Coaching

There’s No Such Thing as a Self-Coached Athlete

By Matt Fitzgerald / April 12, 2023 / 0 Comments

I learned recently that only 9 percent of triathletes have a coach. This struck me as a very small number—until I learned that just 5 percent of runners have a coach. Now, I’m no mathematician, but I think this means that 91 percent of triathletes and 95 percent of runners are self-coached. Or does it? […]

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Curiosity Killed the Competition

By Matt Fitzgerald / March 7, 2023 / 0 Comments

At a recent Endeavorun retreat in San Diego, Jake Tuber and I made a list of key traits of effective coaches. This was not an arbitrary exercise. Jake and I are in the early stages of collaborating on a book about coaching, and we’re trying to nail down our shared beliefs and convictions about the […]

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The Ultimate Athlete Superpower

By Matt Fitzgerald / January 20, 2023 / 0 Comments

If you could choose one athletic superpower to exploit in your future training and racing, what would it be? Here’s the rule: Your superpower has to be a natural human trait that actually exists in some athletes, not a magical attribute like Pogo Feet or Turbo Mode. Potent, yet real. If I were I to […]

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The Problem with Intensity

By Matt Fitzgerald / January 17, 2023 / 0 Comments

In endurance sports we toss around the word “intensity” as if this word had a clear, singular, and consensual definition. In fact, it is not, and I doubt it ever will. “Why not?” you ask. Because exercise intensity is not a unitary phenomenon. Our problem is not that we have so far failed to discover […]

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How to Build Self-Trust As an Athlete (and Why It’s Important)

By Matt Fitzgerald / January 12, 2023 / 0 Comments

I coach a runner who wants to break 1:30:00 in the half marathon. We’d been working together for about two and a half months when she took her first crack at it. I was 95 percent confident that Jody (not her real name) was fit enough to run under 1:31:00, but only 10 percent confident […]

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Coaching the Exception

By Matt Fitzgerald / December 15, 2022 / 0 Comments

Agnes Mansaray arrived on the UNLV campus in September 2018 as a highly touted transfer from Iowa Central Community College, where she had been a dominant force in cross country and track. First-year UNLV coach Angelina Ramos quickly saw why. A native of Sierra Leone, Agnes crushed every workout Ramos threw at her, bolstering the […]

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Who Make Better Coaches: Foxes or Hedgehogs?

By Matt Fitzgerald / November 17, 2022 / 0 Comments

Few reading experiences have been more intellectually validating for me than the one that’s being supplied to me currently through David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. I chose it in the hope that it would inform my longstanding belief that generalists (i.e., creative problem solvers) make better coaches than specialists (i.e., […]

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The Protean Coach

By Matt Fitzgerald / November 2, 2022 / 0 Comments

Among the lesser-known figures in Greek mythology is Proteus, a water god whom Homer describes in The Odyssey as “the Old Man of the Sea.” His signature power is the ability to assume any physical form, à laJayna from The Wonder Twins. Shape-shifters exist in many mythologies, and Proteus represents the Grecian take on the […]

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Art Versus Science in Coaching

By Matt Fitzgerald / April 5, 2022 / 0 Comments

“These other young coaches have their science blah blah but they are not as successful.” —Coach Hailye, Out of Thin Air There’s an endurance coach I follow on Twitter who tweets a lot. We’ll call him Dick Smart. I find him quite impressive on one level. A real numbers guy, he knows more about using […]

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Coaching Mastery

By Matt Fitzgerald / March 27, 2022 / 0 Comments

What is the job of a coach? At the most basic level, it is to help athletes achieve their goals. Sounds reasonable, no? But the problem with this definition of the coach’s role is that it treats athletes’ goals as givens—as things that athletes come up with on their own and bring to coaches for […]

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Effective Endurance Training Is as Simple as Never Taking Two Steps in the Wrong Direction

By Matt Fitzgerald / January 5, 2022 / 0 Comments

For the past several months I’ve been writing a book that will serve as the official study guide for the 80/20 Endurance coach certification program. As you might expect, working on this project has afforded me the opportunity to reflect deeply on my philosophy of coaching. It’s impossible to summarize this philosophy in a pithy […]

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