KoopCast
Coach Jason Koop covers training, nutrition and recent happenings in the ultramarathon world.
KoopCast
High Performance Coaching for Elite Ultrarunners Launch #233
Coach Jason Koop sits down with Stephanie Howe PhD, Nicole Rasmussen and Sarah Scozzaro to discuss the development and launch of our High Performance Coaching service for elite ultra runners.
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Trail and Ultra Runners. What is going on? Welcome to another episode of the CoopCast. As always, I am your humble host, coach Jason Coop, and I am ridiculously excited and fired up about this podcast, and that is because this podcast marks the launch of a service that I've been working on for the last year and that is our high performance coaching product for elite ultra runners. You longtime listeners will remember that I have mentioned this service several times over the course of last year on this podcast. I've also written about it for our own blog, on the TrainWrite website, as well as in Ultra Running Magazine, and now it is ready to debut is live on the website, as of me recording this intro, which I'm recording this after I recorded the main part of it, and I couldn't be more fired up because I think it is time. It is time for this space to have a service like this in the marketplace, and I think that we have put together a good one.
Speaker 1:So on the podcast today, you will hear from three of the people that are involved in this high performance product and Sarah Scazzaro and Nicole Rasmussen, who help out on the strength training side, as well as Stephanie Howe, who is one of our crack nutritionists that works with elite athletes as well as being a heck of an athlete herself. I brought these three together during UTMB week, just after all of the races have concluded, while we were a little bit tired and sleep deprived and haggard and high and low from what had transpired over the entirety of the week, to discuss a little bit about how practically we actually work with these athletes, how we take an elite athlete, we wrap a team around them and we work as individuals collectively to help them better their performance. This is a little bit of a window into how it works. It's not the only window into how it works, because we could go on for forever and ever how each of us do our individual jobs, but I hope, by peeling back the curtain a little bit, it offers some perspective on what we are trying to do in the space to have athletes perform at their best. And mark my words, this is just the beginning. So sit back, take a listen to this podcast. I will give some more perspective on it during the outro of this podcast in terms of how it works, how people can sign up and what the exact steps that we take are to form the perfect team around these athletes.
Speaker 1:But for now I am going to get right out of the way. Here's my conversation with coaches Sarah Scazzaro, nicole Rasmussen and Stephanie Howe, all about our high performance product and what it means for elite ultra runners. I don't have official intros of this. Thanks you guys for doing this kind of last minute just to set the stage for everybody. We literally just came from the prize giving ceremony at the 2024 edition of UTMB, just kind of the conclusion of everything.
Speaker 1:So we decided to gather our coaches in a little bit of an ad hoc fashion to talk about one of the next steps that we're going to bring into the ultra running coaching market and that's the development of these high performance teams.
Speaker 1:So no better place or time to do it, since it's all wrapped up and all the results are in, and inevitably what happens at this time of year is there's kind of a grand reshuffling of everything across all the elite athletes and the brands, and people renew their contracts and they change coaches and they decide what went good and what didn't so good, and what they're going to do different and how they're going to get better ultimately. But before we get into that, I have three amazing individuals at the same table as I'm sitting at right now in our chalet and chamonix, who I've known for a long time, I've gotten to work alongside with a long time and have been involved with coaching our athletes in kind of like various capacities, which I think is kind of cool. So I think before we like kick this off proper so everybody gets to know each other's voices, I'd like for each of you to describe who you are, what athletes you're working with, kind of in this UTMB and high performance capacity context, and then I think that's it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Who you are and who you work with in this context. Here We've been up for like 48 hours straight, so this is what you're getting right now, nicole. You start and I'll stop talking.
Speaker 2:We have been up, haven't we Sleeping on aid station floors. There we go. I am Nicole Rasmussen, CTS, ultra running coach and also strength and conditioning specialist. That's kind of the category I bring to the table when we talk about. The high performance model is the strength side, and I work with John Ray and Lucy Bartholomew.
Speaker 1:Scazzaro, you're next.
Speaker 3:Hi, I'm Sarah Scazzaro. I also do strength and conditioning with the high performance coaching team and I coach strength coach for Katie Scheid and Germain Grangier.
Speaker 4:And I am Stephanie Howe and I do the nutrition part and I work with John Ray.
Speaker 1:The nutrition part.
Speaker 4:The nutrition part. Yeah, the nutrition piece.
