View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Jim Rutberg is the Content Director for CTS. He has co-authored ten books on training and sports nutrition, including “The Time-Crunched Cyclist” and “Training Essentials for Ultrarunning,” and produced more than 20 full-length indoor cycling videos. He is also the primary author for the Research Essentials for Ultrarunning Newsletter.
Episode highlights:
(31:32) Finding coaching mentors: the best way to progress as a coach, personal example, collaboration and competition
(51:24) Second phase of coaching: growth and expertise, creating a product to innovate in business or sport, variability of duration, personal examples from Rutty and Koop
(1:23:55) Safeguarding you reputation: coaching is a small community, competitors may eventually be colleagues, be someone other coaches want to work with
Additional resources:
FastTalk labs- How to Remain Relevant in 10 years
Podcast with Lindsay Golich
Podcast with Andy Kirkland
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible.
Information on coaching-https://www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media: Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Jim Rutberg is the Content Director for CTS. He has co-authored ten books on training and sports nutrition, including “The Time-Crunched Cyclist” and “Training Essentials for Ultrarunning,” and produced more than 20 full-length indoor cycling videos. He is also the primary author for the Research Essentials for Ultrarunning Newsletter.
Episode highlights:
(31:32) Finding coaching mentors: the best way to progress as a coach, personal example, collaboration and competition
(51:24) Second phase of coaching: growth and expertise, creating a product to innovate in business or sport, variability of duration, personal examples from Rutty and Koop
(1:23:55) Safeguarding you reputation: coaching is a small community, competitors may eventually be colleagues, be someone other coaches want to work with
Additional resources:
FastTalk labs- How to Remain Relevant in 10 years
Podcast with Lindsay Golich
Podcast with Andy Kirkland
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible.
Information on coaching-https://www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media: Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
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 Koop. Last week on the podcast we had an extremely interesting one. We talked about the business of coaching and I got to be honest with you guys, that is the podcast that has received the most feedback out of any of the podcasts that I have produced. Time will tell ultimately if the downloads kind of work out like that, but I can't tell you that you guys were interested in this and I'm very humbled at that fact because it does seem like kind of an inside baseball type of content to produce. So on the podcast this week we are going to do something of a very similar theme and talk about coaching.
Speaker 1:On the podcast today I have one of my longtime colleagues, jim Rupberg, otherwise known as Ruddy, and somebody who I will refer to during the course of this podcast as Ruddy. Ruddy and I have worked with each other for over 20 years now in a professional capacity. I am a great debt of gratitude for many of the projects that I have been on, including being the co-author of both editions of the book, as well as a co-author of the research essentials for ultra running newsletter, ruddy wrote an extremely fascinating piece for fast talk laboratories titled what Coaches Can Do To Be Relevant In 10 Years, which is a vantage point that not a lot of people can have, because that is a long period of time to work with and to observe coaches being in their profession to reflect on what coaches can actually do to be relevant in that time frame. So I wanted to bring Ruddy on the podcast to do a little bit more of a long form discussion on that particular topic and we go through absolutely every single aspect of it. We get into a lot of some of our personal pet peeves with coaching, but ultimately what I hope happens is coaches out there have a little bit of a toolkit to work with that if you are thinking about becoming a professional coach or if you're curious about how professional coaching works and should work if coaches want to remain relevant. I hope that this podcast actually satiates that curiosity. I had a lot of fun with this. Like I said, I've known Ruddy for a very, very long time. We get along well and he is extremely good at what he does, which is helping coaches to articulate their messages. So with that as a backdrop I am getting right out of the way.
Speaker 1:Here's my conversation with Jim Ruppberg, also known as Ruddy, on what coaches can do to be relevant in the next 10 years. It's a little bit of a backdrop, ruddy, I don't know if you listened to the podcast last week, but I did it on kind of the business of coaching. I invited two coaches in and we served in Dirk Field as a moderator and they served as a panel and we just kind of discussed a lot of things that you and I discuss outside of a work context, when we're not supposed to be talking about work and we end up talking about work which is not coaching but just kind of the business side of it. In that podcast episode I've received the most feedback on. I'm not surprised, it's kind of interesting.
Speaker 1:The downloads really don't change all that much from week to week, like if there's some sort of salacious title or I mentioned like protein or something like that and the title, usually it gets triggered, the algorithm somehow, which I really don't care all that about. But in terms of like people after listening to the podcast proactively reaching back to me and having some piece of commentary thank you, or I learned this, or whatever that feedback is, and it wasn't by a trivial amount either. So I just kind of like found it interesting, because normally I try to focus on like coaching and applicable pieces of content with eggheads in the space and researchers and coaches and things like that. I just found it. I don't know whether you want to comment on that, but I just found it interesting that the business side just generated that much discussion.
Speaker 2:I think that the business side of coaching has been a black box for people for a long time. They understand the business structures in real estate or in stock brokers, or how lawyers work or how the convoluted medical insurance thing works, but I don't necessarily know that people understand what the business of coaching really is or what it entails, or whether or not it's a lucrative business or not. I mean, we've heard over the years, in the past 20-something years oh, you guys must be everybody's, we're making millionaires.
Speaker 1:and then anybody who's actually been involved in it. You're like, no, we're not.
Speaker 2:Most coaches are probably making less than teachers. And that, for you and I, comes straight to the point of things, because we both have spouses and ex-spouses who are in education, so we understand what that kind of context is. So there really is a broad range for it and I think it's for the most part. For people, it's a complete black box. They have no idea what the economics or what the business structure is. Is everybody? Are they employees? Are they independent contractors? Are they some other form of business structure?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and for I think a lot of the reason behind that is for, either intentionally or unintentionally, we keep we being the coaches keep it in a black box and you're only gonna open up that box if you choose to do so. And that was kind of part of the discussion that not only I had during the podcast but also I've had with Dirk and you and other people kind of for years is that it's good to open that black box up for everybody. You might view it on the surface, on a very superficially surface level, and say, well, you know, you're giving away part of your edge or advantage or whatever, and I just don't think that's the case. I think in a industry like this, I don't think that's the case yet.
Speaker 2:I think, that, and one of the things that we'll talk about potentially later is this idea of and I do find it very interesting within this profession that we are competitors the different coaching companies and different coaches individually as well as collaborators.
Speaker 2:So as a profession, we're all trying to get better for the sake of the profession and for the sake of the athletes. At the same time, you're in a room at USCO or USA Cycling or whoever, and you're looking around at the people who are potentially taking business from you. So and it's not the only place that that's the case I mean, any tech convention is kind of has the same dynamic. But we have to be cognizant of the fact that at a certain level, right now at least, there's plenty of athletes. And when there's still plenty of athletes and there's still plenty of athletes to coach and plenty of room for everybody in the space, then I'm not really all that worried about the fact that there's transparency. And because I don't, I think there's plenty of athletes to go around. It's if the space or the business or the profession got to the point where we're really dealing with a limited number of resources essentially, if you think of athletes as resources, then that competition level is going to get more fierce yeah.
Speaker 1:Here's how I've kind of viewed it, though not to belabor the point too much Is that let's just say, in the worst case scenario, by being so transparent you cannibalize your incoming business by 10%. That would be reasonable. You give Alpha away, you kind of share best practices and things like that. People take those best practices and they become better. That somehow cannibalizes your business by 10%. I kind of don't view that as a big deal, either to me personally and here's why I know you're going to jump in for a second either to me personally or to the business, because we can kind of control the supply side of the equation, not the demand side. Right, I'm talking about the demand side chewing up 10%, but we can control the supply side of it by like way, way you know two or three X of that 10% based on how many people we hire, just kind of like making sure that we look at the marketplace and things like that. And it's not all that. And it's not all.
Speaker 1:Like I said, even in the worst case scenario, which I view, that 10% as a worst case scenario, it's not all that material.
Speaker 1:And then I look on the upside, into your to use your quote of it's a there's a finite customer base.
Speaker 1:I actually view getting best practices out there from that lens is that when you have a finite customer base, you want to keep as many people in that customer base as possible, and the best way to do it is to have good services across the board.
Speaker 1:And we see that we're seeing this in the racing world right now, where race directors are trying to figure out what those best practices actually are, and that'll be interesting to play out. But because, because you have a finite, you have a relatively finite customer base, you want to make sure that as many people come into that customer base as possible and then you keep all those people in, or keep as many people as those in as possible, because once you jettison them out of the space from being an ultra runner to not being an ultra runner, or to being a coaching candidate to not being a coaching candidate those people very, very rarely come back into the space. So I view it more from the latter as opposed to the former. But even in the former, if you're cannibalizing it, I kind of view it from a business standpoint. It's no big deal, honestly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would agree with that, especially, as you said, the risk of and we've definitely seen it from, I think we've at CTS. We've caught some athletes on their way out of the sport, like they've tried two or three other coaches. They didn't have a great experience, they're kind of at the end of the like if this doesn't work, I'm done, man, and thankfully we're able to. They do find us and we're able to catch them before that happens. But to your point, if the churn rate for the whole profession is such that people are just like, yeah, coaching doesn't work, or these people don't know what they're doing, or there's not enough professionalism or whatever else, and they just go away entirely, that's bad for everybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I once again, I, the lens that I look at that through, or the athletes that I get that very fortunately I've been able to get, despite them having a bad experience. And two great examples of that we'll actually talk about this kind of kind of like later are athletes who's who's in the entirety of their program has been deleted, or components of their program has been have been deleted by their former coach, and it kind of takes them off guard because they think that that's a common practice amongst coaches and they get a sour taste in their mouth and, for whatever reason, they're willing to go to another coach. But I know, for every one of those that I see, five or maybe even 10 times more are just like screw it, I'm out. Or there's some other similar poor practice they didn't get a call before their race, or they didn't get a you know good job after their race, or you know something like the stereotypical things that we kind of like see coming into it. So anyway, before let's not get too far ahead of ourselves, I think we have a killer, really killer, topic lined up.
Speaker 1:So that is a backdrop. We're going to talk about something that's really not all that training related. It's going to be more coaching related. But before we get into it, you've been on the podcast before. I'm obviously really familiar with you, but I don't want to take it for granted. So I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit and let you sort of introduce yourself as well as kind of the career trajectory that you have taken, and then I'll try to like fill in the gaps, because I know you'll probably be a little bit too humble and I'll get to brag on you at the end of it.
Speaker 2:Thanks I, yeah, I've been on the podcast before and I've known you since. I think we met in 2001, maybe it's been a long, long time. I've grown to view my career as kind of a helping coaches to get their message out is probably the most succinct way of saying it whether that's been through blog posts, audio recordings, producing hour long cycling videos like cycling training videos I think we're up to 10 books at this point things along those lines. I don't do a lot of individual coaching on my own and at this point I, if somebody comes to me and says I want you to be my coach, I go oh no, you don't know much better coaches than me.
Speaker 2:I made the decision early on that I liked the idea of coaches who are really good and really passionate coaches, allowing you guys to focus on being coaches and let me help with the message distribution. So, whether it was convincing you to write the training essentials for ultra running book, or working with the individual coaches on blog posts that leverage their skill sets, that's kind of what I've grown to enjoy doing and I'd be remiss to mention that.
Speaker 1:First off, you're extremely talented at it. The tentacles of your talent reach kind of like everywhere. So any of the content that CTS puts out and the majority of the content that I personally put out has Ruddy's fingerprints somewhere on them. Sometimes it's as far as ghostwriting the article for me. So you and I sit down together, I give you a little bit of an outline and it turns out wonderfully. Sometimes it's editing the garbage that I put out and making it more succinct and coherent and telling the story a lot better and the construction of the article is a whole lot better and there's kind of a slider in between those two end points, between ghostwriting and kind of coming in and editing.
