Why we built Corsa

by Stephan Schwarze • Founder, Corsa • Endurance coach since 1989

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I started coaching endurance athletes in 1989, as a college student in Germany running the university triathlon team. I've been involved in it ever since — most recently in Austin, where I kept a small coaching roster of around ten triathletes at a time for many years. Most of them came to me chasing serious goals: qualifying for Kona, a sub-10 Ironman, a Boston time. They paid $100–$200 a month for a custom plan and weekly check-ins, and a lot of them got where they wanted to go.

But here's what I kept noticing: the athletes I worked with were a tiny slice of the people who actually wanted to get better.

For every triathlete who hired me, I'd meet ten more at races or on group rides who clearly wanted to improve — but either couldn't justify the cost, hadn't grown up around the idea that "you hire a coach," or just didn't know where to start. They were guessing. Doing the same loop three times a week at the same pace. Going hard when they should be easy and easy when they should be hard. Smart, motivated people, training without a plan, frustrated that they weren't getting faster.

Then my kids got me into mountain biking. (Honestly, it started as a safety thing — I wasn't excited about them riding on Texas roads.) Suddenly I was in a completely different world: NICA races, school teams, hundreds of kids who were equally hooked. And the gap I'd been watching on the adult side turned out to be even wider here. Volunteer NICA coaches do incredible work, but they can't write 20 personalized plans. Most parents don't think about hiring a youth coach the way they might think about a swim or tennis coach. Kids train hard during the season, then go quiet for the other half of the year. Same problem, younger demographic.

A quick word about me, since this is the introduction to Corsa. I've been racing endurance sports since 1988 — 60 Ironman finishes, with a couple age-group podiums at Kona along the way. Endurance sport is a deep passion, but my day job, for the last 30+ years, has been in software engineering and technology management. For most of my career I've kept those two worlds completely separate.

What changed is AI. For the first time, it's actually possible to do what I can do as a one-on-one coach — sit down with an athlete, understand their schedule, their goals, their experience, their constraints, and build them a plan that flexes week by week — at a price that works for everyone, not just the people who can write a $150+ check every month. AI doesn't replace what a great coach does in a real coaching relationship; nothing replaces that. But it can deliver a meaningful share of the value, at a small fraction of the cost, to enormously more people. That math is new, and it's the reason Corsa exists now and not five years ago.

Corsa is what came out of that combination — the personalized, athlete-by-athlete coaching philosophy I've followed for decades, the engineering background to actually build it, and a much clearer picture (thanks to my kids) of who has been left out of structured training so far. It's built for runners, cyclists, triathletes, and mountain bikers. It's built for the 45-year-old picking up running again, the triathlete preparing for her first 70.3, the cyclist trying to figure out winter base training, and yes, the 13-year-old NICA racer who wants to keep improving in the off-season.

Corsa is a small, founder-led operation right now — me, a build partner, and engineering backup when we need it. That's by design. It means the product is shaped end-to-end by someone who's spent decades coaching athletes and decades building software, instead of being filtered through a large team. We're building it the way I'd want it built if I were the user: plain-language explanations of every workout (so you know not just what to do but why), safety guardrails that adapt to age and experience level, real periodization that thinks about the whole year instead of just one season, and a price that doesn't gatekeep the people who need this most.

The website is live at www.corsa.coach. The mobile app is coming shortly — we're working through App Store and Play Store approval.

One last note: my sons — 13-year-old Pablo and 11-year-old Philip — are two of the reasons Corsa exists, and they each insisted on writing their own blog post. Pablo's is up next; his angle is different from mine, and honestly probably more fun to read. Philip's will follow.

— Stephan