Jason Koop: AI in Running, Ultra Training, and How to Get Faster

In this episode, Nick Hancock hosts trail and ultra-running coach Jason Koop to talk about ultra running training, performance, and the role of AI in coaching.

Jason shares how he coaches both elite ultra runners and everyday athletes, and what actually drives improvement. They break down key training principles like progressive overload, increasing mileage, periodization, and recovery, along with how elite athletes use highly individualized training, nutrition, and strength work to gain an edge.

You’ll also learn:

•  Why increasing running volume is often the most effective way to improve 
•  How to use DIY training camps to boost performance 
•  The biggest differences between elite and recreational runners
•  How Jason uses AI for coaching, training plans, and athlete feedback analysis
•  What the future of running coaches and AI might look like 

If you’re training for a marathon, ultramarathon, or trail race, this episode will help you train smarter and understand where endurance coaching is heading.

Right, that's us done. If that was useful… share it. Stick it in your club WhatsApp, send it to that mate who's always getting injured three weeks before race day. You know the one ;)

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See you on the next one.

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Nick's YT - youtube.com/channel/UCgdIPeN3bF7I7-tcspyFbVg/

Faye's IG - https://www.instagram.com/fayejohnsoncoaching/

Rachael's IG - https://www.instagram.com/rachforthelongrun/

Hannah's IG - https://www.instagram.com/coach_hannah_witt/

Matt's IG - https://www.instagram.com/ultracoachmatt/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey, welcome to the Maximum Mileage Podcast. I'm Coach Hannah Wynn, and this is where we talk about building strong, resilient runners without the constant cycle of injury, burnout, or guesswork. Each episode, I sit down with runners, coaches, and experts to break down training, recovery, fueling, and mindset so you can train with more confidence and actually see progress at last. And if you prefer to watch these conversations, you can find the full video versions on my YouTube channel, Coach Hannah Witt, under the Performance Collective series. Let's dive in. Today's episode is a little bit different. Instead of me hosting, the founder of Maximum Mileage Coaching and my mentor, Nick Hancock, is hosting today's conversation with Jason Coop. Jason is one of the leading trail and ultra running coaches in the sport, known for developing elite athletes while still working closely with everyday runners. In this episode, they break down what actually drives performance from simple, consistent training to the highly individualized strategies used at the top level. They also dive into how Jason is using AI in coaching, what it's already changing, and where he sees the future of the industry heading. It's a sharp, insightful conversation. I think you'll get a lot out of it. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

All right. So on today's episode, we've got somebody that uh I've had the pleasure of actually meeting in person and and and could call uh a mentor, both directly and indirectly, you know, directly from our time that we spent a few days in in Colorado Springs a couple of years ago at the UESCA coaching conference, but also indirectly because I've been an avid listener of your podcast, which I know you get bugs about. But I've got Jason Coop on today, generally regarded as one of the leaders, if not the leader in in coaching in the ultrarunning space. So yeah, welcome, Jason.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Yeah, thanks for the nice intro. Always happy to provide a positive influence on people, especially in their coaching careers. And uh like likewise, I always really relish spending time with other coaches and helping them in the areas that that they need, because that's something that was really that was very, very fortunate in my coaching career that I'm trying to kind of pass forward or pay it forward, is I was just surrounded by really, really great coaches that I probably didn't deserve and I certainly wasn't seeking out. And uh that that is not lost on me, that that has had a very big impact on my coaching career, and I would not be here where I'm at right now without those very early influences. So any way that I can pay that back across people who I've just met or people that I've known for many, many years, I'm always happy to do that.

SPEAKER_02 2:50

Yeah, no, no, thank you for everything you've done. The uh yeah, the USCA certification is uh you know, it's the one that I've done is is your ultrarunning one and and your book, the trail essentials for uh sorry, training essentials for ultrarunners was one of the one of the first books I read, and still really the only, I would say credible uh ultrarunning training book. There are others that were people will know, but I just don't think they're that well grinded, particularly in the science which you you immerse yourself in quite a lot. So so before we get into some of my questions, tell us a bit about yourself, Jason. Like, you know, there's gonna be people that don't know who you are. So who are you?

SPEAKER_01 3:34

I'm I'm a Trail multi-running coach. I'm based currently in Chamony, France. Space for the first part of my coaching career, the majority of my coaching career in Colorado Springs, Colorado. And uh the reason that's relevant is we just had a it's where the Olympic Training Center is. And we have a very rich legacy of everything's related to Olympic sports. Coaching, physical therapists, massage therapists, exercise physiologists, sports psychologists, you kind of name it. They all have uh they've all made a big imprint on that area, and that was very influential uh for me when I was a really uh when I was a really young coach. I've spent my entire career doing everything that you could imagine around coaching. I started out as an intern when I didn't know anything about anything, and we were storing things on like floppy disks, and you know, we built our own coaching tools, and I helped software developers build coaching tools. Ironically enough, I'm kind of like rediscovering that role 25 years later. Manage coaches, I've created coaching pipelines to screen, evaluate onboard and continually mentor coaches of developed coach education materials like you've experienced with uh Uesca. I've created camps of all different, you know, sizes and shapes and running and mountain biking and things like that. I've managed coaching locations across the US, probably trained over a hundred endurance coaches and cycling and running mainly. And uh now I find myself as the head coach of our ultrarunning department. So I've kind of like gone from this big wide scope where I worked with a lot of different kinds of athletes down to a very narrow specialty scope. And now I'm oh I would say I'm mainly focused on developing a lot of the elite ultra runners in the space. I still do have maybe 50% of my portfolio as everyday runners, like the people who are listening to this, listening to this podcast. That tends to shift more and more kind of like every year into this kind of elite, elite spectrum. So it's been it's been a ride. I could say I've done, I could say I've done a lot, but I'm gonna still continue to do more.

