View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
CTS coaches Addison Smith and Adam Ferdinandson join the podcast for an insightful coach roundatble. We discuss subjectivity from coach participation in sport, the delicate balance of simultaneously supporting and challenging your athletes, and the importance of being there either in-person or virtually for your athletes before, during, and after events. We round out our discussion with takeaways from the UESCA conference and the developing professionalism of ultramarathon coaching.
Episode highlights:
(20:24) Addison’s takeaway: supporting your athlete while managing expectations and challenging them as athletes, being the cheerleader while also pushing challenge, fueling example
(28:50) The athlete owns their training: a material coaching philosophy, taking the ego out of coaching, examples, your athlete’s training is not your training, changing vocabulary to reflect coaching philosophy
(35:58) UTMB example: Addison on UTMB, feeling like you have a teammate, example of an athlete who lost all their gear on the way to UTMB, impromptu Billy Yang care package, athlete feedback
Additional resources:
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Information on coaching-https://www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media
Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon and Audible.
View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
CTS coaches Addison Smith and Adam Ferdinandson join the podcast for an insightful coach roundatble. We discuss subjectivity from coach participation in sport, the delicate balance of simultaneously supporting and challenging your athletes, and the importance of being there either in-person or virtually for your athletes before, during, and after events. We round out our discussion with takeaways from the UESCA conference and the developing professionalism of ultramarathon coaching.
Episode highlights:
(20:24) Addison’s takeaway: supporting your athlete while managing expectations and challenging them as athletes, being the cheerleader while also pushing challenge, fueling example
(28:50) The athlete owns their training: a material coaching philosophy, taking the ego out of coaching, examples, your athlete’s training is not your training, changing vocabulary to reflect coaching philosophy
(35:58) UTMB example: Addison on UTMB, feeling like you have a teammate, example of an athlete who lost all their gear on the way to UTMB, impromptu Billy Yang care package, athlete feedback
Additional resources:
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Information on coaching-https://www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media
Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon and Audible.
Trail and Ultra Runners. What is going on? What's happening? Welcome to another episode of the Coupecast. As always, I am your humble host, Coach Jason Coupe, and this episode of the podcast brings back a format that you, the listeners, have been clamoring for over the course of the past few months, and that is one of our famous coach roundtables.
Speaker 1:So on the podcast today we have coaches Adam Ferdinandsen, who's been on the Coupecast before, as well as Addison Smith, who serves a dual role within our coaching department as one of our coaches, as well as working in our athlete services department, and each of us answer the question what did we learn this year throughout all of our coaching experiences and also the collective coaching experiences of all of our coaching department. This is something that we like to do each and every year. We like to recap what we've learned and what we're going to kind of carry into the future, and I also think that this is pertinent for athletes, because you can learn through some of the mistakes we've made and the collective experiences that we have had with our athletes. Alright, folks, with that as a backdrop, I am getting right out of the way. Here's our coach roundtable about what we have learned this year, with coaches Adam Ferdinandsen and Addison Smith.
Speaker 2:Okay, you know ready.
Speaker 1:Do it, man, Adam, since you've got the bigger list, we're going to go
Speaker 1:over. We're going to go over what we learned, what we learned this year. This list could be actually infinite. Now that I'm thinking about it, I usually have 10 points by the end of the year, even at my ripe old age. But you can go first. You seem like you have a big. You seem like you have a big list to go through. So what'd you learn this year? And then we'll kind of get into what we're going to do differently next. But what'd you learn?
Speaker 2:Alright. So yeah, I definitely had to stop making a list just for logistics' sake at a certain point. But a lot of things came up, a lot of little things, and instead of just kind of blasting them all out, I wanted to see if I could find something that kind of brings them together. And one thing that I kept noticing, a theme that kept popping up, was the theme of my athletes are not me, and at first glance that's a very elementary coaching 101 type subject. We all know that, we all try not to do it, and I know it most of the time as well, but it sneaks in in ways you don't expect especially with athletes that may be a lot, a lot like you and similar to your own fitness, it can blind you to something.
Speaker 2:So, an athlete that typically kind of runs around at the same pace as that you do, they're going to a race and maybe, instead of diving into their pacing as much as you should, you know oh, this would probably be about a 30 hour race for me and maybe you shortcut some of the due diligence you may have done before.
Speaker 2:So, recognizing that athletes are more than their FTP, or they're more than just what they run around at, and you need to really look at each athlete as a whole, take that into consideration and really dive into it like you would with anyone else, because they're not you. And I'll add one more to that umbrella. So one more to add to that is night running. Something you guys brought up in a past continuing ad that we did recently was focusing on night running and, to be honest, it was something that I had been doing, but maybe not to the extent that I should be with my athletes. So that's just one change I'm going to be making is being a bit more deliberate about the extent to which I train that, since it is a big part of 100 milers, and it's something that I've done so much and I feel comfortable with. But my athletes might not, and it's easy to forget that they're not in the same spot that you are.
