What is a Coach
What Is a Coach? (Hint: It's Not Writing Workouts)
When people come to us to help them on their endurance journey, they often think that they just need us to write a better workout plan. But what they soon realize is that being coached is far more than just sending workout sheets with times and splits. Writing the workouts are the easy part. Heck you can find a free training plan online in about thirty seconds or have your favorite AI tool spin you one up in no time. What those plans can't do is know you the human that’s doing the training.
Coaches are load managers
Your body doesn't keep separate accounts for different kinds of stress in your life. A hard track workout, a 60-hour work week, a sick kid keeping you up all night, a stretch of skipped meals or long car rides: it all comes out of the same bank, you. The plan on paper assumes a best cases scenario with you rested, fed, and alert. Real life almost never works that way.
A big part of our job is managing helping you make sense of all the stress and noise and appropriately manage the total load. It’s nearly impossible to be objective with yourself. If you’re doing this and care at all you want to push. But sometimes the growth happens when you pull back. Sometimes the smartest workout of the week is the one you didn’t do. But as coaches we can only help you make those calls, if we know what's actually going on.
Endurance sport finds the cracks
If you have a goal that is actually challenging for you and is going to test your physical and emotional limits, training is going to find the weak points and lean right into them. It could be a calf that's been "a little tight" for three weeks, or sleep that's been slipping. It could be a fueling habit that works for a sedentary life and falls apart as training volume increases. Or it could be the voice in your head that shows up when a race gets tough or isn’t going as planned.
Those cracks don't mean something is wrong with you. They are the work. Our job as coaches is to help you find them early and seal them up, so you get your best shot at your goal on race day.
Good coaching teaches you to fill those cracks. To help you learn that it's about getting better at the whole process: recovering, reading your own body, adjusting when life gets messy, and handling hard days. The fun part, if you listen and learn, you’ll find that this skill translates to far more areas of life as well. .
Tell your coach one thing you haven't mentioned yet. It could be big or small. It could be the tight hip, the cramp you got on your run, or how work has been crushing you or that your kids sports schedule has you feeling thin right now. Or even better, tell them how strong you’ve felt, or a lesson that you’ve learned during this training cycle. Sharing doesn’t always have to be bad. We love to hear the great stuff too! The more we know, the more we can help.
Got questions about coaching you'd like us to answer in a future newsletter? Hit reply and send them our way.
— Coach Brandon