SPEAKER_02 5:41

Yeah, no, for sure. And so who who have you currently got on your books in in terms of elites? What what names are people gonna uh gonna recognize?

SPEAKER_01 5:50

I mean, Katie Scheid, Ivy Hall, who are the last two Western States champions. Katie Scheid's also the UTMB champion and current course record holder, trail ultrasound of the year for the last couple years. Uh Fu Xiao Zheng, who's runner up in Western States the last two years, Jermaine Granger, Katie Scheid's uh partner out, also uh also coach uh so and I could, you know, I mean those probably come to the top of mind. I could kind of keep you know rolling down the down the rollodex there. But I'll say I've been very I've been very fortunate that like I continue to have athletes come and and and want to to want me to help them out. And now now I'm in a position, we built up a kind of a coaching portfolio that's strong enough to where it doesn't have to be just me. I I'll only take on maybe one new athlete every 12 or 18 months. And you know, I probably get maybe 20 elite athlete inquiries, and all those are going to our network of coaches who's who are doing a fantastic job with them right now. So it's like I said, it's been a ride, something I never really experienced. Not now now it's not only me, it's kind of like other people, and I'm I'm here for it all. It's it's it's fun.

SPEAKER_02 7:05

Yeah, no, uh certainly at the moment, you know, Katie Side is certainly a big big name to have on the books. Before we end some of the questions, I do have one question. Are we ever gonna see Katie versus Courtney? Yeah, that's up to them.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

You know, like I don't get into I don't get into all that type of banter or the you know the fantasy free trail stuff or stuff like that. If they end up meeting each other, then great. If that's their desire to have, you know, some big epic showdown that's amazing. One thing I will say, like relative to that, that's been really cool to kind of like witness from the inside is is is that at least with the people that I work with, they all want to race against the best. Like they want more of like a unified championship, so to speak, which really doesn't exist. And that's not I wouldn't say that's the case with every elite athlete. That's the case with the elite athletes that I work with, where they're only interested in kind of like competing against the best. They want the best people to line up to, the best versions of those people to line up with and kind of do battle with. And I think that that's really neat, you know, and who knows? I mean, the board the world wants Katie versus Courtney. Who knows if the you know Cosmos will kind of like a lineup that way, but it's certainly not up to me.

SPEAKER_02 8:22

No, of course. I mean, they they've got to both be you know, signing up to the same race, you know, at the same points in their careers and and peeking for them. So uh but yeah, no, it's certainly a question that gets, I'm sure you know, gets floated around the internet.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

Yeah, I I don't I don't participate in any of that. You know, I know that there's a lot of banter about it, and people every once in a while ask me my opinion on it. And I'm here to support the athletes, I'm not here to create entertainment or anything like that. I'm just I just want athletes to win races and be the best versions of themselves. Yeah, of course. Cool.

SPEAKER_02 8:59

So with your experience of working with elites, I'd I'd really love to sort of hear about what what elite athletes that you have, what they're doing, and uh and what they're doing that perhaps the everyday runner isn't doing, but probably should. Because particularly in my coaching, I get asked about so many things that quite frankly are distractions from the real work. Um so yeah, I'd love to hear from sort of you know how how how are you positioning that with your elites and and how can that um how can that then filter down into the everyday athlete?

SPEAKER_01 9:42

Well, I mean, 90% of all of the performance gains that you're gonna get are the boring day-to-day scheduling stuff. Like, and I hate to say that that's the case with the elite athletes. It's the case probably even 99% with the with the everyday athletes. And you know, it it means just putting together a reasonable periodized plan that has enough overload and then has enough recovery. It kind of is as simple as that. Like all the different variations of workout and intensity structure and interval design and periodization this and block periodization that, they can all work to some degree or another when they're deployed at kind of the at the individual level. But fun, but fundamentally, 90% of it is going to get accomplished by very simple overload and and recovery, recovery principles. Now, when you get like in the elite level, the things that they really that that the vast majority of them, especially them with especially the elite athletes with really good counsel around them or who are very good at being self-coached, then there's a whole variety of that that exists today. The the thing that they really excel at is taking those fundamental principles and individualizing them to themselves. So either the coach individualizes it to the athlete or they individualize it to them. And that and that goes, that falls along every single line that would make an impact in performance. So that's the training, it's the strength training, it's the psychology, it's the nutrition, it's even like the annual planning and what races do you go to and things like that, and how that wrap all wraps into a cohesive, a cohesive program, a cohesive program. That's starting to make a bigger and bigger separation within the elite field. You're starting to see that. And the best elite athletes and the ones that that have made kind of like the biggest jumps in performance are typically doing those things the best. They're typically doing things like they're heavily scrutinizing, it's usually their weakest point. They're heavily scrutinizing their weakest point. Let's say it's nutrition or hydration. We just had a continuing guide with the fine folks over precision hydration. So it's kind of top of mind to me right now. They're they're looking at that one particular component in their in their arsenal of things that they can improve on, and they're hyper-individualizing it to themselves through testing and science and bringing on good people to help kind of scrutinize the data and build and kind of build big plans for them. So I kind of view it as this like two-stage approach, right? Where the fundamentals of training get you about 90% there, and then the last 10%, it's individualizing those components to the person that's in front of you across all of these, across all these different levels.

