Outrun
You can’t outrun your past. But you can try.
Outrun is an iPhone and Apple Watch running app with the most honest motivation system ever shipped. Add up to nine photos of things you’d rather not think about: an ex, an old apartment, 2019. Pick a heart rate floor or a pace ceiling. Hold it, or one of those photos appears full-screen on your wrist, mid-run, until you speed back up.
Slow Down and Your Past Catches Up
Every run starts with a warmup, because nobody deserves to be haunted in the first two minutes. After that, the rules are simple. Stay above your target and the watch tells you you’re doing great. Drift into the warning band and you get a tap on the wrist: don’t slow down now. Actually breach the line, and a memory fills the screen until you’ve earned its exit.
The details
- Your choice of stakes. Set a heart rate floor or a pace ceiling with the Digital Crown, whichever kind of runner you are.
- Fair hauntings. Built-in buffers and confirmation windows mean one bad GPS blip never triggers a photo. Appearing and disappearing both feel like events, never a flicker.
- Real workouts. Every run saves to Apple Health as a proper running workout, so it counts everywhere workouts count, including Strava via Health sync.
- The share card. Every run becomes a story-format card (“I outran my past for 32:14”) ready for Instagram, TikTok, or the group chat.
- Nothing leaves your phone. The photos you pick are the most personal thing in the app, so they never touch a server. There isn’t one.
And after the joke stats, the run summary leaves you with one sincere line: you can’t actually outrun your past, but moving forward is how you make peace with it.
The Book Behind the App
Built by Chris Weiss, who is also writing The Last Bites.
Outrun is the joke version of the thing the novel takes seriously. Ella spent a year putting distance between herself and the worst decision she ever made: new state, worse restaurant, a phone she stops answering. It works right up until the moment it doesn’t, which is the moment a stranger asks for her by name.
That’s the whole design brief for this app, with a heart rate monitor bolted on. The past keeps a steady pace. It does not get tired. The first three chapters are here if you want to see what it looks like when it finally catches someone.