In two SmartRunning community surveys completed by 688 runners, 47% reported pacing as a challenge, 36% reported difficulty with consistency and 37% expressed concern about injury. Around 71% rated adaptation to daily feedback in one of the two highest importance categories. These are survey findings, not proof of product effectiveness.
The hardest part of running training is often not knowing what a workout says on paper. It is knowing what to do when real life and real legs stop matching the plan.
That theme showed up repeatedly in Coach Parry’s coaching experience – and it also appeared when 688 runners told us where training becomes difficult.
That practitioner experience was useful. But we also wanted to hear directly from runners.
In October 2025, 688 runners responded across two SmartRunning community surveys: 143 through the SmartRunning Belgian network and 545 through the Coach Parry community.
They were runners with different goals and distances, not 688 marathon runners, and the surveys were self-selected rather than representative of all runners. Even with that qualification, several of the findings closely echoed what coaches had already been seeing.
Almost half struggle with pacing
47% reported pacing as a challenge.
Coach Parry’s pain-point analysis had already identified uncertainty about pacing training runs, race execution and deciding when to prioritize volume versus quality.
The survey gives that coaching observation some scale: pacing is not a niche concern. Almost one in two respondents said they find it difficult.
That matters because pace looks deceptively simple. Your watch gives you a number but deciding what that number should mean for today’s training is harder. We have already discussed why SmartRunning does not expect pace alone to tell the whole training story.
Consistency is difficult for more than one in three runners
36% reported difficulty with consistency.
Again, this matches the coaching experience. Busy schedules, fatigue, poor sleep, travel and missed sessions all appear among the recurring problems Coach Parry sees with runners.
That gives “consistency” a different meaning from simply being disciplined enough to follow a plan.
For many runners, the real problem is keeping training going when life does not behave like the original calendar.
Injury concern is part of the training experience
37% expressed concern about injury.
The Coach Parry analysis similarly includes recurring injuries, uncertainty about returning after illness or injury, recovery problems and questions about when to push and when to back off.
The survey does not tell us that 37% were injured. It tells us that injury is important enough to influence how many runners think about their training.
That distinction supports the approach we described in our injury-awareness series: a plan cannot guarantee that a runner stays injury-free, but the training decisions it controls should not ignore the risk.
Runners want training that can respond
Around 71% rated adaptation to daily feedback in one of the two highest importance categories.
We need to interpret that carefully. It does not mean 71% want their plan rewritten every day.
What it does suggest is that many runners value training that can respond when what is happening no longer matches what was originally planned. That also closely reflects Coach Parry’s recurring coaching questions: What should I do after a bad run? Should I do more after a good one? What happens when I miss training?
Different evidence, similar problems
The coaching experience and the survey are not the same kind of evidence. One provides practitioner insight built from repeated conversations with runners. The other tells us how frequently certain issues appeared within our survey sample.
What makes them useful together is the overlap.
Pacing. Consistency. Injury concern. Knowing when training should change.
These were not problems SmartRunning invented to justify a product. They were already present in the experience of coaches and runners.
That does not prove SmartRunning solves them.
The more interesting evidence comes next: what happened when runners trained with SmartRunning?
See how SmartRunning is designed around the training problems runners repeatedly tell us they face.