Speaker 1:So well. So it's funny that you mentioned that, because I was reminded that the first way that we came up with any sort of kind of like reasonable framework for ultramarathon training and coaching was with what was called the ultra listserv, and I think it's still active. I asked one of our other coaches about this the other day and he indicated that it was still active, but nobody would even recognize this format of information like dissemination in this day and age, and all it was was just an email listserv. So you would email it. You know how do I prevent blisters during the Ludvill Trail 100, and whoever subscribed to this listserv got that email and had the opportunity to reply. So it was basically a giant. You know carbon copy or carbon copy email, the email chain. For all intents and purposes I'm probably trivializing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, probably trivializing it a little bit too much, but the point that's relevant to you, adam, is that the only thing that people really drew from there were hey, I did this, I heard so and so did that, I saw somebody do this. This is what worked for me. So it was either observations based on what people's personal experiences are and or observations based off of what they saw other people doing. So your point like you or not, your athletes kind of the root of a lot of early ultramarathon training was basically that because there wasn't anything else, you know, I mean, there wasn't any sort of like scientific framework really until you know, maybe 2010, 2009, to really kind of like draw from. And one of the things I took away from the coaching conference that you guys were both at, that we're all just kind of recuperating and trying to digest from is that we're starting to figure it out.
Speaker 1:Like we don't have it figured out yet, we probably won't figure it out for another 50 years, but we're starting to figure it out. We're starting to have common pieces of what are the limiting factors in ultramarathon running, what drives performance in ultramarathon, what are the more important physiological attributes in ultramarathon and what are the less physiological important attributes. And through that lens of figuring out kind of those three categories of things, we can kind of drive principles and drive training that is not based off of hey, here's what I did to make me successful. We can look at it and say, hey, listen, we know this is important, we know this isn't. We know that these other things are important, we know these things aren't. We know that these are common suffering points right or points of performance deterioration, and these other points aren't. So, like I said, we're getting.
Speaker 1:That error is not an uncommon one and it's simply, I think, more than anything else, kind of speaks to the nativity of the sport in general. We're just kind of like early stage. You know we're a decade or so behind a lot of the other traditional endurance sports, so that's fine, you know. So I think you're your plight in terms of what you've learned this year. That's not a plight, that's a good thing. The things in terms of what you've learned this year is actually a good one because it just recognizes that there's a better way and I'm just I'm just kind of thankful that there is a better way, as opposed to just focusing on well, here's what I did for Leadville. You can have it Like here's how you should train for Leadville as well. I'm just glad that we do have we are starting to have these like common points that we can all really draw from.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sometimes being so involved in the sport can actually feel like potentially your greatest weakness is that, since you are a participant, you have all these subjective NF1 experiences and it's really tempting to extrapolate those to everyone else.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, even you can take it a step further and it would be maybe not as egregious of an error, but in the same vein of taking all of your athletes experience and using only that to draw from.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying that you can't draw from that in certain capacity or with a different lens or just a different shade, but certainly if all you did was, hey, I coached these 10 people for Leadville, the eight of them finished and two of them didn't, so I'm just gonna do the same thing for the next 10 people, I would say that's an error, right, because you're still not applying the point, the kind of basic coaching point of individualization, towards that. So I think in our coaching vocabulary, as we talk about how we converse with athletes and how we converse as colleagues, like your intent should always go up and say, well, I personally would do this, or I had an athlete that did that, and not to say that you can't do that because you can have learning lessons and applying for the future absolutely, but solely relying on them or too heavily relying on them would certainly be an error because, once again, the point of individualization should always rain. It should be one of the supreme raining directions that you should take.
Speaker 3:Totally.
Speaker 1:Addison, you wanna tack on to that at all.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think, when you're talking about using your past experience, I think a lot of that comes from taking the easy way out and not doing the due diligence. When you're speaking to an athlete for the first time, when you're tackling a certain problem, I feel like there's always so many more layers that you could be exploring whether that's, oh, this fueling problem. It sounds similar to this past athlete that I had. Let's put A to B.
Speaker 3:Each athlete has a different lifestyle, a different routine, different stressors, and I think all of those come into play and should be used in concert when you're making decisions, in helping them kind of navigate whether that's a nutrition issue or whether that's a night running issue or just tackling a certain workout. I think a lot of ultra runners struggle with that high intensity VO2 max work because it's something that unless they've been indoctrinated in the sport through track and field and road running, they don't necessarily know what it feels like to work that hard. And so I think even something as small as like how do you tackle a VO2 max or high intensity workout, it's gonna take different cues for different people because they're coming at it from a totally different lens.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the people who don't come from a collegiate track and field background tend to, just because they just don't have the experience, they tend to be a little bit more confused about the architecture thing in terms of how hard should they go right, how hard should this be, how hard should that be?
Speaker 1:And when you're a collegiate runner and you have this four year experience of going hard during workouts two days a week and going hard during a race, usually one day a week, throughout, you know, nine months out of the year for four years of your life, if you run indoor, outdoor and cross country, which the majority of collegiate distance runners do, you kind of become numb to the nuance and you just go as hard as you can for every single workout and the coach at D&O kind of dictates the intensity by the duration and the construction and the construction of the workout. And so you're absolutely right that people are not not everybody is coming into the sport with that exact same background and even the way that we communicate what we should be doing and how you should be doing it can take on a little bit of a different tax depending upon that experience.