Speaker 1:You're also the primary author and content creator for research essentials for ultra running right. So subtle plug for that. So we meet in a book club you, me, stephanie Howe and Nick Tiller. We meet in a book club. We all put our thoughts down on paper. You're the primary architect behind the content that goes into it. Steph and Nick and I, we play the peanut gallery and we you know the pedantic peanut gallery sometimes and coming on the background and help you, but it's you formulate our collective ideas, I guess is the way that I would describe it.
Speaker 2:You know how they say that you never want to be the smartest person in the room. That's a room where I feel like I'm the dunce in the room, like I. There are things. There have been times during those book clubs, especially when, especially when I've had to raise my hand until Nick, or ask Nick to explain something to me, like I'm a five year old, cause I just it just goes so far over my head that I'm like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, back up, hang on, what in the world did that mean? And you know you guys are very kind to help me out in that sense, but and I like it because it's a challenge like that. I mean that's part of the, the, the, that's part of the, the draw for me to do that is that it's. It is a challenge.
Speaker 1:Well, they all turn out wonderfully and I don't think that any one of us singularly could actually do that, for whatever reason. That's. Your talent is taking literally what is a dialogue and then doing research on that dialogue through all the channels that you do research on, and then pulling it together in a cohesive narrative. And then we're here to kind of keep you honest on some of the technical. You know pieces of it and it, like I said, it turns out. It turns out wonderfully. You're also a New York Times bestselling author. Don't forget that.
Speaker 2:Barely, barely.
Speaker 1:That's a long time ago, but still, I mean, that's still a big thing that you can kind of like hang your hat on. There's not a lot of people that I can actually, that, I can, that can actually say that, and I will say that's a time when that actually meant something, as opposed to today's Amazon age.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that was in 2000,. I don't know, it was 2003 or 2004. When I jokingly say, barely it was on there for a week or two or something like that.
Speaker 1:And which was still yes, you can.
Speaker 2:I can put it on the resume type thing, but it wasn't like a Stephen King type run on the best seller list.
Speaker 1:We didn't manipulate to get that ranking. You couldn't at that time.
Speaker 2:That was back in the days of brick and mortar bookstores and wholesalers.
Speaker 1:And finally, to just like complete the embarrassment loop, on your idea, you're a 10 time in a row Leadville Trail 100 bike, which is pretty remarkable to not have anything go wrong in that race 10 times in a row.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you. I think that the surprising part of that to me was number one, that nothing went wrong in all of those years and everything else. But there was also the trajectory of my fitness and lifestyle et cetera. During that phase I went from thinking I was a bike racer to having kids and all sorts of ups and downs on a personal and professional level, like my weight went up and down by I don't know 15 pounds, like it was. I was a very different rider in some of those years, but yeah, we managed to get it done.
Speaker 1:You got it done for sure, Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, so the reason I wanted to bring up a lot of that background is actually relevant to what we're going to talk about today, and there's not a lot of people in the world that actually have that comprehensive of a lens on coaching and coaches.
Speaker 1:And what I mean by comprehensive is not only in terms of the scope of the different people that can kind of make up this whole coaching pool and you've worked with a lot of them, a lot of them both within CTS and also outside of CTS and also kind of tangentially related to coaching, like sports, sports support services and things like that but also the fact that you've seen coaches across their careers, both from within your 20-some-odd year career of being a professional, but also interacting with coaches along the different points of their career, from the very beginning all the way to the very end, especially with a lot of the work that you've done with Joe Freel kind of more recently, and so you're the perfect person to offer this perspective on how coaches can remain relevant in 10 years.
Speaker 1:And I think that this is such a fascinating topic for just a number of different reasons, but it's also one that only very, very few people and you're one of them. You're kind of qualified to talk on having the experience that you have. But the first question that I have for you is should we really be looking that far into the future? It's a decade is a long, long, long time. Should we actually have that kind of vantage point?
Speaker 2:So the genesis of this idea was the Joe Freel's craft of coaching, which is produced by Fast Talk Labs, and they asked me to write an article on it, and it's available through Fast Talk Labs and the Craft of Coaching product. But even before we get to that, I think because this I know your listenership and known about the podcast and everything for so long I do want to make the point that this isn't a subject that is only relevant to coaches. I think that the idea of coaches maintaining relevance and managing their career arc is relevant to athletes as well, because the athletes are the ones working with these people. So it's relevant to know who your coach is and where they are within their profession, just like you want to know whether your orthopedic surgeon has done 10,000 knee surgeries or whether they just got out of medical school last week. It's similar to where is your coach in this process, and so I don't want to just be whether this is a podcast just for coaches. I think that this is relevant to athletes as well.
Speaker 2:Now, as for the tenure piece, that was, I think, a title that they wanted to use for Craft of Coaching, which is fine, but I think when I was looking at it. I would really expand it out to the how to stay relevant for a career for the long haul, Because I don't think that the timeframe is necessarily the important component. It's that we want coaching to be a profession. I don't think you or I or anyone, and I certainly don't think the athletes want their coaches to be involved in coaching a little bit for a couple of years and then they go off and do something else. We've been trying for the last 20-something years to develop the profession of coaching so that the level of professionalism, the level of expertise, this level of service are elevated to the point where there's a big difference between somebody who just came into the space and somebody who is really able to call themselves a professional.
Speaker 1:Well and I know just from my own kind of like personal development arc is I didn't care about anything. That was just except for what was in front of me the 40 athletes that I had to work with, that I had to respond to, and things like that until about four or five years into it. And then I really started to get it, and I don't know what the catalyst or catalysts were for that in particular, but I do spend a lot of time thinking about that now. You know, now that I'm almost I'll be 45 years old in a month when this podcast comes out, almost exactly a month when this podcast comes out, and I'm definitely thinking about what I'm going to be doing when I'm 55 and maybe even 65, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're in that elder phase. We'll talk about the elder phase.
Speaker 1:That makes me sound way too old, but you mentioned this really interesting component and I've had a hard time articulating this to people. So I want, obviously, you, being the articulator right, are going to do a better job better job than I am and you did a masterful job in this article. Why should coaches be the ones that are the ones raising the bar out there, like, why do we even have to, like, take the own onus on ourselves which I have kind of taken up a little bit of that mantle as well over the course of the past several years why does it have to be us that does?
Speaker 2:it Because our profession is relatively young. So the idea of a personal coaching profession for endurance athletes is only about 25 years old and you're up against or comparing against, professions like law and medicine and big business and things like that that have 100 plus hundreds of years of experience and history to have created best practices, and our best practices are just really now getting formulated or considered. And I think a big reason that we have to be very that we, it is on us. Number one there's no governing body. I mean there's no certification board. There are individual certifications but there's no professional board. You're not a board certified coach or you don't have a Juris Doctorate or any of those kinds of things, the way that other professions do.
Speaker 2:So there's no barrier to entry. Anybody can hang a shingle and we've been fighting against that for years and years. So it's in the best interest of the athletes and the coaches to use our own ability to raise the level of professionalism and expertise so that we can kind of I mean it sounds kind of nasty to do, but to essentially expose the charlatans. The best way to be able to show an athlete or a prospective athlete that there's a difference is, in my mind, to make it clear that, oh, this person has such a level of knowledge that they have gained that. I can definitely see the difference between that and this person who I just talked to, who doesn't know anything.
Speaker 1:We typically think about the quote unquote charlatans right almost in the health and fitness space, which is like an adjacent space to the coaching, where we can go out and point out any number of people who are being deliberate bad actors in the space in order to monetize and, to you know, gain power or whatever their end goals kind of are, and you can look at the social media space to find numerous examples of that. But what one of the things the listeners will be curious about and I'm actually curious about this as well to get your perspective on it is do you think that there are truly bad actors in the coaching space?
Speaker 2:I think that there are profit motivated actors in the coaching space, people who look at the profession of coaching as an easy mark, somewhere that they can swoop in, apply some technology, apply a little bit more marketing glitz, make a decent amount of money with a low overhead. You don't have to invest a whole lot and then if it blows up in their face, okay, they go on and do something else, and that is. We've definitely seen that, you know. We see it more, I think, in the fitness space and the nutrition space, but I think it's certainly the profit motivation is a can be a damaging component within, or is a vulnerability with our profession.
Speaker 1:Well and you can look to not maybe not necessarily well. You can look at Alper O'Salazar, right, obviously a bad actor in the endurance sports space, but you can look at the a lot of the Olympic and team sports for some of those blueprints where it's not so. I'll take a tangent from the profit motivated side where sometimes it's not so much of a profit motivated but it's some other power motivated aspect that they're attracted to in terms of being in charge of people, and that's more of what I see in the space in terms of bad acting. Is they get into it from a power perspective, or they get or maybe not get into it.
Speaker 2:But they get attracted from the elite standpoint. I'm thinking about it more from the kind of the everyday athlete, master's athlete, mid pack kind of person as a consumer. I think there's a profit motive there from the power struggles standpoint. You have to be an elite coach or you need to be at the upper end in order to get that power. And it can be corrupting, certainly, but I think those might be two different things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, but you're right, I'm definitely taking that bias on it and I have seen people within the trail and altering space that have had that power component of it that end up being a bad actor, some of which have not lasted in the altering space for very long, very, very fortunately. But I do think that it's one. It's something that proposition is never static, and one of the things that has been highlighted just this week with all this news that has been coming out with UTMB and other trail running series, is just the professionalization of the sport as a whole. The sport continues to grow economically and when you have a lot of economic growth, you have people looking at that economic growth and trying to find how do they get into a part of the pie, how do they get into a part of the pie from a race perspective, how do they get into from equipment perspective, nutrition perspective, coaching perspective, other services and kind of things like that. And the more opportunity there is out there a total opportunity there is out there the more opportunity there is for bad actors intentionally bad actors that are profit motivated to your point to come into the space and try to grab a slice of that pie.
Speaker 1:And I think your point that coaching in particular has no barrier to entry Anybody can kind of hang a shingle makes it one of the makes it one of the more ripe areas to do it, versus something like nutrition, where you have to raise capital. Right, you've got to raise capital to kind of infiltrate that space, and then you can raise that capital and then you can sell a shitty product right, or a product that, whereas marketing claims don't actually meet any sort of degree of efficacy. You have to go through that initial step of doing something, not just going on square space like I did, and putting up a coaching website and things like that. You have to go through some kind of a prohibitory step in order to enter the marketplace. Coaching is not like that, and so I think it actually becomes an area that's a little bit more ripe for let me use the word abuse, although it might be a little bit harsh, but it becomes a little bit more right for those actors to kind of come in.
Speaker 2:I'd agree, but I'd also. One component of that, too, is that we are in a very we're in a profession where the delivery of service and the results of coaching are sort of ambiguous. You're talking about someone who went faster or performed better, and how do you define that? And some people love working with their coach and they haven't gotten better in any way, shape or form. They just feel better about themselves and they've accomplished some other kind of goal or some other kind of accomplishment that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that they ran or didn't run. I mean, we have people who are thrilled with their coaching. Is weird, as this going to sound, that they're thrilled with their coaching and they still DNFed?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because the process that they went through was very important for their life. So because of that it's also ripe for not, even if it's not abuse. You can be bad at this in some ways and not get caught out for it, because there isn't a binary. Did it work or did it not?
Speaker 1:Well, and I've come to appreciate that that aspect takes care of itself over longer periods of time.