Speaker 1:You're also one of our athletes.
Speaker 4:Yes, I am and I also coach.
Speaker 1:And you coach as well. Which is common amongst kind of everybody at this table is you have your own specialties, but you also coach athletes like regular athletes, good athletes, everybody kind of in between, and I think that's kind of a unique aspect of what we're going to talk about. So I'm going to talk about first off the overall strategy here and then I'm going to go to an origin story of how this all came about, and then we're going to talk about how we really do this in real time, kind of peel the curtain back for all the listeners out there. Fundamentally, what a high performance team is? We wrap a whole team of professionals around an athlete. It's really not any more complicated than that, and these types of teams have existed in sport in many different permutations and setups, and different team sports have a really good model for this. The Olympics have a really good model for this. It's not new, but it is relatively novel in the sport of ultra running. We don't see it a lot. I'll go back to origin story for me. This is hard to convince people just to get coaching, maybe 10 or 12 years ago and now we see that quite frequently.
Speaker 1:But fundamentally what we're doing is we're taking a group of individuals or putting them around the athlete, and then that group of individuals is coordinated on multiple different levels, whether it's the, whether it's the group as a whole, or the nutritionist with the coach, with the athlete, or maybe it's the sports psych with the coach, with the athlete, and the group of individuals that we wrap around are. They're not innumerable, but they can. They they can be 10, 20 types of 10 or 20 types of individuals. When you get into these really complicated ones, fundamentally what we do is we have a head coach or a head sport coach, which would be their run coach, which is the role that I play predominantly. We have a strength and conditioning coach, we have a nutritionist and in most cases we also have somebody from sports psychology. At times we'll bring in physical therapy or orthopedics or maybe even a medical doctor if there's an illness that we're dealing with at that time. But the core team that, at least as we know it and is what we are going to describe it as really consists of those individuals. The background story of this actually has to do with this race that we're sitting at the conclusion of right now UTMB.
Speaker 1:So last year, from the end of UTMB to February, I received north of 20 requests from elite athletes for me to coach them individually and I had to say no to every single one of those and my previous solution to that was to offer up another one of our coaches, who are all fantastic and I all vouch for with every fiber of my soul. You guys are fantastic individuals. But out of those North of 20 athletes, the one single person that I was able to place with another singular person the one person was Joaquin, who finished third in this race, who's coached by my fantastic colleague, darcy Murphy, who I've known for a very long time. I'm not saying that's like some sort of epiphany solution, but Darcy apparently did a fantastic job with him.
Speaker 1:But what's relevant to this conversation is the learning lesson for me that I probably should have learned after iteration 10 or 12 of those is that that's not a solution that is appetizing to these elite athletes. I can't just simply pass them off to another coach. They're asking for me. I can't do it. I have an athlete capacity. I just don't take on everybody kind of like willy nilly. I'm very particular about that because I want to make sure that each athlete receives the kind of correct amount of attention and things like that. I can't just recommend another coach, even though I know that coach would do a really good job.
Speaker 4:Sarah is taking a picture of this while I'm doing it to try to distract me.
Speaker 1:It's okay, we like to have fun here. So my solution to that was to boot up this, what we're going to talk about, which is high performance coaching, which is something that I had experienced in other venues and formats, and I'm not going to I'm not kind of kind of get into that, but I kind of feel that ultra running is the is really right for that. But this, literally, was the genesis of it all, and so, to kick that off, I piloted it with a few of the athletes that I worked with that I felt that needed to take the next step, and those two athletes were Katie Scheid and Germain Granger, and I would also say Abby Hall, who had a team wrapped around her previous to other components that I was able to add, and they legitimately took a little bit of a trust leap. I don't know what that is. I was going to say trust fall but it wasn't a leap of faith but it wasn't really that, I don't know.