SPEAKER_02 12:36

Yeah. And that like how so how can an everyday athlete sort of take some of that into you know into their own minds and go, well, right, so you know, put some of these distractions to the side. How can I look at my own training and how can I actually you know recognize my own weaknesses and then put you know put some action in place to remedy those?

SPEAKER_01 13:02

Yeah, I I honestly think the first part of that inventory is just to look at how you can do more volume. The volume is the best hammer that you have, it's the best tool in the toolkit that you have for an endurance athlete and in particular an ultra-marathon athlete. And I'm not saying that you should wield that to the greatest extent because there comes an injury risk with that. But if you take an inventory of your schedule of your whole life, essentially, not only just your training schedule, but your whole life. And let's say you're doing eight hours a week, right? If you can say, Well, I wonder if I could do nine hours a week or 10 hours a week, or wonder if we're getting 10 hours next week and then eight hours the week after that, somehow take that inventory and figure out how to do a little bit more volume. That's the easiest, most nonsense way that you can reap additional improvement. And very unfortunately, that's not the way most people are thinking. Most people are thinking, well, I need to, you know, take XYZ supplement or I need to like redesign my intensity paradigm to fit this, you know, certain thing. And yes, sometimes those things can work, but not not nearly, not nearly as powerful as just simply doing more volume. And just to like give you like a very real time, like a very real-time example. I I've done dozens and dozens and dozens of these debriefs with athletes, very, very good athletes, the best of the best of the best of the world that we just kind of like mentioned. Where we take many years of training, three, four, five, six years of training, and we scrutinize what's going on, where are you performing very well, and where are you performing at your best, and where are you performing poorly and at your worst? And in almost every single, in almost every single instance of here's a really breakout performance, here's a key performance, here's a cluster of performances that are in the top, you know, 5% of what you've ever done. In almost every single one of those instances, the the the training concept that has preceded that is some component of additional volume. Maybe it's overall volume, maybe it's clustered long-run volume, maybe it's some other way that you can kind of contrive it. But that's been the that's been the consistent theme. And like I said, it's not that you have to like do super high volumes all the time or anything like that. You absolutely need to periodize it. But if you if an everyday athlete is coming to me and saying, how can I improve? the very first thing that I'm gonna do is like listen to an inventory of everything and see if we can get an extra 10% volume increase, weekly volume increase on like a quarter of all the weeks that you do. You know, 10, 15 weeks out of the entire year. Let's see if we can bump those weeks up by 10% somehow. And then don't do anything else, as long as you're not doing anything really dumb. Like, and then and then just like don't do anything else and like let that play out over a long period of time. It's it's there's a surefire of a way that you can get to to get a little bit of improvement that I can that I could possibly prescribe anybody.

SPEAKER_02 16:07

Yeah, I completely agree. It's uh I mean I talk all the time about not doing crazy high volume as a as an everyday athlete. Uh, you can't be going out and doing a 25-mile long run on a Tuesday morning and then you know, and then you've got to sort the kids out and go straight to work. It yeah, there is there does come a point, but I often look at an athlete's plan and go, right, can we get on a Wednesday where you are doing nothing at the moment, can we get a 40-minute easy run in on that week? And if you do that over the case over the you know, the course of a 12-month period, 52-week period, that's a lot of extra hours of running. You know, that that that total volume over time is is gonna make a difference.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