Speaker 1:Because I have definitely seen this in the coaching marketplace, where the coach gets a hot hand because they have an initial set of athlete results that they start to take credit for.
Speaker 1:That they probably shouldn't take credit for, because the athletes would have improved kind of despite themselves. Right, they end up getting more athletes because of that attention, because it's a small ecosystem and people kind of notice who's doing well and things like that. But what ends up happening is if that coach doesn't really know what they're doing, both from a structural standpoint, like we talked about last week, but then also from a coaching standpoint, which we kind of talk about every week on this podcast if they don't know what they're doing from both of those standpoints over long periods of time, the gig is eventually up. It does take time for that to kind of weed itself out. But I don't know, I've been. I used to get all been out of shape when I saw things like that, but now I'm just, I just kind of sit back and I just let the let time kind of take care, take care of everything, because I do think that it's hard to keep that gig up for long for people, for long periods of time, over many, many people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that going to sort of that career arc type thing, when people are at the beginning of the career, when the repetition component is really important, they need to coach a lot of people. They need to coach I say a lot of people. I don't mean the way that we had that thing way back at the beginning of CTS, where it was a you know, I don't know 100 people or something like that per coach and it was not very personalized coaching and we were experimenting with different models and things, but I mean probably 30 to 40 athletes at a time and keeping it at 30 to 40 athletes, like as athletes rotate off, you're bringing in new ones from that early repetition phase. You have to admit that not all of those programs and not all of that advice and all of that guidance is going to be great, because you're in that early repetition phase and then you know you're. I'm not saying that you're using athletes as guinea pigs or something like that.
Speaker 2:I think one of the things that I like about the structure that CTS has always had is you have mentorship, so we're not throwing people to the wolves with a brand new coach. That person has backup. They have coaches behind them that have you and other coaches behind them to say what are you doing with that athlete, what kind of advice are you providing? And then there's also a customer service component to it, where there's a person not the coach, who the athlete has access to who they can say you know, I'm supposed to get calls X, y, z and I'm not, or something to that effect. And that's, I think, a really important aspect of helping coaches progress in their early part of their careers.
Speaker 1:Well, because you don't know what you don't know. Right, and I get this question. We're going to get into the arc in a little bit but I want to use this, use this as an opportunity to go over something that I'm commonly asked because I have. I have mentioned many, many times on this podcast and then also when people reach out to me, what kind of the best way to become a better coach is, and I'm just fine, mentors because it's extremely difficult to know what you don't know and to bring that to light.
Speaker 1:If you're coaching by yourself in your basement, maybe you're coaching you've got one other person with you it's your spouse or friend or kind of whatever.
Speaker 1:With all due respect to the people who do that, I don't want people to think that I'm picking on them or whatever, but it is a little bit like the blind leading the blind.
Speaker 1:Like, let's just face it, right, if you've got two years of coaching experience and the person into, like next to you or whoever you collaborate with, has one year of coaching experience, collectively, you don't have that much coaching experience like period. But I struggle with coming up with a tangible way that other coaches can actually gain that mentorship experience other than really just pounding the pavement and creating a network of mentors that have to this article's theme a decade or over a decade of experience. You and I very serendipitously landed literally into that type of environment where we could learn, but I don't know. Like if I were just to put myself back 20 years ago as a 22 year old knucklehead trying to figure it out by myself, without an organization behind me, I don't know if I would have been able to find that answer. I would have thought that I knew everything because I didn't think that I knew everything before I met all these decade long professionals.
Speaker 2:There are some groups online now. I mean there are lists, serves and forums for coaches, and I think there is a good deal of collaboration along those lines. There are more resources available than there were back then. But again that gets back to this dilemma between are we competitors or collaborators?
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. And once again, I've always not always, but more recently, at least second half of my career I've viewed this more through the lens of collaboration versus competition. Not that they exist completely separately, but definitely more that proportion. Okay, we've kind of been beating around the bush here. Let's talk about the arc of a coach. You've got three phases here, so why don't you run through the phases as you have kind of identified with? And I want to pay kind of particular attention to the timeframe of each of those, because that's always like in the eye of the beholder right, whether it's one years enough or five years is enough. We've been talking about a decade, but why don't you run through them? And we can pay kind of particular attention to what the timeframe on each one of those are.
Speaker 2:So the first one is I mean, it's basically a beginner or an initial education phase and or repetition phase really, and I think that that is where the just coaching a lot is important, and not only coaching a lot, but coaching in as many different environments as you can. So it's an exploratory phase for a coach to figure out do you like coaching in person? Do you like coaching at events? Are you one of those people who functions well in on an in person kind of environment? Which sports do you want to coach? I mean? So we've talked at various times about whether are you a cycling coach or running coach, or you a coach who happens to work with cyclists, a coach who happens to work with runners, and I think, professionally. We've tried to take the standpoint of you're a coach first, because coaching is its own thing. It's a process, it's a communication with a person that's examining the demands of a sport, and if you learn to be a coach, you can apply it to a different sport or different activity.
Speaker 2:Now, if you throw a coach who has been mainly working with cyclists for 20 years into the ultra running environment, they're not going to be great at it for a long time. They're going to be great at it for a little bit. It's going to take them some time to get up to speed and everything else. But if you do the reverse and you just say, well, I only know how to work with ultra runners and now you try to transition into coaching anything else, it doesn't work because you didn't develop the coaching skill. You developed this sport specific component first. So there's that. But the repetition piece I think takes at least three to five years Before somebody is going to be able to start honing in on what their specialty really is. And when I say specialty I don't mean just sports specific kind of thing. But even within sports specific your own style, you know you need to have enough knowledge and broad based knowledge before you can start to hone in on. Okay, I really enjoy this aspect of coaching.
Speaker 1:So let me expand upon that broad start piece of it as well because I think that that's really important. And then I want to make a couple of comments on that. Three to five years, because a lot of people will think that that's remarkably long for an initial, initial phase of a coach in quotes. So one of the ways that this like broad based education like plays out in reality, where we have a coach that knows how to coach actually and actually does work with cyclists, know that, a coach that actually does and knows how to work with triathletes, coach that actually does and knows how to work with runners and that's the way that I kind of grew up. I coached everybody before I started kind of specializing in ultra running.
Speaker 1:One of the ways that actually comes through from a very functional perspective is all of the endurance sports kind of draw from each other on best practices. Right. We've seen the double threshold method in. You know, running kind of take a little bit of a permutation and cycling and block training and triathlon is kind of moved over to cycling and into running and this high carbohydrate phenomenon that we see in the pro peloton Some ultra runners are kind of starting to adopt.
Speaker 1:You have the best appreciation for that and you can accurately translate it the best from a coaching perspective when you have actually worked with that sport group, when you have actually coached cyclists with the power meter at a high level and then you see something in cycling that you may want to borrow and you need to translate from one sport to the other. You always do it the best when you have that previous exposure or maybe even the current exposure, depending upon your phase of development within that sport. And I've seen coaches out there that have kind of egregiously tried to borrow things from one sport to another without that appreciation and they don't have that appreciation because they haven't worked with that sport group in hardly any fashion, or at least in an intimate enough fashion to where they know how to actually translate it. That happens all the time running cross country.
Speaker 2:Is there an?
Speaker 1:example of that. Well, so the cycling one, I think, is a great one. So all the professional cyclists are using that's my dog shaking her head in the background all the professional cyclists, or a lot of them, are using this 100 to 100 to 120 grams of carbohydrates per hour when they're out there in these grand tour events. And there are a lot of ultra runners and ultra running coaches that are trying to translate that into the sport of ultra running. But when you understand that cycling is at, especially at the pro peloton level, has this level of caloric output right where they're, where they're putting out 800 kilojoules an hour or 1000 kilojoules an hour, versus running where you might put out 600 kilojoules an hour, 800 kilojoules an hour, right, 30 or 40% less. When you understand that translation and you understand that translation by working with cyclists and working with them with a power meter, because you can accurately measure that stuff with a power meter you understand how to translate into running and you're not just kind of like making it up and guessing. And I've seen runners and coaches make that exact, egregious translation of whether it's one to one or they're not translating it correctly and the gap and not and not having it translate correctly is not actually appreciating and understanding how the first sport group that came up with whatever the intervention is actually works. We see it with cross country skiing, with a lot of the interval design that that Ron said and all those people have designed over years specifically for cross country skiers, and in that environment we've seen the permutations of that kind of escape.
Speaker 1:A lot of coaches.
Speaker 1:I mentioned the double threshold training, which is meant for a very kind of specific context, and I could go on and on and on and on. But my point with that is is that one of the big advantages that you mentioned and I see this when I mentor a lot of coaches as well of working with a variety of sport groups is that then, when you go narrow and something else comes along in another sport that you want to, that you think might be applicable for the sport group that you're now working with, you have some sort of framework. You have some sort of frame of reference to come from to say you know what? Here's how I'm actually going to apply this in this new sport, where the intensity might be slightly different or the demands are different, or the limiting factors might actually be different, or even just the way that intervention is going to have an effect on somebody actually is actually different. So I think that first point that you mentioned of like being broad is extremely important.
Speaker 1:Now we get to the timeframe. So three to three to five years, that's a lot of repetition, that's a lot of hours to be quote unquote, stuck in this initial, I'm going to say beginner phase, and people are going to get mad at me that coach five years still a beginner.
Speaker 1:I don't know what else you want to call it.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I mean I don't think that it's terribly long, I mean we can say that now, though.
Speaker 2:Well, physicians are not going to say that a coach has the same education level etc as a physician, but they've a four year residency before you're, you know, out from under serious supervision and things like that. I mean, you're a good coach. Ratio is probably 30 to 40 athletes at a time. So when we say, how many repetitions do you have, you haven't really coached that many people. If you keep an athlete for a year or you keep an athlete for nine months or something like that, so you end up with, okay, a full load of 40 athletes and your turn is at nine months or something like that, so maybe you've coached 50 athletes within one year. You've only worked with 50 people. That's really not a lot.
Speaker 2:And how much progress did you get with those athletes? How many things went wrong with those athletes? Again, it's not the value of can you write a training plan and can you analyze a power file or a elevation profile or something. It's how many athletes got sick and had to come back. How many athletes got injured and you had to walk them through it? How many people got totally derailed and you had to figure something out? How many people were on the verge of divorce and you had to. You know, have the come to Jesus conversation with them about this isn't as important as your marriage is. Go home. You know those are the real life coaching conversations that it takes a lot of time to get to those conversations with people.
Speaker 1:It's a lot. And, once again, speaking from personal experience, I always view like the apex of everything not to not to bias is too much from an elite perspective, but I've always viewed the apex of everything is working with elite athletes, because the margin for performance is just so small. I'm really lucky that I did not get my hands on any elite athletes until I was like 10 years into my career, with good mentorship and doing it as a full time professional and going through all the other things that I've kind of like gone through before. I'm really lucky that it took me that long before somebody kind of barely popped the gate open and said, yeah, you might be ready for this coop, just still don't screw it up. Right. And this is me doing it in the first three to five years of my career, or three to four years of my career where certainly the worst case scenario for a lot of people is early success.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know that you happen to be, and this happens, I think, a lot with the elite athlete who becomes a coach, because their buddies are the elite athletes, so they get an early crop of promising emerging athletes who go. I want to work with a guy that won X, y and Z. The problem is the coach doesn't have enough experience to really do much with that athlete and if the athletes are emerging elites themselves, that they're getting again. You can I hate to say it this way, but you can mess up a lot and those athletes are still going to be emerging elites because they're just that good. Where the rubber hits the road, so to speak, is taking somebody who is not that talented or is at a different stage in their career or is really going through some stuff that could derail them, and do you have the skill set to be able to help that athlete?
