simon Lindgren — a CTO and product leader by profession, a self-coached runner by obsession.

The professional background matters for how the product works: a decade building digital products at startups and scaleups in Stockholm, several years integrating AI into clinical decision-making in the med-tech space, and enough time spent working alongside doctors and physiologists to develop a genuine understanding of the science beneath the coaching.

The running background matters for why the product exists. Simon started running in late 2022 with a 56-minute 10k. Three and a half years later: 16:56 for 5k, 34:53 for 10k, 1:18:13 for the half marathon, 2:55:35 for the marathon. All self-coached. All while working a demanding full-time job and raising a young family. No training camps, no professional support team, no life structured around running. Just structured, consistent training informed by a deep engagement with the physiology and coaching traditions that Runaid's articles describe.

That progression is not elite. But it is the product of exactly the process Runaid is built to deliver: study the science, understand the coaching traditions, apply them to the specific individual, adapt based on what actually happens, and sustain the work over years. Runaid exists because that process — the reading, the reasoning, the integration of evidence and experience — should not require years of self-education. It should be accessible to any serious runner willing to train with intent.

Simon is not a certified coach. Runaid does not rest its credibility on coaching credentials. It rests on the quality of the coaching philosophy, the depth of the physiological reasoning, and — ultimately — whether the product delivers results for the athletes who use it. The articles on this site lay out the thinking in full. The product is the test of whether that thinking translates into practice.

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