Yeah, if you really wanted to like drill down the priority of that, right? Not to be too counter to that particular example. If you're looking at if somebody's out there DIY in their training, or if their coaches out there kind of like listening to this, and you want to start to deploy this volume proposition, the first thing you should, and if you're an endurance athlete and in particular an ultra-marathon athlete, I always have to have my caveats to these things because ultimately somebody will like slide into my DMs and said, Well, you said this, that, and the other on, you know, Nick's podcast. And I'm like, Well, yeah, I should have caveated that. Usually it's me making the mistakes. So, anyway, all the caveats aside, I think your first order of priority is how do you make the biggest things a little bit bigger or do more of them? So let's just say you're capped out at a three-hour long run for whatever reason, and you're gonna do three of those in advance of your key race. How could you do four? Like, let's just figure out how could you do like one more, or how could you make half of those three hour runs three and a half hours? Because there is a compounding effect as you start to go up in duration to where two plus two doesn't equal four from an adaptive perspective. One four-hour run is usually more valuable than two two hour runs when you compare in the literature shows this uh uh pretty clearly. When you can concentrate the workload in any way, whether you're concentrating volume or you're concentrating the intensity, usually it usually the adaptations are superior. So that's the first thing is just trying to make the bigger things bigger, just kind of like do more of them. Second thing is just bring the whole average up. Like, how do we bring the whole average up? Either by a mechanism that you mentioned earlier, we're gonna take these days and do 60 minutes, or we're gonna turn your 60-minute runs into 90 minutes, you know, more consistently. That's kind of the second, the the second tier. And then I would say as a parallel uh exercise, this is once again more particular to ultra-marathon crowd than anything else, is look at your calendar and figure out when you can really hyper concentrate some training blocks and do like a DIY training camp or go to an actual training camp that actually somebody somebody puts on. We we put on these fantastic ultra-running training camps in in the US, maybe three or four times a year. And most athletes in between, uh, they either double or triple their volume, somewhere in between there. It is three or four days long. So if you take like the average of what they're doing in a week and the average over those three days, they kind of they usually kind of triple it. When you look at it on a paper, it kind of looks preposterous, right? Like you're going from a two-hour run to an eight-hour run all of a sudden, right? Or two-hour run to a six-hour run, all of a sudden, like you're like, whoa, like like you're scrutinizing 10%. Yeah, that's way more. That's way more than 10%. You're scrutinizing that from a coaching perspective. Some red flags uh should go off. But when you're able to get in this like isolated environment and strip away, maybe not all of the other stressors, but the vast majority of them, your body's just more receptive to work. And so looking at that as a separate like project, especially in the ultra-marathon perspective, I would I I would yeah, I would take that as another task.

SPEAKER_02 20:10

Yeah, that that that is something I've I've learned from you directly, is is that particularly recis, you know, going to recce in a course, go and spend three days up in you know the Lake District or North Wales or you know, wherever it is in the world you you're doing your race, and you know, take a few days off work. You don't have to think about work, you don't have to think about the kids. All you are doing is thinking about being out there in the mountains, fueling, you know, and you can get that extraordinarily crazy amount of extra time on on feet, like like you say.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

Yeah, extra time on feet, you also like get garner a lot of confidence. It's one of the few venues, training venues, where you can really work on your race day nutrition program because the duration is so long, like so many good ways to do it. Plus, they're fun. Like you know, you get out of the house, you get away from your job for a couple days, get away from you know the yard work that you're doing, whatever home processes. Get away from the kids, you know, like all the due respect to kids and people like their kids and all that. But it's like they it there's this, there's a whole there's a litany of reasons. There's there's a whole midloup of reasons to go and do these things. I do think that they can be quite effective. And once again, up and down the chain. Like I do this with my professional athletes, where you know, they do a really concentrated block of volume, you know, they've got all the time in the world, you know, that it that is their job, but they have it's the same principle. Same principle applies as we kind of isolate it, rest going into it, rest going out of it. It's a big concentrated piece of volume. It might be 2x. And even and I'll and I'll tell you, I'll I'll tell you guys this just as an anecdote, managing a lot of professional athletes. Even the professional athletes look at the jump in volume when they do those things and they kind of get like, whoa, like oh like that that. That's a lot. But then once they do it, they're like, oh yeah, okay, I can do this. And then they do it again, they're like, okay, I can do it again. Then they do it again, okay. So don't be afraid of it. The key is is just like I said, isolating it, making sure that you've got enough space to handle the bomb. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:16

Cool. Thank you. So just a couple of takeaways from that. Look at look at your diaries, folks. Look at like where can you get that little bit of extra from, you know. I think you probably agree with this. Most people's easiest win is looking at your screen time on your phone. Yeah, yeah. How much time are you spending on your phone? That's a big one. Yeah. Cool. So subject number two. Uh I'm uh and this was actually something you you you suggested us talk about because it is everywhere at the moment. You can't go a day without hearing about AI. And you've mentioned about where you're potentially using AI or you are using AI in in your coaching practice. So I'm keen on a personal level to hear this, but I'm I'm sure plenty of people will be keen to hear about how how you're utilizing AI. Because I know there are still a lot of people that will jump on ChatGPT and say, hey, I've got 100 Milo in you know 20 weeks. What do I do? It's gotten better. I I must admit it's gotten better. But yeah, how are you using you using AI?

