About the founder

I learned to run while designing a FITNESS tracker

In the fall of 2019 I joined the small team inside Amazon creating Halo, its first personal health and wellness product. I was brought in to lead the  design and research and answer some key questions. What would the app do? How would it fit together? Who was it for? When I arrived, we had nothing more than a short list of hardware features that CEO Jeff Bezos had asked for.

Two months in, I decided to give running a try. And I got hooked, fast. That first month I ran almost every morning, until my shins started to hurt. I learned that was perhaps a bit too much, too fast! But I kept running and learning, including how much my bad eating habits were holding me back. By the end of the first month I had finished my first 10k. By the end of the second month while on a vacation, I ran my first half marathon. It was, to put it mildly, hard. I finished in 2 hours 26 minutes, and could barely walk for the next two days.

I've continued running every month since.

Designing Halo taught me how much trust people need to use a fitness app. As a new runner myself, I understood where many of our customers were coming from. I wanted to understand what these kinds of apps were recommending, believe I could trust them, and see that they were designed for a person like me.

My best race came from a plan that hurt me

For my first few marathons I mostly just ran more, and gradually got faster. Seattle in 2021, my beautiful, cold, hilly hometown marathon, took me 4:58. Three marathons later, at Disney World, I ran 4:10. I may have slowed a few times to take pictures with Tigger and Mickey as I ran by.

By the fall of 2023 I was ready for a job change, and Amazon Halo was shutting down. But I still had big ideas about what a product like that could do.

That winter I was researching marathon training plans and decided to try Pete Pfitzinger's popular 18-week, 55-mile plan for the Eugene Marathon the following spring. A respected plan for a respected race. What could go wrong? I learned to run my easy days easy, and I made sure I was already running the weekly mileage the plan asks for before I started.

What I didn't see coming was the jump in running days per week. My legs couldn't keep up. By week 10 of 18 I was in serious pain and had to dial way back. I spent the last 4 weeks wondering whether I'd be able to run at all. Should I cancel my travel plans? It was emotional and hard.

Come race weekend, I felt just healthy enough to race, so I drove down and got ready. I finished the race in 3:51, a 19-minute personal best, at age 41. But the injury was still there: I spent weeks afterwards unable to run at all, and had to gradually and annoyingly build back to full strength over many months. And that injury in my left glute still flares up if I train too hard for too long.

Your run, your plan and your food belong in one app

My first months running taught me that running and eating are one problem, not two. But most runners juggle three apps to handle them: one to track runs, one for a training plan, one to count calories. I managed several spreadsheets for years trying to keep everything straight. But none of these solutions work together, and it's a lot of manual effort. Not great!

Buena Vida does all this one place. It tracks your runs with GPS and heart rate. It provides live voice coaching while you work out. It knows what today's workout is and what's coming next. It sets your calorie and macro targets to match each day's training, then adjusts them as your body changes week over week. You can log foods quickly by voice or barcode, from more than 3.5 million foods. It learns what foods you eat at certain times, and paired with other foods. It even keeps track of the miles on your shoes.

And all of it stays private. None of your data is ever stored on our servers or visible to us for any reason.

for runners with real lives

Some of us started later in life, or are just starting now. Many of us have to fit training around work and family.

Some of us are chasing a specific goal, like a first half marathon, a faster race time, or a first triathlon. I did my first Ironman 70.3s at 42 years old.

And because most of us aren't professional athletes who can always put running first, life gets sometimes in the way of running. Schedules fall apart. Mine do. In 2025, I ran the Honolulu Marathon without training, because I happened to be there that weekend. I felt ok until mile 15. Then had to walk a long way in the heat. I found a small, final burst of strength to run the last mile and finish at a good speed. It was sort of fun. Sort of. I wouldn't do it like that again.

Why you can trust our reviews

I've been designing apps, websites, and digital products for almost 30 years. While at Amazon I led strategy for new products and experiences across Amazon's store as a Senior Principal (Director). I did work that hundreds of millions of shoppers still see every day. At that scale, small mistakes reach millions of people and have big impact. So you learn to check and double-check your work, to build from evidence instead of opinion, and to examine your own assumptions and beliefs. I've spent hundreds of hours with customers and read thousands of pages of research along the way. 

I bring the same habits to Buena Vida, with one goal: helping runners enjoy and get more out of running. It's hard to tell whether a training plan fits you, or builds safely, until you've run it. So I built a scoring system on 30 measures, drawn from sports science research and time-tested coaching practice. You can see every plan's strengths and weaknesses before you start.

The initial scoring and review is automated using my scoring system's measures.. Then the work gets checked, and checked again. Every claim about how to train, eat, or anything else has to connect to a real, published study. Each study of the 290 studies I've compiled is checked against its source, and anything the evidence doesn't support comes out.

I publish my own plans in Buena Vida, so I have an obvious interest in how they compare. That's why they face the same scoring as everyone else's, with their weaknesses published. When I find a problem in one, I fix it. 

No plan author pays to be reviewed here, and Buena Vida has no investors and no ads.

I'm not a certified coach or a sports scientist. I'm a runner and a researcher who shows the work, so you can check it and trust it.

Hold me to it

If something on our site or in our app looks wrong - a fact, a study, a score, or a line about a plan you know well - write to me at corrections@buenavida.run. I read every message, and I fix what's wrong.

I did the homework, so you don't have to

I've run the races, read the research and scored the plans, so you don't have to guess. Whether you're training for a first half marathon or a Boston qualifier, tell Buena Vida your goal, your fitness, and the days you can run, and get a plan that fits your week. It tracks every run and fuels every day. It's the system I use myself. You can try it free for 7 days.

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