Coaching
About a year ago, David Warden persuaded me to create an online course that would serve as an athlete-focused companion to the 80/20 Endurance coach certification program. It would teach athletes everything they need to know about how to train effectively for endurance performance, starting, of course, with the 80/20 intensity balance. I say “persuaded” […]
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Every once in a while, an athlete I’m coaching will confront me with information that they’ve obtained from another source and that (at least in their perception) challenges what I’ve told them or what I’m doing with them. For example, an athlete might say to me, “You always have me do some work at higher […]
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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“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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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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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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