Speaker 2:Addison. That touches on my second point that I was gonna get to is educating my athletes, and educating them about the workout structure is one of those where you do need to take it so individual and it's really hard for the new people and they don't know what you know. So I think that's a really good point.
Speaker 3:Yeah, with my new athletes I come into it, giving them cues, whether it's using the talk test. Should you be able to talk to someone during a VO2 max intensity interval? No, definitely not. How are you feeling internally? Could you have gone a little bit longer? Maybe a touch, but we're trying to get you at your highest output in a way that doesn't feel sustainable and then having them go out and try it and then looking back at the data and being able to course correct from there. Giving them as many cues as they can the first time, but letting them know that it's okay if we screw up this workout a little bit and course correct later, because it's gonna take time to hit the workout in a way that's gonna be hitting the right intensity moving forward.
Speaker 1:You guys don't know this, but I literally just recorded a podcast this morning that would have already come out by the time that this podcast came out. And I did this with Michael Rosenblatt, who has wrote a lot of or he's performed a lot of meta-analyses on intensity structure. So how can we divide intensities into different components and how do those actually make a difference towards any physiological parameter or kind of end performance? And once again, you guys didn't know this. I literally recorded this two hours before we jumped on the horn here. And one of his points throughout evaluating all of that research across many, many years, across many papers and producing at several meta-analyses on these, one of his like broad brushstrokes that he would apply to it is that if you get the intensity close, it's probably doing the exact same end effect.
Speaker 1:So if we use the example, I'm gonna throw our cycling brethren kind of under the bus here, where they tend to overcomplicate the intensity domains that they use and they've got even seven or nine structures, which is not all that uncommon in a cycling framework, but certainly we've seen more where it's 15, 20 or whatever. That's way too much complication than is actually physiologically practical, because your body doesn't know systems, you know, and his point with it all is is, as long as you get the intensity close, it's more important to get the interval duration correct, not so much the intensity. So the interval duration has a greater degree of precision, if you wanna think about it like that, versus the intensity or itself, where the precision I guess is more important than on the interval duration. That it is actually on the intensity side of things. So that is into your point.
Speaker 1:That you know, let's just get it close and you're gonna have the same net effect is actually really well taken and also backed up by the vast majority of the scientific literature when they've actually looked at this and tried to decide is it different if we run or ride our bikes at 97% of our maximum heart rate or 92% of our VO2 max versus 96% of our maximum heart rate or 89% of our VO2 max or some kind of like trivial difference? When you whittle through all of that, the answer is no. Those differences probably don't make as nearly as much, if any difference at all. And what really matters is is the interval duration into a second extent, like the total time under a certain amount of load?
Speaker 3:No, that definitely checks out. And you know what I've been at least experiencing with my athletes. You know they come into it obviously nervous because they've never experienced a lot of them that kind of intensity before. But then, you know, as we've been talking about, you know, either stacking back to back workouts or even the second workout of that week, they're like, oh wow, I actually, you know, felt even better than I did the first time.
Speaker 3:It went really well and I understand you know what that intensity feels like. So takes a little bit of time, but you don't have to get a perfect.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%.
Speaker 3:And.
Speaker 1:Coup to your point.
Speaker 2:I've always seen us as having an advantage of not having power meters, because our athletes aren't tempted to split the hairs that many ways and you have to just choose three big buckets. Essentially those are kind of our ranges for intensity. If you were to do more it just wouldn't be practical and I'm just glad that our athletes need to learn to listen to their body and don't have the power meter there to trick them.
Speaker 1:But here's the deal that proposition of not having sophisticated tools. That's not static and something will come along. Foot-based power meters came along and everybody, especially in the trail running world, went me, this isn't really practical. Real-time normalized graded pace is a thing. You can get it. It's kind of a convoluted thing. You can get it on your garment and probably other watches and everybody's kind of like man, this isn't all kind of all that practical, but those will gradually get better.
Speaker 1:You guys have heard me say this in our coaching continuing ads. Real-time lactate monitoring via a wearable sensor is not that far off. That is going to be here very, very, very soon, within the next three years at the very most, and that'll be a seismic shift at that point in time when you can actually do that, because you've taken something that has been used for forever that we have very good, very good, very good research behind that a lot of labs around the world use in terms of how to actually control intensity, and you're bringing it to the everyday person. And that's not indifferent from how the cycling power meter actually proliferated within the commercial cycling world, where at one point the cycling power meter was exclusively limited to either a lab setting or professional athletes, and those professional athletes wouldn't even use it in races because it was heavy, it was clumsy, it was just awkward, and even the first versions of it, especially the wireless versions, you always had issues with the file transfer and stuff like that. That same evolutionary pattern where an intensity gauge was reserved for a very small audience and then broadened out to a large audience in cycling, that same pattern is going to maybe not repeat but it'll at least rhyme when we have an analog and running and personally I think that analog is going to be lactate and of course all the other sports will have access to it as well. So I think this theme we don't need to forget this theme keeping the intensity ranges simple and practical needs to prevail. Even though the technology might actually kind of get a little bit ahead of itself, we need to find kind of the right use cases for whatever kind of comes up, whether it's a real time lactate meter or whatever permutation of putting in some sort of intensity gauge actually kind of flows through.