Speaker 1:We're going to derail this conversation already, which is fine by me. We'll only get like halfway through our outline. But since you mentioned it, one of the phenomenons that we actually do see in the space are elite athletes becoming coaches. Is there a different career arc for them? And the reason I mentioned that is because you've mentioned one kind of permutation of that. Right, you have an elite athlete kind of in the twilight or when they're kind of ending their career, they want to become a coach and it's a natural fit for them to work with elite athletes because of that kind of like recognition, even though it might not be an economic fit.
Speaker 2:We can probably won't talk about that later.
Speaker 1:But we also see another version of this and I see, I think we see this a lot in trail and ultra running and it's very specific because of just the economy that these elite athletes are kind of going through, where it's very hard for a lot of them to earn a full time living just off of their running, and so they have to do something else. Some of them take up a job within their sponsor. They're kind of like a product rep, so to speak, or the help with special product projects, and they kind of do things like that. Other ones choose to coach and I get it. I mean it's a really easy gig for them because they get a lot of their like almost kind of fan base into it. And don't take, don't anybody take me out of context on this, I'm just kind of pointing out what's actually there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can't blame them for it. I can't blame them for it. It's great marketing to be at the front of a race.
Speaker 1:It's great marketing, but also because they're attracting a natural fan base, the expectation for the service delivery in many but not all cases, in many cases just lower. Because you have this like oh my God, I get to be coached by whatever athlete. There's a little bit of stardom or kind of like fandom in it. But I'm wondering if you have it like a any sort of like commentary to offer specifically on these elite athletes that are taking on athletes that are becoming coaches at any kind of like part of their career, and should they view this arc that we're going to finish at some point during those podcasts. Should they view that arc any differently?
Speaker 2:Not necessarily any differently. I think that the they start with an advantage because they have name recognition. They have a marketing edge on the you know person who just decides coming out of an exercise physiology degree or something that doesn't have any name recognition. They have a starting advantage. But I think that the best case scenario is the elite athlete who is serious enough about it being their long-term profession that they are investing in the education component, Not just looking at it like hey, I know what worked for me and I can write a program just as easily as anybody else can, and no one's really going to know the difference, so sure I can do it.
Speaker 2:I think if it's viewed frivolously as I don't know what else to do, so I'm going to do this, that has a different scenario than somebody who says I know I have a competitive advantage from a brand perspective and I have a real, true interest in this profession. I can marry the two of those together and invest, especially the time during the latter portions of my career, my running career, to gaining the experience and the education to be a great coach. Then I think you have someone who is authentic about wanting to be a professional coach and I think one of the people that comes to mind not necessarily in running, but in in the cycling side right now is Caroline Manny. She is a French athlete, was an elite athlete in cyclocross, was coached, is coached by Jim Layman, who's one of the CTS coaches, and she has spent a pretty significant amount of time preparing herself to be a professional coach. She didn't just hang up her cycling shoes and say, hey, I'm a coach. It's been a long process.
Speaker 1:We have the same scenario with Steph Howe on the running side of things. You know, to mention somebody who's also one of our, you know, research essentials for altering co-authors, where she's an elite athlete. She's still a sponsored athlete by the North A. She still has very high aspirations for herself as a, as a competitive athlete. She's still going to do very well in kind of a number of races but has been because I personally coach her as well and I've coached her for a while she's been very slow and deliberate about becoming a coach, almost to a fault, because she, because she recognizes that she has to, you know, treat it seriously and she sees, you know, the kind of the blueprint for how I work with athletes and how I've kind of like, developed my career as well. But, similar to Caroline, she's just taken a long thoughtful road to.
Speaker 2:But to your point about it, the people who don't do it very well having a limited shelf life. Yeah, so an elite athlete is uniquely aware of the fact that they have a short shelf life in general. Their career is not going to be very long, it's not going to last them through old age, middle age, et cetera. So they have to figure out something to do after the speed is no longer there. And if they don't take the advantage of the fact that their athletic accomplishments provide a great storyline and a great marketing advantage, et cetera, and if they don't invest in creating a foundation underneath that, that notoriety piece is going to isn't going to last them very long. Not notoriety, not recognition.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know it's easy to sell that and there are business models in the in the old training world that are intentionally trying to leverage that with elite athlete name recognition or just name recognition in general, bringing them in as coaches and or as partners to develop coaching type products. Once again, I get that as a business model because I understand how much of a magnet those names are and it is very it's much easier to sell a person who has good name recognition than it is somebody who does not have name recognition in a service industry. That's just the kind of like not kind of not not fake it. However, we've always taken the approach that we want to grow our coaches. Yeah, if we have the perfect marriage of name recognition and they want to be a good coach, like we just mentioned with stuff, great, we'll take it. That's great. Win, win, win.
Speaker 1:Go out and only hire elite athletes or recognizable names and build the business upon that, and I think that that's actually to stand up on my soapbox just a little bit. I actually do think that that is a critical business kind of business structure compare and contrast that you can look across a coaching group like ours and then a coaching group like Chaskey, which they have very deliberately grown their business through coaches that are either current or former elite athletes, and they don't make any bones about it. That's their whole marketing strategy. They think that those elite athletes produce better coaches and that's why they're kind of like only hiring them and we're not going to adjudicate that here. But that is a very kind of like clear, like compare and contrast between ways to actually grow a business. Okay, so we don't get derailed too much on the elite side, let's go back to the coaching arc. So, after the initial education and repetition phase, coach enters a growth phase.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's the growth phase is definitely the sexiest phase in the career arc, kind of a thing in the sense that this is where people have enough experience and expertise to really call themselves an expert somewhere and narrow down and say this is where I want to make my mark, so to speak, and they have enough business experience that they start thinking of creating a product or writing a book or creating an app or something along those lines, where they're doing something that could potentially either just benefit their business very well and move it forward, or something that can really change the sport entirely, like it's kind of game changing type of innovations. It's a very innovative phase and I think, when you ask about the duration of these phases, this is also the one that can be very quick or quite long and it really depends on the coach and what they're trying to achieve and their personality and probably mostly their ability to handle stress or their ability to accept stress. Your schedule, for instance, between you and me you and I started in this profession at the same, basically the same time. I cannot and will not do what you do, because I don't want to travel as much as you do. I don't handle the stress that, the stresses that you take on and are not stresses that I am well suited for.
Speaker 2:I've learned those lessons the hard way and I recognize that I can't replicate what you do, because we're not built the same way and so our growth phases were very different. I wrote a bunch of books in a period of time and that was probably my growth phase, but it also was. I wasn't traveling, I was home, I was by myself, I was shuttered in an office like that worked for me. We're traveling all over the world and going to races and talking at symposiums and creating new products and all of those things. That's your growth phase and it's a very different kind of process and it's very personality based to me, I just came up with a perfect example for this as we're talking as another one of our colleagues.
Speaker 1:That growth phase doesn't have to be the end result of that can sometimes be something that is adjacent to coaching. So you gave yourself as an example. You became somebody who communicates for coaches. That's an adjacent thing to coaching. Best example I can think of is our mutual friend, somebody that we both love very much, as Lindsey G elites.
Speaker 1:She started with CTS, kind of you know, just after me. We were colleagues together and then I supervised and air quotes her for a long period of time, although she took me to school way more times than I took her to school way, way, way more times than I took her to school. She began this growth phase into moving into our physiology lab and became kind of the go-to person within that kind of sphere of our business services where she was doing all the physiology services for all the athletes who came in elite athletes, you know, running athletes, cycling athletes, triathletes, normal athletes, you kind of name it. She then went to the USOPC and she's now one of the head physiologists there and is still in that growth phase there because she has people who are, who have more experience than her, who have been in that Olympic system for longer periods of time and kind of seen more Olympic cycles, and she very much is still growing within that kind of within that system.
Speaker 1:But it's a great example of a coach who is a really good coach, right, getting into an area of specificity that suits their personality, which is something that you mentioned being in the lab versus being a coach I think suits Lindsay's personality. She would absolutely I'm not speaking for her, she would agree with that. And then she took it another step further by getting kind of like out of the commercial space, so to speak, and going into just the elite athlete space, which probably suits your personality even more. So just working with just the Olympians, just kind of the elite athletes and things like that, and we see that a lot with coaches and I think that's a cool progression to actually look at. Like you said, that's the exciting part, right.
Speaker 2:Right, and there was a period of my career where I was not happy with the idea of coaches developing and then leaving. Cts, for instance. I felt like we had invested in these people and then they were going and I was territorial about those individuals, and it took me a long time to recognize and actually Chris was key in helping me to recognize it that we were developing coaches so that they could go and take leadership positions in the profession other places, and there was nothing wrong with that. The fact that we played a role in the professional development of a great sports scientist who's working at the USOPC is great. And even the people who went and left and built their own coaching businesses, which again now you're getting into the idea of you're growing your own competitors, which was very bothersome for a long time.
Speaker 2:At some level, though, it was that we developed their professional expertise to the point where they became entrepreneurial. They weren't entrepreneurs at the beginning. They didn't have the skill sets for it, they didn't have the expertise for it. They outgrew our system, they outgrew the environment that we had had for them, and they developed or found their entrepreneurial voice and said I think I wanna go out and do this on my own Great. I mean, you and I are still friends with a lot of those people who have gone and done that. It took me a while to be okay with it, but now that I am, I celebrate those people and I would love to have them back in the fold sometimes, but I'm really happy to see what they're accomplishing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, many times they do come back in the fold and either direct or In some way shape or form.
Speaker 1:Yeah, either direct or kind of like roundabout ways, and I've kind of the same way. Initially it might have been a little bit too like territorial. Take it personally. Territorial is not the right word, just take it personally. Oh, I was like, okay, yeah right, fair enough, fair enough. But I'll take.
Speaker 1:Going back to our earlier conversation, ronnie, earlier part of our conversation, I'll take that competition 10 times a day versus the competition that delivers bad service always because you know they're not cannibalizing the audience, right, that's what I kind of keep coming back to. It's like you know what. You wanna go out and technically quote-unquote compete with us and you're delivering a great product, I'm not gonna have an issue with that. If you're gonna come into the space and compete with us and have a shitty product and kick people out of the marketplace, that's when I still get territorial is not the right word I just get pissed off because once again, I view it as a kind of a limited audience. But I agree, ma'am, growth phase is awesome. I personally giving a preview to the next phase in the elder emphasizing elder intentionally, just so you can poke fun at me at some point the elder mentor phase.
Speaker 1:I love seeing coaches go through their growth phase because it is one where they kinda, once they get over the monotony of just coaching a lot of athletes and they start thinking about things really differently. I love seeing that and that's kind of why I like coaching. I love seeing that growth in such a rapid secession. And so, like a parent, I like seeing that in athletes. I like seeing that in people as well, but it does take a while. It's like almost opposite If you think about it athletes you see all the development really early on. You see very little development later on. It comes into a different flavor. With coaches it's almost the opposite. You see very little development early on because they need to be in the grind and then they get to a certain point where they just find their niche and then that's where you see all the really cool development and I personally get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing that part of the process.
