Even coaches still benefit from being coached. Whilst they are busy sharing their knowledge with others and helping to structure their training, increase accountability and get results, they too, can do with help from time to time. There are coaches out there who are former athletes, there are coaches who have never been athletes and there are coaches like myself, who still have athletic ambitions. There are plenty of pro’s and cons to each situation, but no matter what a coach' own personal experience in the sport, few coaches would claim that they know it all. In fact, if they do claim to know it all, I would say that they are deluded.
One of the big goals for me as a coach is for my runners to continually learn more about themselves, their mindsets and their bodies. I am no different. I want to learn and improve both as a coach and I have learnt more to improve my coaching from being coached myself and through reading about other coaches, than I could have done otherwise.
In many industries or other sports, we wouldn’t think twice about getting a coach or a mentor, or even having several coaches to help us at work, in our relationships, with our children’s soccer practice. We have PT’s, pilates instructors, yoga teachers, swim coaches, financial advisers, executive coaches and more. Just take a second to think how many coaches you might engage in different areas of your life and barely even bat an eyelid. In the corporate world there are coaches everywhere and there is even a name for coaches coaching other coaches….ever heard of 'train the trainer?'
However, when it comes to running, many of us try to go it alone. We download a training app or the official training plan from the event that we have entered and follow that. I have no issues with these approaches, I just believe that for many people, there is a more effective way of them learning and improving their running.
I remember the moment I decided that enough was enough and I decided to get a coach myself… In the lead up to my first Boston Marathon I had spent hours poring over running training plans and books. I would take elements of each plan and change my own plans for the next day, week and month. Sounds like good, adaptive, evidence informed work, right?
This constant adaptation became over-complicated, obsessive and wasteful. I was adapting, overthinking and trying to get my training just right. I needed to know that I was doing the right training. The problem was that I simply didn’t know. I didn’t know what was right for me and couldn’t distinguish the advice, supposed evidence and opinion from the thousands of resources available through Dr. Google. I was paralysed with too much information and couldn’t objectively look at my own training needs.
In general, people are quite time poor these days, so to spend an hour each evening obsessing, over-thinking and ‘faffing’ (I love this word!) with my training plan, wasn’t constructive and wasted a lot of valuable time and energy. I invested so much in ‘perfecting’ my plan that I was exhausted mentally and had less energy to put into my running or my recovery.
At one point, I remember my sister saying to me…"Does Roger Federer have a coach? He seems to know how to hit a ball pretty well, but he still has a coach.” A fair point I thought...
After that comment and letting the dust settle on my Boston Marathon race, I decided that there had to be a better way for me to improve, and if the best in the world can still learn from a coach, then coaching might just work for me. In particular, I wanted help with creating a structure, being more accountable and having somewhere to go with all my hundreds of questions.
Since that point, I have become a coach myself and changed my perspective on coaching and training. Whether you are an elite athlete or someone who is starting out, having someone by your side, at the end of the phone, or an email away to help construct and implement a plan that is catered to you, is enormously empowering. I now see it with the runners I coach, where they become accountable, they re-gain time in their day and massively reduce the amount of guess work that they do. They trust in my expertise and experience and that the plan we have created is right for them.
Over the last 4 years their trust has been repaid with so much learning, hundreds of "a-ha!" moments, growing confidence, taking on new challenges and getting personal best times in every distance from 5km to 100km.
The great thing is that none of us are finished learning. There is room for us all to grow and improve.