Speaker 1:Adam, you've had enough of the floor here and gone through a small sliver of your list. I'll make fun of you publicly because I know you can take it, adam, so the listeners know part of the inside joke here is renowned within our coaching department for having long lists of questions wherever we go, whether it's the continuing ed or coaching conference or a camp or just phone call between two colleagues, and so I'm going to cut you off here, with all due respect. We're going to get through a small sliver of the list and let Addison, kind of like, take the floor. So, addison, what did you learn this year after kind of like going through the whole thing? Because you had a lot of cool experience, I would say, as a coach throughout the year, and I'm really curious to hear what you have to say.
Speaker 3:Totally Short answer a lot, I feel like, for both me and Adam as relatively young coaches. We're just trying to grab it every opportunity we can get, either in the field or picking people's brains. So I think the biggest thing for me is similar kind of in the art of coaching realm and kind of trying to balance I wouldn't say a dichotomy, but almost similar to a dichotomy of, you know, wanting to support your athlete with whatever endeavors they want to be doing, while also trying to hold the line, while being realistic with, you know, the goal and their expectations, with what actual training they've been able to put in, and also trying to challenge them, you know, to not only seek out races that might be a strength of theirs but you know they're a little nervous to do so or, you know, challenge them on a certain aspect of their training that you know is lacking. I feel for myself I'm working with a lot of middle of the pack athletes or relatively beginner athletes, which is really exciting because of course we talk about at that stage every stimulus is going to produce some sort of benefit. But now, coming into year two and almost year three, with a lot of my athletes you know I've been the cheerleader, we've seen some great progress but at the same time, you know, realizing the athletes have come to CTS coaching not only to grow, you know, physiologically, you know, improve their fitness, but also as ultra runners, you know they come in wanting a challenge.
Speaker 3:They want, they want to come in and tackle a race and feel really proud of what they're doing.
Speaker 3:And in that sometimes that means being a little bit push you with certain things that I feel like is necessary as the coach, having known kind of the landscape of you know the training process, but also the landscape of on the ground, you know, completing a race, there's certain things that we need to check off the box, whether they realize it or not. And so holding the line on some of those things where, whether it's like you need to be fueling during these four hour runs, because you're not going to be running for four hours in a 50K or 100K, and so those practices need to be in place, and so I'm going to support you, it's your training, you're going to go the direction you want to go on the goal setting side of things, but at the same time we've got to make sure we get our A, bs and Cs in place. So once you get to race day, you have the tools to complete it successfully and in a way that you can really enjoy it.
Speaker 1:You know it's an interesting dialogue because you know we're largely in the commercial space, right, somebody wants to sign up and do a race. We're going to say yes, you know, almost without exception I'm not saying there's like it's completely limited, you know, and, addison, you see this on the athlete services side as well, kind of serving a dual role between a coach and athlete services but we always feel that we can make an impact, irrespective of how short of a timeframe we have to make that impact. But it is a very I'd say not a cautious line, but it takes a very careful eye, to be honest, with where you can make that impact and how much of an impact that actually is. Sometimes just reorganizing things over the course of the last four weeks actually can make a material difference. Sometimes the athlete's confidence in, hey, I've got somebody that's going to make sure that I don't screw it up or help me not screw it up in the last two months or whatever, that short term time frame actually makes a difference. But make no mistake, the biggest difference is over longer time frames. And to your point, addison, of people come to you and you've got this push-pull, of you want to be realistic with them and you also want to challenge them.
Speaker 1:I've always thought the challenge piece comes over long time frames, not necessarily over short ones, because over long time frames. I just had this with an athlete that wants to do coca-dona and it's kind of out of his wheelhouse at this point. I think he can do it whenever, but I think the more years transpire that I have to coach him, to train him properly and to build up his fitness and confidence and all those other things, I think it's a greater chance of success that he can reap in that arena. So I guess my point with that is that, at least in my observation and my experience, yeah, we can push athletes, but you've got a whole lot more bandwidth when you've got longer periods of time to work with. In both cases, both on the physiological side as well as this psycho-emotional and challenge more psychological skill set side of things, it just makes a tremendous difference when you've got long periods of time to work for.
Speaker 3:Totally.
Speaker 3:And I think part of that too is you need those first few months just to establish trust and to establish what their schedule is and kind of just getting our feet on the ground in their training.
Speaker 3:You're not going to be telling them, oh we need to work on X, y and Z, and really giving them hard challenges at that point because you just met the person. There's kind of two motivating factors One, you want to keep them because we're still a business and you want to support them, but you also want to retain that athlete. But then, secondly, you have to establish a relationship so that the athlete knows that these challenges, these push-polls, being honest with them, comes from a point of that you care about them, you care about their training, you care that you want them to get to the race and succeed and coming in just with flames and being excited and holding that line and engaging them that way I just don't think is a sustainable way to go about it at the start and, like you said, it takes years of building that relationship, establishing the trust, and then we can start to work on some things on the fringes or holding the line on a few of intangibles that make a big difference on race day.