SPEAKER_01 23:27

Well, let me back up a little bit with like the origin story of this all. Because I I do think that there's a kind of a learning lesson in this. We mentioned how long I've been doing this for. So I've seen cycles, right? And these business and athletic cycles, they never repeat, but they always rhyme. And I've seen enough of them to kind of recognize that this is one of those ones that might actually rhyme. So maybe five or six years ago, I was invited to be kind of a domain expert. It's calling myself that, but a domain expert in a in a business coaching conference. So imagine what we do as athletic coaches, as running coaches. There's a parallel to that in the business world where they're working with mainly C suite level people and helping them do their jobs better, just like we help athletes, you know, run better races and stuff like that. Yeah. So anyway, I I was invited to kind of share my domain expertise in a parallel industry at this thing. And one of the topics that they talk about, once again, remember the time frame here is maybe maybe six or seven years ago, if my memory is serving me correctly. One of the topics that was that was coming around is is oh, AI is coming around the corner. The big bad machines are all gonna take our jobs. And there's maybe three hours of programming, this whole three-day conference kind of kind of around that. And the overriding tone of the discussion and coming from the participants was fear. Like we're gonna I'm gonna find a way to dismiss this right off the bat because there's no way that I'm gonna have my job replaced. That's a natural like human reaction. I've learned that whenever fear exists in a marketplace, there's usually some sort of opportunity. And this was earlier, maybe not the earliest, but earlier stages of some of this, of some of the AI technology, which at least to me became very apparent that it was gonna be transformative technology across kind of across the board. So instead of being like fearful of it, I said, okay, how like how I'm gonna see if I want to play ball. Like let's just try to figure it out. I'm not an expert in this, but my MO, and I'm not an expert in really anything, but my MO when an especially I'm really far out of my really far out of my depths, is I go and I try to find, as I go and I try to find experts.

SPEAKER_03 26:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:01

And so I spent maybe about 18 months or two years kind of doing that, networking, like kind of like I always do. And I just happened to be introduced to a business partner who knew he and I are developing one of my products right now, Banette Lancia. And he he just happened to be in Bali at the time. And we are organized a Zoom call, and we get on the Zoom call. And this kid's on the beach in Bali with his shirt off, and there's a beach volleyball game going on in the background, and some kids building sandcastles around him. I'm like, this is the this is the guy that I'm supposed to meet to show me the way through this artificial intelligence, intelligence technology, and how coaching can integrate into it. Like this, this is the guy, this guy with his shirt off and bali. And so we start this meeting. This is the really there's a there's a whole point with this. I promise I'm getting there. So we start this meeting, and he's like, Well, you wrote a book, right? I'm like, Yeah. He's like, Can you get me a PDF copy of that book? I'm like, Yeah, sure. And I sent him it like in real time in the in this meeting. He's like, just give me like two hours, okay? This was, mind you, this was four years ago. Okay. My book had not been out for that long. So I give my book a PDF copy. I go back to my coaching things, he pings me really quick. He's like, hey, come back. In two hours, he had wired one of my books into one of the early LLMs and and shaped it. We'll use that term terminology to keep it simple, and shaped it to a certain extent. And he said, Well, what's the last question that you answered for one of your athletes? And I was like, Oh, I built them a nutrition plant for the Western States 100. And he's like, Oh, okay, great. So he pulls up his terminal, which is very, you know, this very code looking, not very fancy, no UIUX or anything like that, because he only had two hours. And he type, he types into it. He's like, Who is this athlete? And I gave them the like a profile athlete. It's like, can you build a training or can you build a nutrition plan for the Western States 100? And using only my book as the source material and shaping that to how he wanted to shape it, it gave me an answer that was maybe 95% close to what I had actually done in two hours. So it was at that point where it's like, okay, I'm gonna figure out how to like play ball here.

SPEAKER_02 28:39

And that's not just two hours for creating the nutrition plan, that's two hours of actually building the tool to create to then create it.

SPEAKER_01 28:46

Yeah, exactly. And so we went through a few more iterations, but that was the real marquee one. It's because I had just done it for an athlete. It was and what this what this person had created was so incredibly representative of what I would do. And I'm not gonna go into like all the detail of how representative it was, but it was very, very good. Was obviously wasn't perfect. So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna figure out how to play ball. And so since then, we've been kind of working on two parallel tracks, is one to essentially build an agent of me that acts like me in a coaching capacity. So athlete comes in, the agent onboards them, the agent builds the program, the agent analyzes the training, the agent communicates with the athlete just like I would communicate with the with with the athlete, modifies the training in a way that I would modify the training, creates the long-range plan, counsels the athlete when they have a crisis of confidence, like all those things that I do as a coach, tries to emulate that to the best of its capacity. That's one agent, that's a live product now. People, you know, people can go to it, but and that's been the workhorse, the workhorse behind there. I'm super happy with with where we're with where that's that's at. And there's going to be other iterations of that. That's I'm not the only one kind of doing it. There's you know, hundreds of it right now in the athletic space. But the other piece of it is how individual coaches can leverage this to enhance their their coaching pipeline, so to speak, how they how they deliver coaching. If you think about coaching fundamentally, we're kind of doing three things, right? Prescribing training, we're analyzing training, we're communicating with athletes. Where along those, where along those three delivery points in working with athletes are there friction points that you can use enhanced technology to alleviate your workflow? And there's something along all of those. And I'll I'll give something that's just I've built over the last, it took me like two days to build, which is crazy. The speed is incredible. So one of the things that you'll probably recognize as a coach that's that is uh time consuming and also very imperfect to analyze is sentiment through post-activity comments. That is a really if I've I have requested this of training peaks, which is the the training platform that we use. You're wearing training peaks hat.