Speaker 2:I get a lot of satisfaction out of it. However, I think one of the things that I've definitely grown to recognize is it comes at a gigantic cost. The growth phase takes a significant toll on people, and some more than others, but in the sense that some people may only really be able to push at that level and give that intensity and that effort level for a couple of years, five years, three years, whatever. Some people are able to sustain it for 10 plus years. But I don't think that we have the kind of profession that is predictable in the sense of saying, okay, you have entered managerial level two and you're now gonna be here for the next 12 years and then you move into senior management.
Speaker 2:I think this growth phase for coaches is very independent in terms of being highly variable, based on the individual and what they're trying to achieve and what they're pushing for and from a if. The advice to coaches in that sense is be careful about comparison to other coaches and what they're doing and, if they're in there, what phase they're in versus you and don't drive yourself into the ground. I think that we've seen coaches do that where they've just tried to hang on to that phase too long and it destroyed other parts of their lives. Yeah, 100%.
Speaker 1:I'll leave a link in the show notes of this, but somebody had on the podcast a while ago. Andy Kirkland talks about this a lot within his social channels, kind of from the perspective of UK athletics and some of the sports systems within the UK. I'll leave a link to the podcast interview that I did with him which touches on some of this but also some of his social handles that you guys can glean some good content from that. I think it'll definitely be interesting to that last point of burnout and making sure that coaches have a healthy relationship with their work and with their athletes and with their colleagues. So now, if the coaches managed it correctly, they go through their growth phase and eventually they realize, hey, I'm gonna get burnt if I keep this pace up. I don't know. Slow down into the elder mentor phase.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you wanna put it, but you can take it away from here.
Speaker 1:I just find the title very comical. As you can appreciate, that's because you're uncomfortable being called an elder. That's true, I'm not that old.
Speaker 2:I think that it's not so much that it's a fatigue-based transition, so much as it is a realization at some point that the simple acts, the coaching, comes down to repeating simple things over and over again for athletes. And it isn't about the shiny objects. And I've had this conversation with coaches over and over and over again and kind of fought against the establishment to some extent within CTS even because I'm the media guy, I'm the guy that needs to come up with topics for blog posts and podcasts and whatever else. And so I'd be looking at the hey, can we talk about this new supplement? Can we talk about that new wearable? Can we make a new workout, a different kind of intervals set that is more fun or gimmicky or whatever?
Speaker 2:And I would go to the coaches and they'd look at me like, no, just do the simple stuff, Just three by 10 steady states. I'm like, yeah, I can't go back out to the market with three by 10 steady states again. But from a professional development standpoint I think the benefit of that is eventually coaches realize that it really is the simple stuff and it's the fundamentals, and they strip away all the glitzy, gimmicky stuff and at that point they're potentially less entrepreneurial because they realize they're gonna stick to what works and what's proven and unfortunately or fortunately what's proven is pretty darn simple.
Speaker 1:You know it's funny, I was giving you grief for this earlier, so I might as well bring that grief to the public now. We had Steve Magnus's and Brad Studelberg's like MO of just like, stick to the fundamentals. The fundamentals aren't sexy. We had that like 10 years before they did, but we didn't have the genius to make it into a like a like a like a MO or a product or a service or a book or kind of like anything like that. We would have really had our thinking hats on. We would have been able to come up with that product much, much earlier.
Speaker 1:It is really refreshing to see a lot of the content kind of come back to the fundamentals and get and have the spotlight on that, as opposed to the bright, shiny objects, because it's been something that we've been, you know, much to your dismay at points. We've been kind of like preaching for years and to have them be in the limelight now, not as a byproduct of us but as a byproduct of other people, kind of doing a good job of communicating. I kind of like really revel in that. I like to see it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, it's the it's difficult. It's definitely difficult for you, as you were talking last in your last podcast about the business of coaching. It's a difficult component from the business of coaching side too, because you're competing against people in their growth phase who are brand new. What behind the year? Not brand new they're if they're in the growth phase, but they're entrepreneurial.
Speaker 2:They're very enthusiastic about new technologies and whatever else that they're coming up with, and when you're the person who's preaching simplicity up against that, it can be difficult to not seem like you're just the old curmudgeon kind of thing. And so it's definitely a place where you have to figure out how to communicate it well so that the consumer because at the end of the day you can be a great coach, but if nobody's willing to, nobody knows you're there and can't relate to you then you're not going to have any athletes.
Speaker 1:I want to spend a little bit of time talking about this like final transition point, because you mentioned earlier that there's a high reasonable chance, or there's a high susceptibility for people getting burnt out in the growth phase, because it's exciting, it requires a lot of energy, it requires a lot of focus, but you're going to burn the candle at both ends and the world's kind of your oyster, so to speak, and there's not a magic switch that gets flipped. If I kind of take it from a personal perspective, I was almost like thrust in that position right. I was literally promoted into it from one day to the next. I'm coaching one day and I'm growing one day, and then I'm responsible for coaches and kind of mentoring in the next day. It was kind of literally like that.
Speaker 1:That doesn't happen with everybody because in today's gig economy there are a lot of sole proprietors and things like that. So what have you seen out there in terms of this transition of okay, I'm going along and coaching, I've become an expert in the field, I've gone through this kind of like growth phase, I'm still in coaching and now I'm kind of taking more and more on the responsibility of mentoring and managing other coaches. How does that get facilitated?
Speaker 2:I think it gets facilitated Again. I don't think people are doing making that transition purely out of fatigue. I don't think it's a. They've burned themselves out and that's what's triggering the transition. I think that they accomplish what their main thrust is They've grown a business to a certain level, they've gotten a product to a certain level, et cetera, and then they start to look at what's next, and that what's next is typically not. I wanna start from scratch on another aspect of entrepreneurial coaching. It becomes the legacy component or the leadership within either advocacy groups or the NGBs or local government or something that's bigger than themselves and that's not at odds with the entrepreneurial piece. But it's difficult for someone to be hyper focused on new product development and innovation at the same time that they're focused on either call it legacy or just the bigger picture of the profession itself.
Speaker 1:Well, and I once again kind of making it personal and coming back to it for my own journey, who? I'll agree with you, as much as I hate the title, I mean the elder. I'll use the mentor phase. I like that better, I mean the elder slash mentor phase. It's one of the only areas where I can, where I still grow as a coach by being in that phase and I didn't have an appreciation for that until I actually started doing it a lot when I was responsible for a lot of coaches and I had a hands-on application of developing those coaches from the very beginning through whatever kind of like part of their journey. And I kind of view the there's like three buckets of how I get better as a coach now, which are very, very different than how I got better as a coach early, which is mentorship and reading and being in the grind right, Coaching 40 athletes, just really having my nose to the grindstone and just doing it. Now I get better as a coach. I serve my athletes better by mentoring other coaches. That's a huge bucket.
Speaker 1:Doing the podcast, that is a huge bucket and is very serendipitous and I'm not taking a kind of a lick of credit for it.
Speaker 1:I did not anticipate that, but just because I have this professional network now that I can kind of like go back to and ask them questions and sometimes hire them.
Speaker 1:Sometimes I hire them as special counsel for particular athlete projects and just general education and things like that. But preparing for the podcast because I'm always talking to people that are smarter than me except for this one, I'm always talking to people that are smarter than me I have to prepare for those podcasts quite meticulously. And then the third bucket is just my own reading and research and things like that. But that one is really small actually, because the greater your knowledge base expands, when those pieces of research actually come out, yeah sure you realize what you don't know or there's a little bit of a wrinkle on things, but really it's not like there's not any seismic shifts or anything like that that are coming out in rapid fire. Secession. It's really those first two buckets the mentorship piece and then this podcast piece where I've really honestly grown as a coach the most and I'm absolutely better able to serve my athletes as a coach, having a foothold in both of those components.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would add to that from your standpoint, the there's the book component or the content component, as well as the USCA. I think that when you decided to be active in coach development and certification, that yeah, there was probably an entrepreneurial component to that, but I think there was a bigger profession, a bigger outlook to the future of the profession at that point than just there's money to be made in certifying coaches.
Speaker 1:I mean I have to have all cylinders hit. When I look at a project like that, I have to like it. I have to think that there's an economic component and I have to think that it's going to serve my coaching and my athletes better. If I hit on all those cylinders, then it's usually a win. If one of those is missing, it's almost always a pass. And I get things served up to me. Not to sound too braggadocious, but I get things served up to me on a weekly basis and I'm constantly evaluating it through that lens. Right, does it serve me better? Does it serve my athletes, am I gonna get better from it and is there an economic incentive for it? If I can make all those melds together, then it's usually a pretty good opportunity. But if something is missing, it's not gonna make me a better coach, right? Or it's not gonna serve the community or whatever component is missing. It's usually a pass.
Speaker 2:Well, and that gets to one of the other things that was in that piece about being careful about sponsorships and partnerships, because I think too many coaches, one risk that coaches take is that they don't think as analytically about the relationships and the partnerships and sponsorships that they take on. They're not looking at it through that kind of lens of who's it serving and what's gonna happen when that partnership maybe goes away, or what words are you using to describe the partner and the sponsor and the product? I'm not saying that. I know that you have taken the stance in the podcast and other places that there is no sponsorship here, there are no paid ads, et cetera. And I don't necessarily think that everybody has to go to that level, but I do think that they should at least be careful or cognizant about how they approach sponsorships.
Speaker 2:It's different than an athlete taking on a sponsor or a partner. It's different than a race taking on a sponsor or whatever. You're a nutrition, sports nutrition company that sponsors a race and has sampling, essentially at aid stations. Okay, there's no good or bad ramification to the races, to the events, reputation, by being with one nutrition partner this year and another one next year. Sponsors have changed. Different stuff appears at the eight stations? No big deal.
Speaker 2:Athletes okay, we all know that they get sponsored on an endorsement basis. The difficulty with coaches is we're supposed to be expert advisors to athletes. We're supposed to have the athlete's best interests at heart. You can say that you're supported by a, let's say, a sports nutrition company, because the way that I would look at that is saying this is a good product, this is a valid, healthy, well-made, high-quality product. I would stop short, ideally, of having to say this is the best, eat nothing else kind of product, because you can't move on from that. What are you going to say? That when that partnership goes away, the next one comes along, that that one's equally best?
Speaker 1:then what was the previous one. They're coming too fast. It doesn't really work. It's only one of us.
Speaker 2:And then if you repeat that multiple times over this course of 20 years, it just becomes meaningless. I think that companies now are more realistic about that as well. I think that they recognize that with this proliferation of influencers etc. That they have less of an expectation of somebody just creating some blind superlative recommendation or endorsement of a product, as opposed to saying it's a high-quality product. But I'm not going to say that you should use nothing else than this.
Speaker 1:I don't think I've ever told anybody this, but deciding not to take sponsors is actually one of the easiest decisions I've ever made.
Speaker 2:It's easy to make because they're hard to maintain.
Speaker 1:Well, no, no, no, no, no. It has everything to do with what I just mentioned in terms of the framework that I use when taking on any sort of business deal or partnership. So let's think about this for a second. Some nutrition company. I hate to pick on the nutrition companies, but it's kind of easy.