Speaker 2:Addison, to echo your point there, especially the first part of it, I have written down on my list be 10% pushier. So you know, kind of the theme of this is I'm not making any giant changes. I'm not completely changing how I coach people, but there's definitely some times where I'm a very laid-back coach. I don't see my role as I'm not here to force you to do anything. I'm not a drill sergeant, I'm an advisor. I'm here to educate you, as long as I properly educate you on what the benefits and what the costs are to what you're proposing, whether that's you don't want to do the long run. Say someone doesn't want to do any intensity ever.
Speaker 2:I'm not pretentious about that. If I communicate to them what they're leaving on the table and they're okay with that and that's how they want to train and that's what's sustainable for them 10 years later, then I'll go with that. But there's probably about 10% of the time where I could probably be a bit more holding the line, as you said. No, we're not going to switch to a bike ride today. The race is two months away. Let's make sure we do this and just nudging myself that direction.
Speaker 3:To piggyback off of that a little bit. I think when we talk about holding the line or trying to challenge people, you have to remember, at the end of the day, that it's their training. They're paying for the service and they're getting the experience. It's not us trying to enforce what we feel like they need to do. At the end of the day, it's their goal, it's their race and we're here to support that. But I think too, if you can get that balance right or improve on that balance a little bit, I feel like we're trying to do as younger coaches I think at the end of the day, they have a lot better value out of that product, because we're not just going to be yes men or yes women and do whatever they want to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really easy to be a yes coach instead of yes man, yes man or no, yes man or yes woman. That's what I was trying to say. I wholeheartedly concur, addison, with this concept of it's their training and, honestly, incorporating that overarching philosophy into everything that I do every single day, every single conversation I have with an athlete, makes a material impact because it takes the ego out of it. I've always found that coaches who get really protective about what they're doing, like, oh, I'm doing something proprietary, I don't want people to share it, I don't want other people to know it, I put two hours on the calendar tomorrow and if you do an hour 45, I'm going to take personal offense to it and I'm going to like lash out in this way or whatever. All of those behaviors are symptomatic of you think it's your training and it's not. It's the athlete's training. They're the ones running, putting one foot in front of the other. Yeah, sure, we're guiding it and we should take pride in our work and things like that. At the end of the day, the athletes got to choose to wake up, put their running shoes on and go off the door and execute, kind of whatever the training plan is, and I've always found that attitude of keeping yourself in check, keeping your own ego in check and making sure that it's the athlete's training. It kind of makes sure that you're not cloting your judgment whenever you're talking to an athlete and evaluating their workout. Whenever they don't do something, whether they deviate it from it or whatever, sure you can provide hard, tough, love course correction type of stuff. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. That's a big role of a coach. But when you do it from a standpoint of it's the athlete's training, it's not your stuff, it changes your whole. In my opinion, it's changed your whole perspective, because I used to be one of those coaches that was like, oh man, this athlete's not doing my stuff.
Speaker 1:I used to use that vocabulary they're not doing my workout. And I don't know at what point this actually I can't pinpoint the exact time or instance where this actually changed, but whenever I did change to this other frame of reference, where it's not my coaching, it's not my training, it's the athlete's training, it just made a whole world, made a whole world of difference, so much that I even try to change the vocabulary like oh, the athletes that I, you know my athletes, right? I try to change it to the vocabulary of the athletes that I work with, right, not my athletes possessive, the athletes that I have the honor and the privilege of guiding and working with. I even take it to that extent. So, for all the coaches out there listening to this, think about that for a second. Like whose training is it at the end of the day, and are you wrapped up in your athletes' training with your own stuff, or are you wrapped up in your athletes' training with their stuff, meaning it's their training?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 1:All right, do you guys have anything to ping pong back on that before I go?
Speaker 3:No, go ahead, Go ahead.
Speaker 1:So I have two, just like you guys. Actually, I have two, unlike Adam, who's got 20. One of them is more of a business thing, the other one's a coaching thing. So which one do you guys want to start out with? I'll give you the choice.
Speaker 2:Let's go coaching.
Speaker 1:You want to go coaching first? Okay, pretty simple. Just being there for your athletes is ridiculously important. And I've kind of just learned this over the years of just going out to a lot of races and then also seeing what happens when that isn't the case. And I had the example this year where I was at a UTMB and I can't be everywhere all the time, and but I do know that the times that I was there, just standing on the side of the trail ready to give somebody a high five not anything magical like oh, we're going to patch up your feet or tell you you're awesome, or whatever Just being there on the side of the trail, those athletes perform better.
Speaker 1:In the places where I couldn't be. I wish I was there, I wish I had ten of me to kind of like be out there, like that's how powerful this, like this, like just being their piece is of it, it is of the is of the whole thing. And coaches who are ever out there in a deliberate capacity for athletes during their races, that have worked with athletes for a long period of time, will all, will all recognize that that somehow just being physically present at the race to see the, the kind of the end of the relation, of all the training and all the stuff that you went through and all the conversations and emails and text messages and file analysis and things like that that you went through to get to get to that. Just simply being there to see the end product of that particular phase of training actually ends up being pretty, pretty material for the athlete. And you don't have to do anything. Even when you just sit on the side of the trail and, like Addison and I did, drive around you know, france, italy, france, italy and Switzerland at two in the morning just to be at random ass locations on the side of the trail, that can actually be like really ridiculously impactful for the athletes.