SPEAKER_03 31:16

I am, I'm wearing the hat, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:18

I've requested this of them. I can't tell you how many times and I get denied every single time. I want the post-activity comments to be the first thing I see in the email, not the hero data. They flip it around, or is the hero data first? It's like time, power, pace, elevation gain. That's the first thing you see, and then post-activity comments are second. I want I want to customize it to the post-activity comments are first. And the only reason I'm mentioning that is that's I place them at a higher value. Now, the hard the hard part with that is when you're managing a portfolio of athletes, you have a stream of sentiment coming into your inbox. And when you have, you know, 20, 40 athletes, reasonable athlete load, and you're trying to analyze sentiment not only on that one day, but on the last three or four or five days, which actually becomes meaningful. It's just like a training input. It's not one single thing that's usually the impulse. It's usually five or six things that are kind of like adding up to show you the direction arrow. It's hard. And we want athletes to put in as much, it's their training log. We want them to put in as much context as they absolutely can. Weeding through that sentiment. I hate to use a negative term here, but I'll I'll emphasize it for the coaches that are out there that are listening. Weeding through that sentiment to find signal is extraordinarily difficult, yet very valuable. And every coach out there is giving me a nod right now. So, anyway, I'm like, how am I going to solve for this filter? So I built a I built a sentiment dashboard that exists outside of training peaks that takes a three-day rolling average of an athlete's sentiment and boils to the top the things that I need to pay attention to. It racks and that's something you can't do in training peaks right now. I can't like flag for sentiment and elevate the things that I need to respond to to the top. And it does a remarkably good job of doing that. Now, that doesn't help me coach more people, it doesn't help me like scale the business. I'm not looking at it from an economic perspective, but it does help me be more insightful on tying an athlete's post-activity comment, the verbal feedback that they're actually giving in their post-activity comment to what's actually going on in the data. It gives me an enhanced way of scrutinizing that because I can spend more of the time, more of my time focusing on the sentiment that is boiling up, boiling up to the surface. I couldn't do that without integrating. I use I use claud cowork just to be transparent. I I could not do that without integrating an AI agent into that that is that is sifting through all this because I've been a coach for 25 years and I know I miss sentiment. I know it. I know it. And I'm not saying that this makes that miss rate zero percent. Like I know that I'm not, I know that I'm still gonna miss things through sentiment, either through a byproduct of me not reading everything or reading everything carefully enough or the filter not working perfectly or whatever, but it makes it light years better than a linear look at sentiment where everything is prioritized equally. That's the improvement that I just now created is that instead of looking at all the pieces of sentiment and trying to rack and stack it myself, I have a high pass filter that it goes through first and it tells me how to reorganize and rack and stack the things. And I absolutely like, you know, maybe somebody's gonna be out there like saying this is like a squeaky wheel theory or whatever. Like the athletes that have, you know, some flag within their sentiment over the past few days, I immediately prioritize and I jump on communication with those athletes. Like immediately, because it's like, hey, let's fix this. Do we need to change the training? Do we need to give you less? Like, kind of like whatever it is. And the opposite is also true. Yep. If everything is like rolling and being perfect, then you might want to add a little bit more load, but it's more, it's more often kind of the former case. So that's just one, right? That's just kind of like one thing within my coaching practice. There's maybe a dozen or so more of these specialty like tools that I've built over the past like six months that vary in the use cases. Some of them are very that the the this athlete sentiment filter is the one that I bring out first because I use that across everybody. Everybody gets that. It's the first thing I check every morning. That's how valuable it is, too. The very first thing when I sit down and coach, I look at the athlete sentiment thing. It helps me organize my day. But there's a maybe a dozen or so tools that I've always wanted as a coach. I've begged training peaks for them for you. I love the guys over at training peaks, but they're making a tool for everybody, not a tool for me. Yeah, right. That's part of the that's part of the bargain you get with software is you get software for everybody. You don't get software for yourself unless you build it for yourself. There's maybe a dozen of these like little widgets that I built that have always been problems that I have wanted to solve for, but I did not have the skill nor capacity to do it. And now I've got a tool that gives me the skill and capacity. That's the undeniable piece. Yeah. Is you have a tool out there that's remarkably powerful, that you can choose to wield in any number of different ways. And if you know how to wield it correctly, you can turn that, you can turn that expertise, you can turn that know-how into better prescription, better precision, better analysis for each individual athlete. And that's what I've kind of been focused on building off to the side, so to speak, is this suite of tools that I can deploy within my own coaching practice.

SPEAKER_02 36:57

Yeah, I I have done something similar. So with my weekly feedback form that I send out to my athletes, which I send out via Google Forms, which is very cumbersome when it comes to all these coaches. How do I read this? And that's what I built myself as a script that then takes that weekly feedback and it then looks back through that sentiment over previous weeks, and and then it says, right, okay, so over the last four weeks, Matthew has said these things. There's a trend, you know, whatever it might be. Oh, right, okay. I might not have seen that on a just on a one weekly basis, you know, just like you, there's there's those opportunities to maybe see things on a trend basis that perhaps you wouldn't have seen just from reading you know individual messages or you know, those individual check-ins at that particular time. So that's how I've I've been using it. It is it is great because you can just jump on cord and say, hey, here's the here's my my feedback forms for the last four weeks. What what am I what what are you seeing? What what uh what what can I pick out? And then I look at you know the data on training peaks and and go, right, okay. So Matthew has said he's feeling a bit tired, right? I can see why we you know we've been building up his volume, but that's okay. Let's cut him back this week, you know, whatever it might be.