Speaker 1:It's easy, sorry, sorry. I love a lot of the nutrition people out there, but come on, let's be honest, it is easy to pick on. They approach me and they say, hey, we want to give you X to promote your podcast. Okay, let's go through my checklist. Does this help my athletes? Well, no, it's actually worse for them because I've got to take time out of my day to do the deal, make the read, do what. That takes time away from me coaching athletes. So it's a negative. It's not even a positive. It's negative. Does it make me a better coach? No, absolutely not. Does it serve the community better? No, absolutely not, and I'm not interested in chasing around the economy. So not only does it not hit all four of those things that I just mentioned earlier, it doesn't hit any of them and some of them are actually negative. So that's why I'm saying it's an easy decision for me to not do that, because I have a framework for which I take partnerships and other deals on, and if I go through that framework in a logical fashion for a podcast sponsorship, it's just, once again, it's a very, very easy decision. There are a lot of product manufacturers that have approached me about sponsoring the podcast that I like their products. A lot of them most of them do, 80% of them I like their products. I don't like them any better than any other ones, and it kind of in most cases. But because I have this framework that I go through to evaluate those types of things once again, it makes it easy. Even though I actually like, I might like the people, I might like the product, the company behind them, all those things it's not a matter of do I like it or not. It doesn't make me a better coach, it doesn't make my athletes better. Does it serve the community? Am I interested in the economy? It doesn't hit any of those. So it's a quite an easy decision. But then I can, because I've done that, I can actually look at the space and actually have a message for all the coaches out there that have podcasts or other platforms and they take these sponsorships on.
Speaker 1:To your point, let me kind of summarize it a little bit differently Counsel is your currency. That's what you're in. You give athletes advice, you prescribe them training, you tell them to take a gel at 30 minutes of race, kind of whatever. You're providing counsel to athletes and they're renumerating you for those services. Fundamentally, that's what you're doing. Counsel is your currency. If that is your currency, you want to make that as uncorruptible as possible. You have to hold that to the highest standards, because that is ultimately what you are dealing with. Right Is counsel, and by taking on an endorsement that has even the perception even with products that you actually like that has the perception that that counsel can somehow get corrupted in some way, shape or form.
Speaker 1:Now, I'm not saying that coaches and or athletes that take on partnerships do so and don't like the products. There are many of them out there that love the products that they endorse, and I know many of them. I coach many of them. However, there are just as many of them not more that don't like them at all, and to the public it's almost impossible to perceive the difference because they all kind of have the same playbook. We're going to do this on Instagram. Here's this 20% discount code, this, that and the other, and when I look at that landscape, it just kind of. I just come back to the exact same thing every single time. I just don't want to play ball, like I would say. Four or five times a month, people ask me to advertise on the podcast. It's always known. It's an easy note.
Speaker 2:Now I'm not as much of a purist on that standpoint as you are. I understand you and I have talked about it multiple times and I certainly get where you come from. I do think that you have a don't take this the wrong way but you have a little bit of a privileged position because of the reputation and the skill level and the level of professional, the level you've reached in the profession. Where you're, you don't need it. There are people, if you were trying to figure out how to pay your mortgage and had a smaller coaching business and some of the where you had some other challenges that were more financially based and you wanted to say, hey, if I can, if I work with this company and I get a couple of these endorsements, I can stay in business and continue to work with these athletes. Otherwise I have to close the doors.
Speaker 2:I don't begrudge coaches for doing those things and I don't necessarily, as I said, I don't take a puritanical kind of viewpoint on partnerships and sponsorships. I just hope that a the conversation with the partners and with the sponsors can happen authentically, where the both parties can look at it and say we know what we're doing here. We know that we're endorsing a product, we know that we're using your audience to promote it, et cetera. You're going to do it in an authentic way. You're not going to say that you like a product when you don't. You're not going to take money to promote a product that doesn't work all of those kinds of things. I think if it's done transparently and authentically, then it's the right choice for some people in some circumstances.
Speaker 1:Yeah, once again, I get that component. I get trying to make ends meet or even growing your income through pieces of that. I just once again it's not to sound too arrogant it's just not material to me. If I had a huge podcasting platform and I was getting millions of downloads and it was material, maybe you can say I think about that a little bit different, maybe I don't. But one of the reasons I can say that and ready this because we've worked together on these partnerships for a long period of time is I actually have been in the position where we do have to make ends meet by bringing in a partner and I've scoured the earth for those partnerships and been the person to help bring those to light for CTS as a company when I was a full-time employee and partially responsible for this stuff.
Speaker 1:Some of those partnerships were great. We loved it, we love the product. We authentically believe in. Some of them we helped develop, like the Powerbar drink mix and the Powerbar recovery mix kind of back in the day, where we were not just a small part, we were a critical component of bringing that product to light and our logo was actually on the packaging. Other partnerships were garbage and there's a whole range of things in between. That, once again, it's kind of having lived through that experience. It's very difficult for the user to kind of discern between those. I empathize with your statement of sometimes you just got to do to make ends meet, because that's like literally what I was trying to do to try to keep the company growing and flourishing and things like that is catalyzing these partnerships, of which they were always varying degrees of how good or not, how I don't know how much they fit Right, I guess, is the better way to put it.
Speaker 2:I mean, I feel pretty confident that we didn't do anything that was egregiously poor product or something like that. We probably made some partnerships that were at the neutral end of kind of yeah, it probably doesn't make that much of a difference in performance and things like that, and it was still a partnership that we made. But there was definitely enough pushback of if it really was not going to, if it was a bad thing and we were going to put athletes at risk or we were going to be selling them snake oil, then yeah, we definitely we walked away from plenty of those. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I walked away from a few of those as well, much to the chagrin of other people that would yell at me to make those deals work. But anyway, those are things that we have to rehash here. Okay, so we're on this theme. We already jumped to it from a previous conversation, but the meat and potatoes of this article, of which this endorsement piece of it is one component that we can rehash at a certain point, if you want to, is how to actually remain relevant in 10 years. So we have this backdrop of the coaching arc, right, coaches go through a prototypical development phases as their career goes along.
Speaker 1:What can they do to proactively kind of safeguard themselves? That's really the lens that I look at it through. They're kind of safeguarding their career, the career path that they've chosen for the next decade, and you have highlighted several areas here, and I'll really, one of which is the partnership thing that we've already discussed. I'll let you take it from here, like what are some of the highlights of the things that the coaches can do to really be relevant in the next decade?
Speaker 2:Well, one of them was part of the career arc which was just become an authority in some place, something. And you have to start with that broad base of knowledge before you hone in. But at some point I think it is useful to become an authority in some way, shape or form within your, within the profession, so that you can differentiate yourself and so that you can go further and deeper. You can't be, you can't know everything about everything. So at some point, finding that interest for you and sinking yourself into this is what I'm going to do.
Speaker 2:You, for instance, you were a generalist coach for the beginning portion of your career. You coach Ironman triathletes and runners and cyclists and everybody else, and then you made the transition of no, this is the area where I'm going to become an expert, and that changed the trajectory of your, of your coaching career. And I think that, similarly, people need to do that, and it doesn't have to be that you're headed to the elite level, it doesn't. You know that we have some friends who are mountain bike skills coaches and they're not. They're not going to coach world champions and things like that. From that standpoint, they're working with youth and they're working with development riders, but they are really, really good at it and there's no. That person has as much value to the value to the profession as the person who's coaching the next Olympian. They're just at a different place within the profession.
Speaker 1:Shout out to our colleague, jane Marshall, who's a great example of that. Where she works with, you know, mountain bike athletes mainly female mountain bike athletes that are not elite athletes and she's fantastic at it. Everybody loves her just super high retention rates. She gets a great results out of those athletes. They're always asking her to do duo races with her and things like that almost serve the point where her schedule is like too, you know, booked out as a mother of two and also as a career professional coach. But she serves as a great example who? Somebody who's reached this kind of specialization phase of their career and has learned a lot, yeah, josh Whitmore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, josh Whitmore is another one right Mountain bike skills coach and has not had to and, once again, for whatever reason. The end of that or the latter part of those phases doesn't necessarily have to be. I guess I would be the prototype for which is work starting, starting or maybe almost exclusively working with elite athletes.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 2:I think the other big component of it is being a coach that other coaches, other professionals want to work with, and that this comes back to the idea of safeguarding your reputation and safeguarding your, your, your attitude towards others.
Speaker 2:And it even gets into one of the other components, which is that idea of not getting territorial around athletes. If you're it's a small community I mean the coaching communities are small and if you're somebody who the people that you're currently viewing as competitors will eventually be colleagues at some, you're going to meet each other somewhere down the road. You're going to meet each other at races, you're going to meet each other at an NGP conference. A person that was a rival coach, so to speak, is going to become the national coaching director at your, at your NGP, at some point. So something like that is going to be the the environment. And if you've, if you have been adversarial your entire career, the avenues available to you are going to start closing. Now I'm not saying you have to be a pushover and you have to make everybody happy and you got to be a people pleaser and you can't have opinions of your own and everything like that.
Speaker 2:At some point in in in your profession you're going to encounter everybody that you've encountered before, like it's a small circle very small community and you want to have a reputation of being somebody that they can work with, that they respect enough to say that they're willing to work with you or they're willing to have their athletes work with you. Maybe your coaching trajectory is that you become the coaching director for something, or you're at the OPC, in the physiology lab or something. And if you, if your early career was adversarial and you were kind of just not somebody anybody wanted to be around, or the coaches that are out there still working with athletes, going to say, yeah, go work with that person, go be directed by that person, go be tested by that person, they're not going to. So the avenues and the opportunities that you are afforded later in your career are going to dwindle based on how you conduct yourself early on. Can?
Speaker 1:I bring up an interesting element that I think I don't know if it's specific to alternating or not. So maybe you can kind of bring in the cycling side, since it's been a while since I've had a touch point in there. But you're right, it's a very small community but also we tend to take things really personally and I've kind of noticed this and I probably know why you're laughing. I've kind of noticed this because you know, you know me, I've. I do not shy away from criticizing other things in the kind of in the coaching world, and one of the reasons for that is because when I came into coaching, people were highly critical of me. But another reason is just that I don't ever take it personally, I just take it professionally, and I would hope that other people take it professionally. So kind of give you a great example.
Speaker 1:So Jeff Browning, who was on the podcast last week. He and I could not be on further ends of the spectrum from a new nutrition perspective. We could not, and he and I could disagree about stuff all day. We're never going to get mad at each other because we don't take it personally. I can bring him on this podcast, we're going to have a great time I can go see him at a race, we're going to have a great time. We don't ever have any like friction.
Speaker 1:I've had that same interaction with other coaches but because, for whatever reason, there's a I don't know some sort of like personal tack to it I don't know whether it's my fault or other coaches fault or combination of whatever that that that that same relationship doesn't, doesn't kind of exist where we can kind of like coexist in the same circles, and I don't know whether that's like unique to the ultra running world or whether that is just something that everybody can kind of take less and from that, whenever there is that out there in the space, their points of disagreement or whatever. It's not personal, it's professional.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the difficulty is, if you feel passionately about your stance in certain areas of the profession, it's difficult to not have those lines blur it. Being able to stay objective about that I think can be difficult. The the the why I was smiling earlier is that I've said for years that in especially coming from a cycling background, the number of business deals that didn't happen because somebody cut somebody else off in a criteria 20 years ago or the number of business deals that did happen because they were in a breakaway together 20 years ago is baffling.
Speaker 2:So there's a lesson in that somehow these grudges that that exist from bike races you know a lifetime ago still affect major business deals between large corporations and within the cycling world.
Speaker 1:That's hilarious. Okay, you mentioned one component here, and that is the don't-get-territorial over athletes. I'm going to bring up a quote from the article itself. I'm going to read this in the first person, but I want the listeners to realize that the I piece of this is actually ready. I'm going to start with this. When onboarding new athletes at CTS, we encounter some athletes who have never been coached before, but many have worked with other professional coaches in the past. The number of coaches who retain or delete an athlete's past training schedules is concerning. Here's some reasons blah blah, blah blah. That part stuck out to me because of the volume. Is the volume really? You're ready for fast talk. So it's a little bit of a different. It's obviously a different sport group, but is it concerning? I guess was the word that jumped off of the page to me.