Speaker 1:The opposite is also actually true and this is a kind of a coaching lesson for everybody out there. I don't want to neglect to just say, hey, good luck to your athletes before a race or afterwards, a good job, or tell me how it went, just kind of like simple things. That's probably the biggest coaching area that you can make and Dominic, who's probably right over Addison's shoulder, is ears are probably burning right now because that is one of the top three, if not the top one, complaints that he hears, my coach didn't call me right before the race and my coach didn't say anything after I did the race. So it's not like we're infallible here. We obviously make that mistake, otherwise Dominic wouldn't hear that feedback at all.
Speaker 1:But the opposite is actually also true. 180 degrees the other way, like you, completely deteriorate any level of confidence and trust and relationship building and things like that when, for whatever reason, you neglect those touch points. So I'm not saying that every coach has to be at every race for every single athlete. That's somewhat impractical, unless you're a national team coach or you work with one of the NGP's or something like that. But at least some physical and or virtual touch point is just ridiculously important and you can't underestimate the power of just saying, hey, go get them, or just being there out there at the side of the trail. That actually means a lot to each and every athlete.
Speaker 3:And you can see it like being a third party witness to all the athletes that you worked with at UTMB. It's going from suffering and all of the different faces you can make in the pain cave to just lighting up and feeling like you have a real team member on the ground. And so, yeah, being able to be a part of that, not only for my athletes but for everyone that I was helping out crew at UTMB in various races throughout the year. You can not only hear it from the feedback afterwards it was great to see you but you can see it and it's a positive shift in no matter what sort of suffering that they're in, when they see that person that they've worked with for weeks and weeks and weeks to get to that pinnacle moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so good story about that that I'll tell publicly and I'll anonymize as much as possible. We had several athletes both a lot of which I coach but also some of our other coaches worked with that weren't over at UTMB and one of them happened to have all of their stuff lost in transport right before the race. They came over kind of late maybe it was like Wednesday or Thursday or something like that showed up and immediately no baggage or anything like that Our whole coaching team kind of rallied to put together some sort of like Frankenstein care package for this athlete, based on our gear, because we had our gear there right. So we put them all together, put it in our chalet, opened up our chalet athlete, came over and then kind of like backfilled the rest of the stuff with all of the things in Chamonix for anybody that ever goes to one of the UTMB races that ever has this happen to them. And this will happen because there's just so many people on the airlines suck at keeping track of people's bags. Don't panic, because Chamonix is an outdoor person's paradise and you can find pretty much everything you need within that very, very small valley or, if you happen to fly in Geneva, a combination between those two, you can almost find almost everything, almost everything that you need. So that's not the important part of the story.
Speaker 1:The more important part of the story is what happened on the backside of the race. So his athlete was having a rough day, kind of behind his splits, but certainly within all the cutoffs. One of the things that he needed to gather was all of this nutrition, because he was planning on flying with it. And they gathered it all in the Chamonix Valley and just didn't get enough of it. You know kind of quite frankly. And so his wife, who's his primary crew, texted me kind of late into the evening it was probably 10 or 11, 10 or 11 PM on Friday and told me two things. One, I am falling asleep because they were all jet lagged and I don't feel safe driving from Champailoc to Triant. And two, this athlete has run out of his nutrition. So I said, listen, I'll drive out to Triant. I was in Chamonix at the time. It was, like you know, 11 PM. He was gonna be there at four in the morning or some kind of ungodly hour, and I said just stay in Champailoc, I'm gonna tell this athlete that you were gonna stay in Champailoc, so you're gonna sleep and he's, you know he's not kind of concerned about you. You know, driving through a couple of foreign countries all sleep deprived and jet lagged and things like that. That's a psychological thing and I will take care of the nutrition. I'll find it. I'll solve the problem, Don't worry about it, I'll just solve it. And I just happened to.
Speaker 1:During this whole thing, I just happened to be getting gelato, which will be a material part of the story in just a second. I just happened to be getting gelato at 11 PM and noticing that everything is closed. However, there's 10,000 runners in the Chamonix Valley. I don't need to rely on stores to get stuff. And then, magically, Billy Yang and his whole crew appeared and I'm like, oh yeah, I'm just gonna ask Billy for all of his stuff.
Speaker 1:So Billy put to shout out to Billy Yang put together this care package, this kind of elaborate, actually care package of stuff for this one athlete that needed like two gels going into the Triant aid station. And so I took that and I drove out to Triant a couple hours away, maybe about an hour away, like three or four in the morning or something like that to meet him in Triant and he took two things from me, Two things, two things, neither of which were all that material. At the end of the day it's not like rocket fuel or something that would like solve some sort of epic problem. But his feedback afterwards was, oh my God, I felt so much better after I left that aid station and it had absolutely nothing to do with anything that I put in his water balls, like nothing.
