Can Endurance Athletes Truly Learn from Other Athletes & Coaches?

This Coach Tip Tuesday is the 416th one that Coach Laura has written; today we’re celebrating the EIGHTH anniversary of Coach Tip Tuesday!  Coach Laura was inspired to keep sharing something she wrote every Tuesday by her friend and mentor Coach Brendan Jackson.  So, in what has become an annual tradition since that first Coach Tip Tuesday eight years ago, she is sharing something inspired by what she learned from Brendan for the anniversary of Coach Tip Tuesday.

No matter how many people we have to teach us and guide us along our endurance sports journey, ultimately, we must learn through our own experience.  The successes teach us something, but the failures actually can teach us more if we are open to receiving the lessons they carry.  Perhaps ironically, the cost of failure is what teaches us the most.

Read this Article: 

https://www.fullcircleendurance.com/blog/can-endurance-athletes-truly-learn-from-other-athletes-coaches 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Opening
• 0:16 Remembering Coach Brendan Jackson
• 1:47 Eight Years of Coach Tip Tuesday
• 3:08 The Most Significant Thing I’ve Learned as an Endurance Coach
• 6:28 Endurance Athletes Must Feel the Costs of their Choices
• 10:27 The Bottom Line
• 11:12 Closing

Transcript

(0:04 - 0:19)
Hello, and welcome to the Full Circle Podcast, your source for insights into the science and art of endurance sports training and racing. I'm your host, Coach Laura Henry. Eight years.

(0:19 - 1:09)
For the 416th Tuesday in a row, it is Coach Tip Tuesday. Eight years ago, my friend, colleague, and mentor, Coach Brendan Jackson died suddenly and unexpectedly while he was running the Seneca 7 relay race in upstate New York. I was devastated when Brendan died, and I dealt with my grief in one of the most therapeutic ways I know. 

I wrote about it. I decided to write about something that Brendan taught me, and in doing so, I felt like Brendan wasn't truly gone. For the past eight years, I've made it a tradition to share something that honors him, his spirit, and the things that he taught me, and so many others, each year on the annual anniversary of Coach Tip Tuesday.

(1:10 - 1:41)
In those anniversary posts, I've shared some of the kicks in the rear that he used to dull out, how fundamentals are the foundation of any and all athletic gains, how running laps to get a quote-unquote good distance on your garmin is just plain silly. I've written about how we should all write ourselves a letter, and how important it is that you have something to do in your leisure life whose only function is joy. I've written about why duration-based training is better than distance-based training.

(1:41 - 2:05)
And last year, on the seventh anniversary of Coach Tip Tuesday, I wrote about what if you fly. As I considered what I wanted to write about for this year's Coach Tip Tuesday anniversary post, I reflected back to that first Coach Tip Tuesday that I wrote eight years ago. Eight years, simultaneously, seems like such a long time and such a short time.

(2:06 - 6:03)
While eight years is not the longest period of time ever by any stretch of the imagination, it is certainly enough time for us to grow and change as humans, and I'm not an exception to that. The person and coach who I am today is an evolved version of the coach and person who wrote that first Coach Tip Tuesday article eight years ago. Reflecting back over those eight years, I started really thinking about the nature of that evolution and growth. 

While the foundational elements of my coaching style are the same, my coaching practice is rooted in honesty, treating all athletes with dignity, and supporting athletes where they are, I can pinpoint many things that I now do and approaches that I now take that are vastly different from how I was thinking and coaching back in 2017. I've learned from all of the athletes who I've coached over the years and from all of the experiences I've had over the years, and this has collectively added up to manifest as some significant evolutions in how I approach coaching and how I guide athletes. Of all of the changes I've been able to perceive and appreciate over the years, there's one thing that stands out to me as the most significant thing that I've learned. 

Are we able to learn from the teachings, experiences, and mistakes of others, or do we have to make mistakes for ourselves to learn life's lessons? I've thought about this question countless times over the years, and it's something I've really been thinking about over the last several months. I've considered this question from the perspective of an athlete and also from the perspective of a coach. Am I able to learn from the lessons, teachings, experiences, and mistakes of others, whether that other person is someone such as a friend, a colleague, a mentor, a family member, or a coach? Are the athletes who I coach able to learn from the mistakes I've made, the experiences I've had, and the experiences and lessons that I communicate to them, or do we all need to learn lessons through our own experiences and through our own mistakes? In short, do we have to feel the cost and pay the price of our decisions in order to truly learn lessons? An endurance sport and the training for it is often a mirror for life, and the lessons we glean from our training are often about much more than running, swimming, or cycling. 

After 16 plus years as an endurance athlete and coach, I've come to appreciate that I will never stop learning about endurance sports, and that is a mirror for life. I will never stop learning about life, and I will never stop learning the lessons that life has to teach me. But considering that learning process, how do we have to learn those lessons? Because I do believe that we will learn the lessons that both life and endurance sports are teaching us. 

