I had a problem.
Heart rate spiking before the warm-up was done. Every easy run creeping into Zone 3. A plateau that wouldn’t move, no matter how many sessions I put in.
The diagnosis took embarrassingly long: easy days weren’t easy. Hard days weren’t hard. Everything ended up in the same grey middle. Medium-hard on Monday, medium-hard on Saturday, medium-hard on race day.
So I built a tool. I ran a 52K with it, then used it to train for Race to the Stones, 100 km, in July 2026.
You’re trying hard. That’s the problem.
That is the whole product. Zonna sets a zone for every session and holds you to it, which mostly means telling you to slow down on the days you were planning to prove something. It is not the exciting version of training. It is the version that keeps working.
One person, still using it.
Zonna is built and run by Russ Shear. Not a team, not a content farm, not a white-labelled plan library with a logo on it. The coaching logic is written down, argued over and checked against what the app actually does, because the person writing it is also the person following it.
That matters most if you are a charity deciding whether to put this in front of your fundraisers. You are not being asked to trust a brand. You are being asked to trust someone who will answer the email himself.