After graduating from Penn State in 1995, I joined the Nike Farm Team, an Olympic Development group based at Stanford University, which was coached by Jeff Johnson, Nike's first employee. Jeff's philosophy was simple: In order to unleash your potential, you've got to train at your current level of fitness. Add speed and mileage gradually, he advised, and give your body plenty of time to recover so you can get stronger and faster without getting hurt. My teammates and I were skeptical of Jeff's approach. It sounded way too tame.

So we ignored his advice.

For two years, we snuck in extra mileage and speed and ran faster than the workouts he prescribed.

After seeing only modest improvements, and suffering from chronic nagging injuries, we decided to give our coach’s approach a try. We ran the distances he assigned. We stuck to the paces. We rested after tough efforts.

The results were fast and dramatic.

I took 17-seconds off my 5-K time and set a new PR of 14:06. In the half-marathon, I set a 3-minute PR of 1:06.

What’s more, I qualified for the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trails three times over the next 9 years.

Ever since then, I’ve been working to bring this proven training method to runners in all parts of the pack, whether they’re targeting their first race, or their fastest.

In 2002, I worked with my Nike teammate Gary Stolz, to develop a pace tracking and workout schedule tool. Six years later, I decided to take the platform to the next level and spent a year working in my garage, reviewing physiological studies and spreadsheets with Renga Sreenivasan, a former cross-country runner at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, who also happened to be a software engineer at Oracle.

Together, we came up with an algorithm that would help people train at a current level of fitness, and gradually add mileage and speed to reach goals, without risking overtraining issues that sideline so many runners.

We patented that algorithm, and it became the foundation of Runcoach.

In 2014, we launched Movecoach, a turnkey workforce wellness solution that human resources and benefit managers can use to encourage employees to move more, and make healthy lasting lifestyle changes.

Keep Rolling!


Tom McGlynn