So in my mind, it's not a matter of if we'll learn the lessons, it's a matter of when and how. The longer I am both alive and an endurance coach and athlete, I realize that a big piece of how we learn something is the struggle and the cost that it takes to learn the lesson. By extension, I've come to appreciate that making mistakes and failing at things are really important components of the learning process. 

In my early coaching years, I tended to try and prevent athletes from doing unwise things and from making mistakes to an extreme. I didn't realize how important the freedom to make choices, even unwise ones and or ones that result in stumbles, errors, and mistakes is for all of the athletes I work with, both for their own personal dignity and in order to help them learn and succeed over the long run. A big part of my entire job is giving solid advice to athletes.

(6:04 - 7:57)
But what I've learned is that telling an athlete to do something or not to do something is often not sufficient for them to learn or understand what I'm trying to communicate or teach them. They need to have the experience themselves to understand why something works or why something doesn't work, a.k.a. to understand why I'm recommending whatever it is that I'm recommending. Coming to realize this made me evolve my approach to coaching. 

While I still absolutely dole out advice to athletes literally every single day, I realize now that my job is to give athletes information so they can make an informed choice about what they would like to do and to support their freedom to make whichever choice they do decide to make. It is not my job to make a choice for any athlete or to be hard-handed toward them and or to try to force them into a choice that I prefer. Even if I see them making a choice that I wouldn't recommend, I realize that athletes need to play it through and that this making a choice and seeing how it turns out is actually what is going to help them learn the most about endurance sports and possibly even about themselves. 

This is hard, very hard for me, because I care deeply about each and every athlete I work with and I desperately want to see them remain safe, injury-free, and to succeed at reaching their goals. To watch athletes make a choice that I know may lead them to struggle and or to an end point that they will be unhappy with is quite possibly one of the hardest things that I do in my job. I am not a parent and I'm not saying that coaching endurance athletes is the same as raising competent humans, but I imagine that the angst I feel about this must be similar to what parents feel when they are raising children.

(7:57 - 9:14)
When I was working with my first coach, Karen Ellen Turner, she tried to gently steer me in the direction that would lead me to success. I was a combination of both ignorant and arrogant back then, and I thought that I knew more than she did about a lot of things. Never mind the fact that she had 25 years of experience in endurance sports and with working with athletes. 

Me, someone who was new to endurance sports, surely knew more, right? Wrong. It took me crashing and burning, sometimes multiple times and sometimes quite literally, I can be stubborn and I was even more stubborn than I currently am back when I was younger, to learn the lessons that Karen was trying to teach me. I had to feel the cost of my decisions and to see how things actually worked out or how things actually didn't work out. 

Hearing about Karen's experiences and listening to her recommendations was not enough. My own experience and my own struggle made her advice feel more real to me and it helped me learn what she was seeking to teach me. When thinking about my own experience and also about the experience I've had as a coach giving out advice to athletes that sometimes gets ignored, I often think of a line that Glinda the Good Witch says in The Wizard of Oz about Dorothy.

(9:15 - 11:58)
She wouldn't have believed me. She had to learn it for herself. I had to learn things for myself, and it would be arrogant and ridiculous of me to think that the athletes who I coach are any different from me. 

They are not. All of us need to learn things for ourselves. These days, I appreciate this, that all of us need to count the costs of our choices ourselves and that this is how we learn and grow. 

I realize now that my job isn't to stop athletes from making unwise choices before they do. Instead, my job as an endurance coach is to be there for the athletes who I coach, to support them along the way, to give them as much information as possible so they can make an informed choice, to give them the freedom to make their own choices, to celebrate with them in their successes, and to be there to support them if they do stumble along the way. It's this support through the stumbles and the setbacks that might be the most significant thing. 

To be there, to tell them that it's okay, that we all stumble, that this is how we all learn, and how this is part of the larger process is an important part of their ultimate growth and success as endurance athletes. Coach Brendan was excellent at supporting the athletes he worked with. He made everyone around him feel strong, confident, and empowered. 

That is what any coach, or really any human, ultimately wants from their interactions with others. Coach Brendan may be physically gone, but the impact he had on my life and the lives of countless other athletes and coaches in the endurance sports community continues to ripple all of these years later. In fact, I feel like I'm still learning the end lessons of some teachings he planted the seeds for when he was still alive. 

What a marvelous thing to see how we can still grow, evolve, and how those we loved can still live on, even when we are temporally past something that looked like an ending. That was another episode of the Full Circle Podcast. Subscribe to the Full Circle Podcast wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. 

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Please send us an email at podcast at fullcircleendurance.com or visit us at fullcircleendurance.com backslash podcast. To find training plans, see what other coaching services we offer, or to join our community, please visit fullcircleendurance.com. I'm Coach Laura Henry. Thanks for listening.