Speaker 2:Is it really test at level Really? I originally thought this can't possibly be a real problem. Then, the more you talk to the coaches that are in the profession, the more common it became Within cycling specifically, but not necessarily.
Speaker 2:Running coaches have said the same thing, triathlon coaches have said the same thing. Triathlon coaches sometimes even more so the whole squad thing plays a role within triathlon, where they have these training groups and there's some feeling that there's a secret sauce within the training group and they're very territorial about that sense of there being a secret sauce. So, yeah, I was surprised by it, but it's come up so many times that I can't deny that there's something there. I think there's a sense you want to believe as a professional or as there's an ego component to it. You want to believe that you're doing something special. You want to believe that what you're providing differentiates you from another coach. So people get territorial about oh, I don't want to give my program away, I don't want to let somebody know what I'm doing.
Speaker 2:And I think part of reaching that mentor-elder sort of phase of coaching career is realizing that no, really there isn't that much different, especially in the training plan and the data. There's differences in how you talk to an athlete compared to how I talk to an athlete. There's differences in how we're going to motivate them at an aid station. There's differences in how we're going to get somebody through a tough time. All of those things. Yes, there are some significant differences, but the structure of your intervals, whether or not the person got a rest day after seven days or after 10 days, like that's not going to make the difference. And letting somebody else know that or the next coach understand what you did, they're not going to be able to replicate it anyway, because it isn't the plan that's working with the athlete, it's the coach working with the athlete.
Speaker 1:I'm going to give two perspectives of this from two different points of my coaching career that I think are really important. So a lot of people don't know this, but very early on in the day, when TrainingPeaks was just booting up and RemoteBase and Endurance Coaching was just a thing, we built our own software. So our own coaches used our own software. We coached our athletes with our own software. It was all contained within the company the blue tool, the red tool yeah, we had three. Well, I had four versions, but we had very patriotic colors for our coaching tools, called the blue tool, the red tool, and then the white tool was the last one that we had. And then we ran out of patriotic colors and we had the clear tool all named for the background, kind of the background.
Speaker 1:He's laughing because of all the permutations of this. But anyway, the point with that is is I laughed through my PTSD. One of the responsibilities that really both of us had but I mean I had this and Jim Layman, another one of our colleagues, had this as well is we would interface with the software engineers. So none of us were software engineers, but we were coaches and we were trying to communicate to them because it was a new thing for everybody how we wanted everything to look. And I'll never forget this.
Speaker 1:One of our software engineers came up to us and said well, what happens when an athlete quits? This is once again, this is how early it was. We didn't even have the stuff developed. We were moving from word documents and spreadsheets into technology. What happens when the athlete quits? And we all kind of look at each other. We're like what do you mean? What do they? They go away, they cancel their contract. Like we don't understand.
Speaker 1:The basis of the question and the genesis of that question is is what happens to everything that we have put into this tool once the athlete quits and stops paying us? And we all looked at each other for like a nanosecond and said well, the athlete has access to it for forever. It's theirs, they paid for it, it's a service that they paid for. They get to retain whatever is in there the training files and the prescription and the coaching comments and the puritization and the workout structure and all that other stuff. They kind of keep it for forever.
Speaker 1:And the software engineers were looking at it from kind of a pragmatic standpoint like do we need to build a legacy model? Essentially and that's gonna take a little bit more time and energy and money to build to make sure that they have access to this after the fact, after we kind of shut their coaching account down, how do they actually access it? But we are taking it from a coaching standpoint, meaning we want the athlete to have access to all that stuff in perpetuity. We want that to happen because it's good for the athletes. And it was unquestionable unquestionable that that was going to be the answer, even though it was gonna cost us more time, effort, money, software engineering, the product was gonna get delayed, like all those things that happen when you're now like having redundancy within a system. It was unquestionable that that's what we're gonna do. So that was my very first exposure to this concept of what happens.
Speaker 2:But there was another phase of that. Well, hold on. There was another consideration of that. Sure, there was the financial component too, of they're no longer paying us for it. Do we have a, is there a fee, to access that information and perpetuity? Or have we provided them intellectual property that we are now giving away or not retaining?
Speaker 1:Sure, and that's what I meant Like is there now that they're not paying, should they still have access to this? And once again the answer to that was unequivocally yes. It did not take us longer than a second to kind of come up with that decision and then we had to have all of the mechanisms afterwards To actually kind of follow through with that. So that was the first kind of exposure was really more in a mechanical sense versus like what's gonna happen when this actually does happen. We worked through that and honestly, like through the first part of my coaching career, I had very few iterations of where I had to kind of work through this because it was so new, right, Like there weren't a lot of coaches out there, there weren't a lot of athletes kind of transferring coaches, and I didn't have to excuse me, manage it all that much. Then you fast forward, like maybe a decade later and I very first started working with some of the elite ultra runners and the very first time I encountered this was actually with an elite ultra runner. Athlete was transferring for another coach to me and the entirety of their program was wiped out All of the prescription, all the coaches notes. It was done in a spreadsheet. The athlete did not have access to it. They immediately removed the athlete's access to it and I asked the athlete hey, can you go back to this coach and ask for it back? And the answer was no. So clearly it was not a accident or anything like that. You know something kind of like baked into it and I wanted it kind of selfishly for the athlete because they had a race coming up. I wanted to look at the previous training data to see what had worked and what hadn't worked. And sure, I have access to the files and I can always upload all the files in WKO and upload all the files and training peaks. But I wanted to see what the prescription actually was and I wanted to see what the coach's notes were, because it adds really valuable context to what has worked and what wasn't working and the whole history of that training process. So it's kind of appalled because I didn't. You know, I felt like the athlete was intentionally getting hamstrung, because any coach that kind of knows their salt knows how impactful previous training and the prescription of previous training can actually be to prescribing something in the future. And so what I immediately did after I asked the athlete to reach out to the coach and the coach said no.
Speaker 1:As I went to Dirk Freel and Gear Fisher, who are the co-founders of training peaks, who work through this over many, many, many more iterations than we actually do, many more because they have so many coaches on their platforms and things like that and I asked them two reasons or two things. One is why would a coach do this? And two, is there any legal reason at all that a coach would want to hold on to this information? And their answers were very sustained. They said first off, coaches normally do this when they're trying to be nefarious, when they're trying to intentionally hamstring an athlete's progression by withholding their previous training information. Most cases not in all cases, but in most cases they're doing it nefariously and that to me, is quite telling. Right, they know right, and we should all recognize that this is a handicap on an athlete going forward.
Speaker 1:The same thing I asked them is is there any sort of legal standing into why a coach would have to retain that? Are they subjecting themselves to some sort of repercussion down the road, Like gave somebody the wrong prescription, or whether they're like absolutely no, there's no legal reason why a coach would have to hang on to that there's no intellectual property involved on it, kind of on and on and on. And the reason I took that approach for going to the experts to actually kind of like figure that out is I wanted to figure out what the actual real deal was behind it. And so since that point in time, it still irritates the bejesus out of me when I continue to get athletes in CTS not just me personally continues to get athletes where some component or the entirety of all of their training history has been deleted, and I want people out there to know that there's no reason for this, there's no legal reason for this and in most cases when coaches are doing this, they're doing this intentionally to hamstring the athlete, and that is unfair to everybody.
Speaker 2:Now maybe I'm naive or that I choose to give people more of a benefit of the doubt type thing. I chalked it up to more insecurity than a purposeful act to hinder or hamper the athlete. I looked at it and I'm not saying I'm right but I looked at it as the athlete is leaving.
Speaker 2:They've decided for some reason to move on. And if I'm not feeling very secure about my skill as a coach and what I've done, I don't really want somebody looking over my shoulder. I don't want that next coach to go. What the hell are you doing? Well, I don't understand why your other coach was doing it Like they don't want their mistakes to be visible to others.
Speaker 2:And I think one of the things that we did over the course with CTS and the mentorship program was we removed a lot of the fear of mistakes because we put people's training plans up on screens and picked them apart and told everybody yeah, you're gonna make mistakes. Part of you're not working with a machine, you're working with a human being and you're gonna have to make some leaps of faith to say I think that doing X, y and Z with the next month of training is gonna work. It might not and it might be terrible and the only way you're gonna do that through that repetition phase is to do it. But if you're not feeling secure about what you've done, it may not be that you were nefarious about it or that you were abusive about it or something like that, but you're just insecure about it and you don't necessarily want somebody picking their way through it.
Speaker 1:I think that can I interrupt you really quick? Can I interrupt you really quick already? I think that both of those can be true.
Speaker 1:to be honest with you, I think a coach can do yeah, I think a coach can both be insecure about what they were doing as well as intentionally trying to hamstring the athlete going forward.
Speaker 1:But even if they don't think this is what I'm gonna keep hammering down this point because it frigging fires me up even if the coach doesn't think that they're hamstringing their athlete by deleting all or some component of their training program and what I mean by some component is either the prescription or the feedback or the whole kit and caboodle Even if you don't realize that you are hamstringing your athlete. First off you are period period. Absolutely any coach with their salt understands that looking at previous prescription and components of the training is absolutely beneficial going forward If you don't realize that you're doing a shitty job coaching in the first place because you haven't looked at athlete's previous training to derive future training and you don't realize how powerful that can be. So from this whole element of deleting athlete's training programs stinks from top to bottom from many different aspects. At the very least it's bad coaching and at the very most you're intentionally sabotaging some component of the athlete's development, which is particularly egregious when it's an elite athlete and they're making their living at it.
Speaker 2:I'll add one more component to that, because this was created with the idea of it being a guide for coaches in their career arc. I think that one other aspect of this is, if you're gonna be a professional coach, you have to understand that athletes are gonna come and go. It's part of being a coach and part of your role in that athlete's journey is to play a role for a specific amount of time to get them from point A to point B, whatever that may be, and then to hand them off. Handing them off to another coach is part of your role. It's not they're leaving you and you feel rejected and you're a bad person now or whatever else.
Speaker 2:Your role is to ease the transition to the next person, because the next person may have something to offer that athlete that you don't. Not because they're better than you or you're worse than them or any of those kinds of things. It's just that the athlete is at a different phase of their career, their trajectory as an athlete. They need a different kind of mentor that need a different kind of guidance. It could be skilled based, it could be personality based, it could be emotionally based.
Speaker 2:We see it with athletes who are not elite athletes, but they go from. I'm really focused on being a bike racer and I race every weekend and whatever to. I have two kids in the last two years and my lifestyle has entirely changed, and the coach that was really great at helping me optimize my performance for criteriums isn't the same person who can help me figure out how to continue being an athlete with two toddlers at home, like you. Just need a different person for that, maybe. So transitioning from one coach to the other is part of the role of a coach, and I think that easing that transition, which includes preparing the data and preparing the information to your point, keeping the information up to date to begin with, the fact that you actually input your comments, the fact that you are creating a record of that person's training for them it's for the athlete, but it's also, in a way, for the next coach too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and even if the athlete wanted to take their own training kind of underneath their own umbrella, which a lot of athletes do, I mean I've had athletes do that, I've had professional athletes do that, both like layouts and professional athletes. They work with me for three, four, five years and you know me, I'm not the sexiest coach out there, not from an attractiveness standpoint but from a prescription standpoint. I keep it very kind of like boring and routine and they're like yeah, you know what. I get a coupe Like great, you wanna do that. Great, you've got the pattern, go ahead, go forward.
