An expert running coach in your pocket.

Yes — this is actually our most common use case. Runna gives you the plan. Coach Dean gives you the intelligence layer on top of it: a coaching note after every run, load monitoring, and a direct line for training questions. Keep your Runna structure; Coach Dean adds what no app does.

You can upload your plan as a PDF to the dashboard and Coach Dean will reference it directly when giving you feedback. So instead of "you ran 8:45 pace," you get "that was your recovery day — 8:45 with 140bpm HR is exactly right, your legs should feel fresher by Thursday."

Coach Dean is genuinely good at catching the patterns that precede most running injuries — load spikes, declining aerobic efficiency, grey-zone effort distribution — and flagging them early so you can act conservatively. He's not a physio and can't diagnose anything, but he's the early warning system most runners are missing.

When something does flare up, Coach Dean will prescribe specific rehab exercises for common running injuries — IT band, shin splints, plantar fasciitis, hip flexor tightness — and swap affected sessions for cross-training alternatives (pool running, cycling, elliptical) so your fitness doesn't evaporate while you recover. The goal is to stay in training, not just to rest and hope.

Absolutely — no race on the calendar required. Plenty of Coach Dean's athletes are focused on building consistent mileage, staying healthy through a high-mileage stretch, or returning from injury. If you're coming back from something, Coach Dean will ask about your current status and build your program around staying healthy first, performance second.

If you just want to run more consistently and stop getting hurt every time you ramp up, that's a perfectly complete goal. Coach Dean tracks your load, checks in after every run, and flags patterns before they become injuries.

The best way is to connect Strava during onboarding. Coach Dean pulls your full activity history — recent paces, long run efforts, workout splits — and uses that to build a real picture of your current fitness before your first plan is written. No questionnaire can replace actual data.

If you don't use Strava, Coach Dean asks for a recent race time or your comfortable conversational pace and calculates your training zones from there using established pace formulas (the same ones elite coaches use). As you train and share feedback over text, those zones get refined over time.

No — all you need is a phone number. Coach Dean works entirely over SMS with no app, account, or device required.

That said, connecting Strava unlocks the best version of Coach Dean. He'll analyze your history to build a sharper plan from day one, and send you coaching feedback within minutes of every run finishing — pace trends, effort level, whether the workout matched the intent. It's the feature testers have found most valuable.

Beyond just chatting, a few keywords trigger specific actions:

• FEEDBACK — send a note directly to the Coach Dean team. Use this to report a bug, share a suggestion, or tell us something Coach Dean got wrong.
• DASHBOARD — get a link to your training dashboard, where you can see your current week and upcoming schedule.
• STRAVA CONNECTION — get a link to update your Strava permissions, including adding or removing the coaching notes that appear on each activity.
• UNSUBSCRIBE — get a link to cancel your subscription at any time.
• STOP — stop all messages immediately. You'll also receive a link to cancel billing. Text START to resume at any time.

Everything else is just plain conversation — ask questions, report a run, tell Coach Dean your knee hurts. He handles it.