“How was this?”
“How was this?” it’s something that I ask repeatedly because the splits could mean many things without the context of your experience.
I’d like to do a better job of setting expectations for our interactions – so do this, I’ve outlined my perspective on remote coach/athlete interactions.
It helps if the athlete leads the recap. As a coach, I have little to reflect on a session other than the splits, which only ever tell part of the story.
It helps athletes to reflect on their efforts. Capturing your thoughts, experiences, and lessons from a run helps you as much as they help me. By capturing your thoughts post-run, you can move forward with clarity and come back to the event in the future with context.
Everything is on the table. If you want to tell me about how the splits happened, that’s great. If you’d like to reflect on life stress and your psychological journey, that’s excellent. Or if you’d prefer to inquire about my thoughts on a conversation, movie, favorite song, or new Netflix show that occupied your mind during the run, that’s also fun! All options offer me a sense of how you are doing and where you are in the running journey.
A few best practices moving forward,
I will comment on a comment - if you are interested in conversing about an effort please begin the conversation by offering me the context of,
How it felt
What you experienced
Anything that took place of note that I should know
Any questions or concerns you have moving forward
We can converse about as many or as few of your activities as you care to in a week. I tend to focus communication around harder efforts. When pushing the pace or length of a run, there’s typically most reason to chat. But sometimes a striking sunrise hits you, and you want to share, or a slight pain pops up in your calf on an easy run, and I want to know about it.
In general, please check in at least once or twice a week.
You can comment in Final Surge, send a text on WhatsApp, or leave a voice note for a more rambling back and forth. I enjoy voice notes because they allow you to live process the experience with me. This typically provides me the space to hear your voice, including your pace, tone, and overall mood. All of this helps me to assess how you are taking to the training and what changes I might make going forward.
If I don’t hear from you I will reach out, but I tend not to have much to say about splits until I have a sense from you about the experience.
Coaching and training with remote connection is an ever-evolving communication challenge, thank you for exploring this with me and being open to new and different ways of working together!
Please keep in mind
For success in running, it’s helpful to keep a few things in mind,
A — The key to running is consistency.
That’s worth repeating: The key to running is consistency. It is almost always better to do slightly less in one day if it will enable you to return for another successful training the next day. Repeating this over weeks, months, and years is the key to improvement.
B — No runner can do it all.
It’s easy to feel like other athletes can do all the miles, all the workouts, all the lifting, and all the events, but that’s rarely true. And hardly ever true for long. It’s incredibly easy to look at the people succeeding in a moment and grow jealous of them without context for their ups and downs. As runners, we look past the people struggling and fixate on those for whom everything seems to work. That attention bias can easily skew our perception of how others succeed.
C — Our path will be unique.
The training we attempt isn’t top secret or unique, but how it unfolds will be entirely our own. Our only goal is to make the best decisions with the events and information presented to us along the way. We’ll aim not to imitate others while staying open to new ideas and concepts.
D — Proper fitness takes time.
Quick wins and fast workouts are fun, but genuinely leveling up to new ability tiers takes months, seasons, or even years. We aim to appreciate this truth and settle in for sustainable, exciting, and fun running.
E — Goals only need to be meaningful to you.
With so many running events, workouts, and races available around the globe, it can be easy to get swept up in the excitement. This is terrific, but we’ll want to be careful not to settle on goals that come from outside ourselves. In my experience, this often leads to losing motivation or excitement before the event because the origin of the intent wasn’t personal.