Does Runna include strength training?

It includes strength sessions as an add-on to the running plan — generic full-body work, prescribed by exercise and rep range, without load tracking, RIR or progression across weeks. It is better than nothing and it is not a strength programme. Nothing about your lifting feeds back into the running plan.

Is Runna good for hybrid athletes?

It is good for the running half and neutral about the rest. If your goal is a race time and lifting is supporting work, Runna is an excellent choice. If lifting is a co-equal goal with its own progression, Runna cannot see it and its running plan will not adapt to it.

Does Runna adapt if I am fatigued from lifting?

No. It adapts from your running performance and your feedback on running sessions. A week of heavy squatting is invisible to it, so a hard interval session lands on Wednesday regardless of what Tuesday cost you.

Is Runna better than a coach?

For a first marathon or a general time goal, it is close, considerably cheaper, and more consistent. For a specific weakness, a return from injury, or a genuinely hybrid goal, a coach can reason about things a plan generator cannot.

Can I use Runna and something else for lifting?

Yes, and it is a sensible stack. The seam is that neither system sees the other, so the decision about whether Wednesday's intervals should survive Tuesday's squats stays with you.

Base vs Runna for Runners Who Also Lift

What Runna does well, and it is a lot

The plan is genuinely good. Structured, progressive, race-goal-driven, and built on sound principles — a sensible easy/hard distribution, appropriate long-run progression, and a taper that is not an afterthought.

It adapts. Runna reads your completed sessions and your feedback and adjusts subsequent weeks. That feedback loop is the difference between a plan and a PDF.

Paces are prescribed properly. Sessions come with target paces derived from your recent performances rather than from a generic table, which is the single most important thing a running plan can get right.

Watch integration works. Sessions push to Garmin, Apple Watch and Coros and execute on the wrist.

If your goal is a half marathon time and you lift twice a week to stay durable, Runna is an excellent purchase and this page is not arguing otherwise.

Where the strength half falls down

No load tracking. Runna's strength sessions prescribe an exercise and a rep range. They do not record what weight you used, so there is no progression to observe and no way to know whether you got stronger.

No RIR or proximity to failure. The variable that determines whether a set drives adaptation is how close to failure it was. Without it, "3 sets of 10" describes a duration rather than a stimulus. Why proximity to failure is the input that matters.

No weekly volume accounting. The number that governs hypertrophy is hard sets per muscle group per week. Runna does not compute it, so you cannot tell whether the strength add-on is doing anything. Count it here.

No progression across weeks. The sessions vary; the loads do not advance systematically.

That is a reasonable set of trade-offs for injury-prevention work. It is not a strength programme, and if you are trying to add muscle while training for a race, the difference matters.

The connection that does not exist

The more consequential gap is that the two halves do not inform each other in either direction.

Lifting does not affect the running plan. Tuesday: five heavy sets of squats at RIR 1. Wednesday: Runna prescribes 6x800 at threshold. It has no idea, and it will not move it. Why session order and spacing matter.

Running does not affect the lifting. A 50-mile week and a taper week come with the same generic strength add-on, when the volume you can recover from differs substantially between them. The interference is dose-dependent, which is exactly why this matters.

Neither affects what you eat. A week with two long runs and four lifting sessions costs meaningfully more than a taper week. Runna has no nutrition layer at all. How far apart, in calories.

The comparison

	Runna	Base
Running plan generation	Best in class	Session prescription, not a race plan
Pace targets from your data	Yes	From your own threshold
Adapts to running feedback	Yes	Grades every session
Race-specific periodisation	Yes	No, this is Runna's advantage
Watch push of structured sessions	Yes	No, the watch does that better
Strength load per set	No	Yes
RIR / autoregulation	No	Yes
Weekly hard sets per muscle	No	Yes, fractional
Lifting affects endurance prescription	No	Yes
Endurance affects lifting volume	No	Yes
Nutrition	No	Adaptive, same ledger
Recovery scoring	No	Own baseline
Shows its arithmetic	Partly	Every derived number

When Runna is the better call

You have a race date and a time goal. Race-specific periodisation is Runna's whole design and Base does not attempt it.
Lifting is support work, two sessions a week, no progression goal.
You want sessions pushed to your watch with pace alerts. Base deliberately does not do live pacing — the watch is better at it.
You are new to structured running and want to be told what to do.

When the gap becomes the problem

When lifting stops being support work. The moment you have a strength goal alongside the race goal, you need three things Runna structurally cannot provide: load and RIR recorded per set, a weekly volume target that responds to your running load, and a recovery signal that reads both.

The common stack is Runna plus a lifting app, and it works with one caveat worth being honest about: no number that requires both halves ever gets computed. Whether to deload, whether Wednesday's intervals survive Tuesday's squats, what today's calorie target should be. Those stay in your head or in a spreadsheet. What that reconciliation actually costs.

If you want to check one thing before deciding: derive your own threshold pace zones and compare them to what your easy runs actually average. Running easy days too hard is the most common way concurrent training quietly fails, and a plan cannot fix it if you are not executing the easy end.

If you have not committed to paying yet, Runna against Nike Run Club covers whether the personalisation is worth the subscription.