SPEAKER_01 38:24

Yeah, I mean, I to you know to like kind of flip it around a little bit and like turn this into like a little bit of a dialogue that maybe we can go back and forth on. So I mentioned earlier, like one of my roles is I mentor and I train a lot of coaches, and I've really enjoyed that, or very, very, very much enjoyed that role throughout my throughout my coaching career because I get a lot out of it. I grow a lot of out of it. I grow a lot as a coach out of helping other other coaches. It it absolutely makes me better. Is how do we how do we take early stage coaches and teach them how to use these tools? Because it's not like teaching somebody how to use a power meter in cycling, for example, right? Which is an analytical tool that you know tells you how many kilojoules they're producing, how much, how many watts they're producing. This is the tool that like can help be a shortcut, right? And with any shortcut, you're shortcutting at the expense of development with the young coach, right? So do you make them do the work or you give them a shortcut to the work? Because we were trying to balance this like in internally with our new coaches that are like coming on, because part of the reasons that I can use and I can leverage uh a lot of the AI models is because I know the right questions to ask, and I also know how to guardrail it. But I've only developed that over, and I'm not perfect at either one of those, but uh, but I'm only reasonably good at it through my experience. If you don't have that experience, you're gonna get siphoned off into a not developing because you're having something else do the work for you, but B, you're subject to a lot of to a lot of error as a really practical is a really practical point of this. I'm not using ChatGPT or Claude, which are the main tools that I use. I'm not I'm not using them in isolation. I've kind of like armored them up with my body of work that acts as a that that acts as guardrails, so to speak, and uh tone references to make sure that the information that I'm getting is is the right is of the highest quality possible. It's sourcing the right information. It's the way that I've kind of like learned to, you know, use the data and manipulate the data and things like that. And I I literally call it my knowledge spine. And it took me a long time to kind of to bring this together into something that into something that one of the AI tools can actually make use of, but other people have that. I just happen to have a really big set of it, you know. That's the only reason that I can not the only reason, but it's the biggest reason that I can put a lot of trust in the work that I'm handing over to this digital agent right now is because I've kind of like given it these guardrails of institutional knowledge that has been written down and presented on and things like that that I've had throughout my coaching career. I wouldn't have that same confidence as if I was just, and I've done this actually, if I was just using ChatGPT without that. I I don't, I I I would not do that as a coach because I've tried doing that independent of giving it guardrails and didn't like what I was getting. So there's a little bit of a cautionary tale for using this in practice as coaching, is is like you can't use it to replace the work, you can use it to make your work a whole, you can use it to enhance your work. And if you so choose, you can use it to leverage your time better. That and that's a personal business choice that everybody's gonna have to go through. Like scale is uh very much part of the conversation with the technology itself, and it's always been a conversation within coachings. How do you scale yourself? That's a I'm I'm not gonna get into the depths of that too like too much, but I guess my point with all that is is like you still do have to be really careful, and the way that I've been careful is is I've kind of guardrailed the I've got to guardrail the tools to a large extent.

SPEAKER_02 42:33

Yeah, no, 100%. I I I think that's that's exactly what I've done as well. You know, I don't have as much coaching mileage behind me as as you do, but you know, from my previous career of working in learning and development and in the corporate uh side of things, that's the sort of approach I've taken with it as well. Yeah, you can't just drop your weekly feedback form into chat GPT and or claw, hey, tell me all of this stuff.

SPEAKER_01 43:03

It does have to come with those people will do that. And I mean, I every week, I'm pointing my phone over here. Every just this morning, I'd say every week, every day, I get fed a new AI coaching widget on Instagram that's some that somebody's developed. And so there's like there are other people out there that are like harnessing your data through Strava andor Garmin andor Cinto or whatever your GPS use of the choice of whatever is, using using one of using some of the AI tools to synthesize that information and coming up with programming for it. There are going to be any number of different attempts there. And and my bet is the winners are gonna be the ones who have a trusted methodology to scrutinize the data and provide actionable insights and advice with. That's the hard part is taking. The because you know the AI models are harnessing the entirety of the internet.

SPEAKER_02 44:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:05

Taking the entirety of the internet and figuring out how we're going to put a silo around the stuff that is the highest quality of information. My colleague Nick Tiller just produced a pay just produced a really, really good paper about this in the health and wellness space, where they tested, I think it was 250 health, wellness, and performance questions across all across several of the uh AI models. And the summary of it is they did a pretty shit job of producing of producing good information. A lot of it was misinformation, a lot of a lot of it wasn't credible. And so I think it just goes to reinforce the point that like if you're an athlete out there and you want incredibly specific information for you, you've got to figure out how to like harness the entirety of the information that's out there and like tailor it down to that's specifically for you. That's not an easy task. We're trying to chip away at it with some of the tools that we're building, but and we're not and we're not the only ones. But but I do think that there's some magic in that to where you can leverage these technologies and and have a lot of good come out of it.