Speaker 1:It was very, very, very minor and trivial and he would have been fine just getting stuff from the aid station. But because somebody made the effort to, one, give his wife some rest, which they kind of desperately needed at the time, and two, to my first point of just being there, that part of it lifted everything. Lifted him physically, emotionally, psychologically, and he ended up having a pretty good race after that. So my whole point with that is is never underestimate just the fact of just being there, because I guarantee you nothing that I gave him which was very little of this whole elaborate care package that I got from my friend Billy Nothing in there was all that material. It was just actually making an effort to go out there. That was the material part of it.
Speaker 2:Coop. I think that intangible effect of just being there for someone, even if it's not at a race, is probably one of the bigger use cases for coaching that sometimes people aren't even aware of, and I think it's part of why someone will still be with a coach 10 years down the line, even if they kind of know where the training architecture is going. They figured out a lot of the nutrition, yada yada. They know that before the race they're gonna have someone in their corner and that's your time to reach out and say something authentic and meaningful. There's bonus points for that just being there as part of it, and then you also have that opportunity to say something that's gonna make an actual difference and then check in afterwards and actually care about how it went. And they can sense that and if they know you care and you give them authentic feedback beforehand of how ready they are, I think it can make a huge difference.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%, I'm actually so. Every year I've mentioned this I kind of like ratchet up my budget and the whole infrastructure that I have to be there, whether it's buying a van or all the things that go into that. I'm going to take another step forward as well and just try to be there more virtually. I don't know how I'm going to orchestrate that, but that's going to be a deliberate part of it, because it feels so strongly about it, along with a lot of the other things that I've been ratcheting up from year to year. We'll probably come back a year from now and I'll say the exact same thing. I'm going to double down on it again. Okay, so that's my first thing just be in there. My second thing is a little bit more of a business component. That's that the landscape of coaching is changing, and I think it's changing for the better. It's getting more mature, more sophisticated. There are more people involved.
Speaker 1:I never thought in a million years we'd have 85 people physically attend a coaching conference to which there's not going to be a virtual component to it I'm referring to the USCA conference that by the time this podcast will come out, it will be a few weeks old. It's not like we don't have all the video from it. We have all the video, all the audio. It's all captured professionally and we're not going to release it as an aftermarket product or anything like that, because we believe in the physical touch point so much of getting all the people in the same room and things like that. I never would have thought that there was a marketplace for that three or four years ago. No chance, don't pass go. That's a stupid idea. There's not enough people that'll want to come to it. I'm not saying that conferences are like the end all be all of the evaluation of professionalism within coaching, but it's a pretty freaking good litmus test. To be honest with you, the fact that people will take time out of their weekend which is always everybody's hottest commodity fly from all over North America, and we actually had some people from outside of North America, from my understanding as well, attend this as well, take their time, plunk down a few hundred bucks to come just to learn from some of the brightest minds and geek out about coaching for all things for a few days is actually kind of amazing, and I made this remark to a number of individuals who are at this conference.
Speaker 1:It was really interesting to see the adoption across this space, but it was also interesting to see who's not there. And I'm not saying that everybody has to go to every single conference or continuing it or whatever, but it has been, in my observation, very clear that there is a group of coaches that is interested in their professional development and there is a group of coaches that is just not, and that's not indifferent from cycling or triathlon or any of the other endurance sports, but at least seeing that separation is something that is new, because before it was just all a ladder group. There was a group of people that just wasn't. With all due respect to the people that are in there, I just never saw it. I just never saw it especially adopted more kind of en masse, as we've been able to see with a lot of these opportunities that exist within USGA and there's a lot of different flavors of this. I mean Eskert, juke and Drew has a course now that I've taken, stacey Sims has a course that a number of our coaches have taken and things like that.
Speaker 1:So just to see that, just to see that landscape change, where people are treating it professionally, more people are doing it full time, not that that's the only flavor, but more people are doing it full time. More people are taking the leap and, instead of bifurcating their time between five or six different side hustles, they're saying, hey, listen, I can do this as a full time deal. More people are building businesses around it, like really good businesses around it. That part of it to me is I don't know if I just learned it this year or it's just something that's really exciting for me to actually see, because I've seen how powerful it can be in other sports. We did this in cycling, we did this in triathlon and the kind of the communities like Coalesced around professional coaches and professional coaching companies. The athletes got a lot better and that's very clear.
Speaker 1:If you just like look at the results across triathlon and cycling and running, that coaching piece was not the only, certainly, but a big catalyst of all of that.
Speaker 1:So it's really neat to see that progression finally starting to be tangible to where people look at it as a professional opportunity that they're going to invest in and they kind of need to if they want to serve their athletes the best, because all of the other coaches are actually doing it and it will be a case mark my word that three or five years from now.
Speaker 1:The ones that have invested in their profession, just like any other ones, are going to prosper more in the people that they counsel their athletes, are going to prosper more than the people that don't invest in it and kind of stay in their own silos and don't do anything. That's not to say they can't be successful, but there definitely will be a separation there. Just like any other profession, professionals who invest in their profession end up outperforming and outpacing the professionals that don't invest in their profession. Across any service industry that you can, that you can think of, and that's like I said that that that's something that that I learned has been really cool this year, and it's just been highlighted really over the last six months over a couple of developments that I've seen, one of which is this conference that we all just attended.
