About RunCadence

RunCadence started as a markdown file called Runbook 2025.md: a Month × Week table with one checkbox per week, updated every Sunday in under a minute. Over that year the count went from 30 runs to 108.

Seeing the gaps is the feature

What changed wasn’t discipline. It was that the cost of seeing where things stood dropped to roughly zero — and an empty cell in a full year is uncomfortable to look at. That discomfort pulled the next run forward, week after week.

Most running apps lead with your last run and this week’s distance. That view hides the exact pattern you need when you are trying to build a habit. RunCadence shows you the year, gaps included.

The minimum set of fields you’ll actually fill in

Date, distance, duration, effort. Everything else is derived from those four: pace trends, weekly streaks, personal records, relative effort, shoe mileage, race predictions, and a local coach that reads your training load.

No map, no GPS, no heart-rate zones, no feed to scroll. Each of those was left out for the same reason — across the year that produced this app, none of them changed a single training decision.

…and the fields you never have to fill in at all

A friend who runs constantly refused to log anything. Not because he doubted the idea; because typing four numbers after a run is still four numbers after a run.

So on Android, RunCadence can read finished runs from Health Connect and enter them for you. It is off until you turn it on, and it stays that way. “A privacy-conscious running tracker” and “tracking, quietly enabled by default” do not belong in the same product.

Browser or app — same thing

In a browser it runs instantly, offline, with nothing to install. The Android app is the same app plus two things the web cannot do: importing runs from Health Connect, and reminders that arrive when you are not looking at the page. Your data stays on the device either way.

Local-only is not a posture

It is the simplest possible implementation. There is no account to create, no server holding your history, and no analytics on what you log. The cost is real: nothing syncs by itself, so moving to a new phone means exporting a JSON or CSV file and importing it. Analytics exist but are opt-in and off by default, and the fonts are bundled rather than fetched, so an ordinary session makes no external requests at all.

The longer version

• From 30 to 108 runs — the markdown file, and why visibility beat motivation
• The genesis of RunCadence — which fields survived a year of real use, and what was cut
• He didn’t want to track anything — the case for importing runs instead of typing them

If RunCadence is missing something you need, write to info@run-cadence.de.