Speaker 1:Have added I view that once again in your vocabulary as a role of my coaching to prepare athletes for do that, to do that, regardless of whether they're working with a coach or not. If anybody out there, I'll throw this out there to the audience. If you have a difference of opinion on this, come on the podcast. I would love to talk to you about that Once again. I know coaches who do this in the space. You've talked to a lot of them already. I have gone to the experts and done this and talked to them about this. I still cannot come up with a compelling reason that coaches would want to do this, and it infuriates me ultimately because it's bad for the athletes, and that's the thing that infuriates me the most. That's bad for the athletes, but it's also bad for coaching, because so many athletes have a bad experience with that going back to one of our first points that they're then out of the marketplace.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it definitely damages the reputation of the profession itself when coaches do that because the person invested a lot in that data and in that stuff, and for them to have to. If you're making an athlete start from scratch after two years, three years, five years of working with you, that's just awful. I mean, it's just yeah, no, that's, I'd love to skier. I honestly.
Speaker 1:I've never. Once again, nobody. People have proposed ideas to me, right, it's an intellectual property thing or like an actual technical reason versus the confidence piece that you actually mentioned earlier. None of those hold any water, like whenever I talk to the people who are experts in that arena that they actually don't hold water. So, anyway, I need to calm down for a second ready. Let's prepare our next item. This will be our last item for what coaches can do to be relevant in 10 years. We've gone through this whole thing right, like don't get territorial over the athletes, really watch the partnerships. Be a professional that other professionals actually wanna work with. What's the last thing we wanna leave coaches with so that they can? You know they're thinking about themselves as a career and they're thinking about their career from a long-term perspective. What do they need to do to kind of prepare themselves for that?
Speaker 2:I think the last thing is to participate in leadership opportunities, not just within your sport, but more broadly within the athletic and outdoors community. It's the I'll use you for an example. For instance, you were on the board of the Incline.
Speaker 1:We're on Incline yeah, we had the board meeting last night. You had the board meeting last night.
Speaker 2:So you're a local and national international ultra running coach, but in your local area we have this access problem for a very iconic feature in Colorado Springs called the Incline, which is you know the statistics are better than I do Obviously it's 2174, is that right?
Speaker 1:We'll just call it 2000 feet, a gain in 0.8 miles.
Speaker 2:So it's, and it was all it's railroad ties. It used to be a cog railway and it was in horrible disrepair. Access was trespassing for years and years and years and Jason and others came together to legalize the Incline and manage it and improve it and et cetera.
Speaker 1:We doubt that it is a park. Essentially it's a city park is the way that the framework ended up being.
Speaker 2:And now I don't know what the statistics are and the number of people who come and do it, but it's massive, it's a huge tourist attraction.
Speaker 2:That's an example to me of saying, okay, I could stick to myself and I could just coach athletes and I could, you know, write books and do podcasts and be all about myself, but there's an access issue in my local community and without the access, where are the athletes gonna run?
Speaker 2:Where are the athletes? What races are athletes gonna do if I don't participate in making races available and keeping trailheads open and getting access to the outdoors to be usable in the cycling community, trail access, cycling infrastructure, going to city council meetings and making it known that this is an important part of the local community taking part in, I think, the ultra running community recently is. They came up with the trail majors, yeah, very recently. So that's race directors getting together for, hopefully, the good of the whole sport, not just their individual races. It's things along those lines that push you outside of what's good for me as a coach to what's good for the athletes to have access enough to be able to participate in this sport or activity or lifestyle, which, in the end, is going to come back to. You know, we don't have any athletes if there are no races to run, no events to do or no Access to the, to the outdoors.
Speaker 1:Well, I appreciate the compliment there. Right, that's something that I'm actually really proud of being on that board and I'm I'm founding member of that board. Actually, I'm not only founding member of that board still left, so maybe I'm just the most stubborn one of everybody who actually ended up starting this. But there there are innumerable Different opportunities out there for coaches to participate in. There are things within the national governing bodies, whether we're talking about check and field or cycling or or triathlon. There are things within the pro trail runners association.
Speaker 1:I know a lot of coaches do not coach professional trail runners, but still interfacing with them presents an opportunity to have a broader impact. There are opportunities within the local race structure to become a volunteer coordinator or just to be one of those. We all know these people, these serial volunteers, where they're there at every single. They're there at every single weekend, volunteering at every single race that they absolutely can. There are opportunities to help galvanize different corners of the community, because trail running is growing so rapidly and it is growing kind of at every different scene. Possible getting people who have Kind of been in the trenches for long periods of time or the perfect people to throw into these situations because they're all. They're the only people that have kind of the perspective on how things have evolved, and that's extremely important. When you're talking about things that that are growing in this way, you can't always have a growth mindset. You also have to have like a little bit of a history mindset on things as well in order to keep, like the train, on the right tracks.
Speaker 2:There's also I mean for Unfortunately, there's the nimbyism aspect.
Speaker 2:You know careful of the ultra running community is small. Cycling community is small. The bike racing community within cycling is small. They were small, even smaller. The people who don't necessarily want you to close down a trail system for a Race for a weekend are pretty big. The people who get annoyed by mountain bikers going down a trail yeah, a lot of those people. Those people go to city council meetings. So if the If the athletic community, which is much smaller, doesn't show up, you lose access.
Speaker 1:Yep, 100%. I could not agree with that last element more, and it's one that I think we talk about. All these things that are kind of like directly in line With coaching, this is one that's probably Like the least tangential from it, the one that's like the most removed from it, but I actually think it's it's the one where you can have the most impact on everything and also, most of the time, those things are really fulfilling Because because they're removed from coaching to a certain extent, once again, I get a lot of even even though I don't like the politics of it a lot I get a lot of enjoyment from being a part of the inclined friends group and doing things that might not necessarily affect coaching very specifically but are, like, tangentially related or maybe there's two or three degrees of separation related. I get a lot of enjoyment out of that. Now that you know I've done a lot of the things in coaching, I just find it really professionally and personally rewarding.
Speaker 2:I think it rounds out a profession. I think that it makes it so that it's not just about you and your athletes and it's not just about making a living and getting you know, paying the mortgage and and Getting accolades and things like that. It expands into being a part of your community and being known in your community and it does, I think, come back. Even if it's a karmic kind of a thing, it comes back to you in good ways, in ways that you may not. I mean a lot of these things I think come back to you in ways that are Positive, whether it's you're the kind of coach that other people want to work with, means that you get opportunities that you may not have even known were available. You are active in your community, you get athletes, or you get opportunities, financial opportunities, business opportunities that you didn't know were even available, because I Don't know the developers in town, unless you go to some of the places where the developers are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and maybe they're looking for somebody to manage the trail system in their new development or create a trail system in their new Development, because they don't know what anybody wants, except for the fact that there's an ordinance that says that they have to have a trail system.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, here's how it happened with me, with it inclined friends once again. I had no footprint in this originally but because I had to work with all the elected officials in Manitou and in Colorado Springs and I had to work with all the parks and rec Personnel in Colorado Springs and in Manitou. Now, when races want to come, come around, I've got some political capital to throw around and say, hey, let's, let's put this together, let's, let's go meet with the force service. I know Sue, I've worked with her for many years. Here's, you know how we can get a permit together and things like that. There are actually. There is actually like tangible pen action. That kind of like, like, like comes from that where you can Galvanize something that you might not be thinking about originally, but because you have this experience in this area and because you built up the network and the connections around them, it ends up being meaningful and has a positive impact and in the sport that you're ultimately playing in kind of kind of down the road.
Speaker 1:So I'm glad we could leave the discussion with that piece and go away from Deleting athlete programs, because that's just gonna get me all into tizzy ready. Is there anything else you want to leave the audience with. I'm gonna leave a link in the show notes to the article that was the genesis of this, which is gonna be a much faster read than this, to our podcast, yeah, from fast talk labs, I'll give. I'll give a link in the show notes to that if people want to go read it. It's an excellent read, as is all of your writing ready. But is there anything else you want to leave the audience with?
Speaker 2:I encourage, even whether you're a coach or an athlete, I think there's valuable Information within the whole craft of coaching product. So it was a product that Joe Friel Created over the last two years or so with 14 different modules that cover Well, as it's called, the craft of coaching, from the business to how do I work with different kinds of athletes, the technology and how to work with you know what's coming with AI and all those those sorts of things, and it's not, it's written by, or the contributors or kind of a who's who of Coaching. You know. Again, I sort of was, I snuck in somehow, but I think that there's a lot of really great Content within the modules, whether you're an athlete or a coach, or runner, or cyclist, triathlete, the the experts in there Andy Kirkland's one of them are from a very wide range of of Sport groups and professional development. So it's a it's a pretty cool Informational product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a good lineup. It's and the one thing that I could, the one thing that I thought about when I was looking at the lineup there is that's only somebody that has been In doing this for 30 years can actually pull together like just.
Speaker 1:Joe could pull together, like having the clout and expertise and the Kind of just the overall experience and the impact. That's what I was looking for. Impact that he has had on coaches and athletes over the years is just so immense that whenever he asks somebody to do a project and you're one of those people ready, you not only say yes but you kind of view it as an honor to do so.
Speaker 2:Right, because yeah, no, I was. I had the opportunity to co-author a book with Joe a few years ago which was a similar kind of a phone call out of the blue Type thing, and it was a challenge, certainly, but one that I was very, you know, really happy to do and honored to do so. When they called again for the craft of coaching, I sort of my first response was you sure. But you know, once they reassured me that, yes, they actually meant to call me, then it was, you know, a real thrill to be able to contribute well, y'all did a good job with it.
Speaker 1:I've looked through a lot of it not all of it, but it's a fantastic. It's a fantastic collection of content. I'll leave a link in the show notes to the whole thing. It's awesome, ready, thank you for coming on the podcast, enlightening us and, more importantly, thank you for articulating the ideas of coaches, because we, although communication is a big part of coaching, we are not always the best communicators across all mediums. Some of us are great verbal communicators, some of us are great written communicators, but you help that message get out, not only for me personally and sets a personal Thanks, but also for the number of coaches that you've had the pleasure of kind of interfacing with and helping get their message out. So we're all very appreciative of you in particular and people who do that type of work.
Speaker 2:Thanks, it's a good gig.
Speaker 1:All right, folks, there you have it. There you go. Much Thanks to ready for not only coming on the podcast today and kicking it back and forth with me Hopefully you guys found that informational as well as entertaining but also ready for your friendship over the years, and also you are extremely insightful counsel that you have given me. I can't tell you how many times I'm just incredibly indebted to how you have had an impact on my professional career. If you want to see a little bit of Ruddy's brilliance, there's no better way than to subscribe to our research newsletter, research Essentials for ultra running. For only $9.99 a month you get incredible insight into the latest Research papers that are coming out today. We provide expert opinions with our great staff of Nick tiller and Stephanie howe, who we mentioned on this podcast. That really bring to light some of the things that are going on in the research world as they pertain Specifically to ultra running.
Speaker 1:Y'all go and check that out. There is a link in the show notes to get subscribed for. That newsletter is one of the products that I'm the most excited about putting out. Every single month we have a great new issue coming out, probably right around the same time this podcast actually comes out, maybe about a week later. I hope y'all go and check it out. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share it with your friends and your training partners. As we mentioned on this podcast, it is not monetized in any way, shape or form. I just want to get good information out there into the public. That is what I get from it and I hope you guys appreciate that information as well. That is it for today, folks, and as always, we will see you out on the trails.