Speaker 2:I was completely shocked by the participation we saw and just overjoyed it. How many coaches were there wanting to be better and investing that much and being better? I wanted to see that coming at all either.
Speaker 3:And the more the better. I mean speaking to the continuing education opportunities that we have within CTS and kind of learning from different coaches who have strengths and backgrounds in different areas and kind of getting able to benefit from their additional knowledge that we don't necessarily have or on a strong end. I think similar can be said for the group of professional coaches that are coming to these conferences and really trying to up their game. I think it's going to up everyone's game and, as a coach that wants to provide the best for their athletes, however way that comes from other coaches and learning from other coaches coming to these conferences, the better. I'll take it all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, once again, none of us are doing anything proprietary. We might like to think that you know we're doing something special or somebody's got a secret sauce or whatever, but at the end of the day I mean both on the technical training side as well as the kind of the business side of things Most people not everybody, most people have a remarkably like similar structure behind that, and the more that everybody can learn about what's working, what's not working and what best practices are what, what, what practices kind of like fall short, I think it's better for everybody because once again, addison, you see this kind of on the athlete services side, we do see athletes that come into CTS because of a bad experience. Right, they know that they need guidance and things like that, and we've been like victims of that. On the other side, we've provided poor experience that people go out and they and they shop the and they shop the marketplace just to be transparent and not to act like we like know all the answers or anything like that. But I've always said that for every, every, every one of those people that that says, hey, I had a bad experience over here, I'm going to reinvest and shop the marketplace and I'm going to go somewhere else. For every one of those people there's eight or 10 that just are out of the marketplace. They just say, listen, I'm kind of, I'm gone and that's not good for the marketplace as a whole and I'm going to switch from the business side in just a second for people that are tired of this. That's not good for the marketplace as a whole because that customer base will eventually deteriorate when that, when that happens, because you've got to have, you know, 10 good experiences for one poor one just to make it net, not just to grow it right, just to make it net out You've got to have that.
Speaker 1:But the real, the real reason it's is that it's tragic is that it affects the athlete who's spending their money in the harder and time right At the end of the day and that's the most tragic piece of it that when somebody has a bad experience is you know they've, they have trusted somebody with a large proportion of their time 10 hours, 12 hours, 15 hours a week that's a lot of time. And when you're trusting somebody to do the right thing with that time or to help guide you within within that time, and they let you down for whatever reason, that's a really tragic unveiling of their of, of their actual time, and so the fact that more professionals are coming in and we're going to get that proportion better, meaning the proportion of athletes that succeed and do better and have good experiences versus bad experiences, that's good for the whole group of athletes. For for for everything, Whenever you can improve that, whenever you can improve that proposition, I, I like you, adam, was kind of overjoyed was the word that you used.
Speaker 1:I liked it. I was overjoyed at the. I knew the numbers going into it so I'd kind of gotten over it. But but the enthusiasm, I think, was the thing that that I was the most excited about. Just people genuinely curious and just psyched to psych to be there was really cool.
Speaker 1:OK we're going to leave it at that. That was fun. Thank you, guys for being guinea pigs on this. I think you guys both brought great things to the table. Any parting shots that either that either of you want to opine on before we go?
Speaker 2:Just that I'm. I'm always here to keep making mistakes and getting better and doing the best I can.
Speaker 1:You do a pretty good job of avoiding most. I'll be honest with you. I made a lot more. I made a lot more. I like, made a lot more mistakes five years ago than you're making right now. So you know, take that.
Speaker 2:Well, you haven't even seen the list yet. That's true.
Speaker 1:I appreciate it. Trust me, I can imagine.
Speaker 3:No, this is. This has been fun. Hopefully, you know, coaches can learn a little bit from our banter and, yeah, start to start to tread the waters of the art of coaching A little bit more with kind of what we talked about.
Speaker 1:So very well put, young Addison. I appreciate you guys's time. Thanks a lot for coming on the podcast today.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks Thanks.
Speaker 1:All right, folks, there you have it. There you go. Much thanks to coaches Adam and Addison. There's a lot of alliteration going on in this podcast Coaches Adam and Addison for coming on the podcast today and enlightening us with the experiences that they have had this year. I always appreciate our coaches collective perspective on these things because I learn a lot about what they have learned throughout the course of the year.
Speaker 1:If you are considering coaching, go ahead. You can hit me up via direct message or you can go direct to our coaching website, which is trainrightcom. There will be a link to that in the show notes. We would love to see how we can help you get you closer to your goals. I know the fall is the time of year where a lot of athletes tend to recalibrate what they're doing. We see this across the spectrum of elite athletes and everyday athletes alike. They look at their season and look at what they can improve, and if coaching is one of those areas where you think you can improve, give us a shout. We'd love to see how we can help you in that endeavor. All right, folks, that is it for today and, as always, we will see you out on the trails.