SPEAKER_02 45:09

Yeah. Yeah, I think if you're not getting getting into using AI, you're not being I I actually saw quite a good post on LinkedIn yesterday, somebody saying about if you're not thinking AI first, you are going to get left behind.

SPEAKER_01 45:23

Not AI only. But not Yeah, not only AI only. I mean, I so to go through the cycle piece of it, right? So I went through the cycle during the power meter revolution in the early 2000s. And it's it's not exactly the same. It doesn't repeat, but it always rhymes. That's what I've always said. That's a very common phrase. It doesn't repeat, it always rhymes. And during the power meter revolution, they're absolutely 100%. It's crazy to think about this now. But anybody who's been coaching for over 25 years will will remember this in cycling and in triathlon. There was a contingency of practitioners out there. We're like, why would we adopt this technology? We already have heart rate. We have a very great gauge of intensity, heart rate. We've used it for decades. We know all the training ranges, we know everything that there ever needs to be known about how to apply heart rate training for an athlete. Why would I switch over to a power meter? They're big, they're clunky, they're expensive, they're heavy, like it's the force at the level of the pedal and not really your, you know, your physiological representation of the work. Like you heard all the excuses, all the excuses in the world. And that was not a trivial amount of practitioners that were actually saying that. Fast forward, it didn't take more than like four or six years to weed all of that out. You were a dinosaur. You're an absolute dinosaur if you didn't adopt all that technology. That was one of the first big coaching projects that I had, is I had all our whole coaching staff be power meter literate. And that seems like now, like, well, of course you would have done that. In 2002, that was not. In 2002, when I did that across 50 coaches, which is a pretty big coaching staff at the time, that was not a universal thing at all to have everybody be literate and using a power meter to prescribe and analyze training with the old SRN software. If you guys can remember that back in the day, this has a similar signature where it's a tool that you can wield and that will be people out there said, Well, we have all these other tools. Why don't we just continue to use them? Or here's the problem with this tool the tools are going to get better, the AI tools have already gotten better, and remarkably so way faster than the power, way faster than the power meter, way faster than the power meter. It's going it's going to be something that is is going to kind of like run away and run everything over at the same time. And if you're as a coach and as an athlete not thinking about how to how to how to intellectually and honestly harness that technology, you stand a good chance of getting run away from just like everybody in the power meter revolution did in the early 2000s. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 48:10

Thank you so much for coming on. I'm going to ask you one last question.

SPEAKER_01 48:13

Yeah, man.

SPEAKER_02 48:14

Is A AI going to replace human coaches?

SPEAKER_01 48:20

I I think to a certain extent, yes. So here's what here's what always happens with technological revolutions is the bottom gets chopped off first. So anytime there's any sort of efficiency leap in anything, kind of the the the bottom part of the fodder, with all due respect to these people, kind of the bottom barrel that are like using generic training plans and copy pasting things. And uh the generic training plans are gonna go away first. Let's just think about that as an extension of coaching.

SPEAKER_02 48:50

Yeah, my training picks marketplace is dead.

SPEAKER_01 48:54

It'll it'll it'll die. It'll die, it'll die. And and that's fine, it served its purpose for you know 50 years. It'll it'll eventually die or go to you know 1% or kind of like whatever it is. Now, if you go kind of like the next step up from the training plans, the coaches who are using training plans and passing it off as coaching, that'll be the next kind of like piece to go. Then the AI will get better and it'll replace whatever you consider the next level, and then on and on and on. You know, I I do think that like there's always going to be a place for human-to-human interaction in some form. But when you're talking about a service type of marketplace, and you have these technological revolutions, the people who are the best at that service end up being the people who serve not only survive but thrive, the people who can create unique value through whatever their through whatever type of service they actually have in our in our case is coaching. So I I do think that it's going to slowly replace the coaching. And the way it's gonna replace the coaching is kind of from the bottom up, kind of working its way through all of those, all of those different levels. And I think that that's an improvement, honestly. Like there's gonna, you're gonna find cases, and there those are the the the research that I just pointed out from Nick is a great example of this. You're going to find cases where Chat GPT gives somebody a terrible marathon training program. That is absolutely going to happen. But you know what? I can find human coaches that are giving people terror terrible marathon training programs as well. So you have to kind of like understand that like it are terrible training already exists with humans delivering it. So don't use that as the scapegoat for like, oh, we shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't adopt this technology. We shouldn't, we shouldn't trust it. There's already bad stuff out there. Anyway, to answer your question, yes, it'll be as it'll be from the bottom, kind of going to the top, though. Yeah, agree.

SPEAKER_02 50:56

Good to see you. Thanks so much. Good to see you too. Yeah, of course. Um yeah, I'll uh see you soon. Yeah, Nick. Sounds good, man.