Input data of variable length - two scenarios I'm trying to figure out how I could train a neural network with inputs that have variable length. This issue comes up in the following 2 scenarios I'm trying to solve.

Scenario 1:
I have a long list of running distances for various runners which looks something like has 3 columns: runner, date, distance.
Obviously some runners have a lot of entries and others don't. I'm trying to make predictions on the number of miles a given runner will run next. So I'm guessing i need to transform my data to have one line per runner, which gives me variable length features. How can I deal with this in a ML application?

Scenario 2:
I'd like to take various strings ("teststring", "P@ssword", "NotAPassword123", etc...) and classify it as a password or not. I guess i'm trying to figure out how to a) convert strings to numbers to train on and b) how to deal with the fact that they have variable length. 

Thanks for reading this far...
For scenario 1, if you have enough data for each runner, you could build separate models for them otherwise you can add runner as a categorical variable by one hot encoding your runners and then trying out your model.
For scenario 2, you can create fixed sized vectors for each string by handcrafting features, such as count of consonants, count of vowels, presence of special characters, etc.