If you've read my story, you know the pattern. My second weight loss attempt held for almost three years because of one thing: a morning workout window. Then I changed jobs, the timezone shifted, the window disappeared, and so did the workouts.
It wasn't that I didn't have time to exercise. I had time — it just showed up in a different place every day. A gap between two meetings on Tuesday. A free lunch on Thursday that I didn't notice until it was over. And training plans don't help with that. They tell you to run 30 minutes on Wednesday. They don't tell you when on Wednesday.
So I'm building the app I wanted. It's called Intelli Run.
What it does
- You set a weekly goal — how many runs and how much total time. It suggests a starting point from your last several weeks of runs in Apple Health, and warns you if you're about to jump too far too fast.
- Every Sunday it plans your week. It looks at your calendar and the forecast, finds open slots between meetings, leaves time to change and shower, and favors good weather and the times you usually run. You book the whole week in one tap.
- It keeps up when your week doesn't go to plan. Rain coming, or a meeting landed on your run? You get a better time to accept or skip. Missed one? It finds room to make it up. Nothing moves without your OK.
- It checks what you actually did. Any run in Apple Health on the planned day counts, whether it came from an Apple Watch, a Garmin, your iPhone, or another app.
It works with Google Calendar, iCloud, Outlook and Exchange. You can also record runs in the app on Apple Watch or iPhone (with an optional Bluetooth heart rate strap) and sync them to Apple Health and Strava.
Why this fits the way I think about fitness
Most of this site is about measuring things: HRV, sleep, strain, recovery. But data only tells you what happened. The hardest part, for me, has always been the step before that: actually getting the workout on the calendar. Intelli Run is my attempt to treat that as a scheduling problem instead of a willpower problem.
It doesn't replace my WHOOP, and it doesn't fix the runner problem I've written about before. Intelli Run decides when I run; WHOOP tells me how my body handled it.
I'm looking for beta testers
The app isn't out yet, and I want real feedback before it is. If you run (or want to run more) and your calendar keeps getting in the way, I'd love your help. You'll need an iPhone; an Apple Watch is optional.
Join the waitlist and I'll email you when the beta opens. That's it — one email when the beta opens, one at launch.
And if you know a runner with a packed calendar, please send this their way.