Speaker 1:They just trusted me a lot because I said at the end of the season it's like, how are you going to improve? And this was my solution, this is how you're going to improve, we're going to put a team around you. And so, long story short, without getting into the details, we piloted out with a few individuals for maybe the first half of this season and then realized that we were onto something and then started to solidify it, and that is not an easy task. I had to go into my digital Rolodex of professionals and reach out to them hey, do you want to do this? Here's the deal, here's how we're going to make it and make it work, and hear the logistics behind it and what does your capacity look like? And I wanted to make sure that we had a really solid group of practitioners available, group that we could draw from. And so, for example, sarah isn't the only strength training person. I also have Nicole. Steph is not the only nutrition person. We have other nutrition people that have come into the fold. And that was really important, because I understood that if we ever had to scale this up, which we're probably going to have to, aside from the eight or 10 people that we have in it right now. We need to have availability but also unique teams for each athlete, because every athlete doesn't want to feel like they're getting kind of like the same product. They want to feel that they're getting a group and a team that's really customized to them, that they might not share with their competitors that are trying to win the same races as them. And so it was very deliberate about that kind of building this team of practitioners up, and so we're going to launch this to the public next week. This week, if you're listening to this, when this podcast comes up, I don't even know what the URL is going to be. That's like it's like all sitting there and then all Corey shout out to Corey Bruno, it's going to flick the digital switch and then it's going to be live. But so we're going to launch this week.
Speaker 1:After all, the UTMB kind of calms down a little bit, and so what I want to do with that origin story out of the way. What I kind of want to do is go around the table is like how it functionally works. We're going to kind of peel the curtain back as practitioners and go over almost from a sequential standpoint what we actually do, and to launch into that the linchpin and all of that is training peaks. So training piece is a piece of technology that a lot of people are familiar with. It just happens that their co-founder, dirk Friel, is staying in this chalet with us. He's not here right now.
Speaker 1:Those ears are probably burning, and the reason that's important is they have built into their software the capacity that multiple people can look at the same calendar for the athlete and they have access to everything.
Speaker 1:It's completely transparent. Everybody knows what's going on and because of that function, of that interactive calendar, it allows these practitioners to literally look at what is being prescribed and how it went. So, from a sequential standpoint, normally not all the time, but the normal run of show is me as the head coach. I'll prescribe training, pass it off with athlete hey, is this training going good? And then everybody else looks at it and says this is what I'm going to do now. I'm going to do this piece of the strength training now. I'm going to do this piece of the nutrition now, and things like that. So I'm going to kind of kick it over to one of the people that started this with me and that's Sarah, because you and I have the longest working relationship in these teams. Why don't you describe that just a little bit more in depth, in terms of just the sequence of the run of show from your perspective and prescribing the strength training side of it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely I. So you're right. It starts with training peaks and you will be prescribing the run programming and even though I have an idea of where I want the strength to go, I have to touch in with what you're having the athlete do in terms of far as when I'm scheduling things and how that works with your workouts. So we usually like to keep our hard days hard or easy days easy. So I'm always observing what you're doing as far as the run programming and making sure that the strength programming is depending on where we are in the season, especially as we get closer to races. It's enhancing that versus taking away from it.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that I think has been interesting for me to at least find out is I'm not checking your work a lot, no, because if I do that then I might as well do it, yeah, or what. Actually, the other thing that happens is there's just not enough time to do it. So to create a strength training program is just as much time, if not more time, than actually creating the run program. Yeah, and Stephanie will probably go into this on the nutrition side, like just how we've had a lot of conversations about, like how long these things actually take. Part of the advantage of bringing these teams is, first off, it's impossible for me to do as good of a job on the strength training side as some people who actually do it for a living and have done it for a living for a long, for a long period of time. Sarah, how long have you been doing strength training?
Speaker 1:Oh gosh almost 20 years. Yeah, so I can't even me. I've been a coaching professional for 25 years now, or nearly 25 years now, and I have. I've had the strength training certifications and gone over to CSCS and learn from that. I actually created programming for CSCS. I don't know if you knew that. No, I didn't. Yeah, I created some of their not programming their curriculum for their endurance modules a long time ago.
Speaker 1:But even with that experience, I recognize that there's like a limitation there, and so it's bandwidth offload as well, as you just do it better, and the latter being much more important, much more important than the former side. But the sequences that Sarah mentioned is important, right, it's the run training first and the strength training side second. And Nicole is wondering if you can describe that a little bit more for some of the things that you don't have to get into specifics of what you've done with some of the athletes that we're working with, because it's their training. But if you want to go into that a little bit more, just from your perspective, I think that'd be valuable as well.
Speaker 2:Sure, I think, even before we talk about the nitty gritty of like within a week what that looks like, it's kind of important to recognize that that you and I, the run coach and the strength coach, are communicating from the beginning of the season on what the long range plan looks like. Right, so we develop. We know this athlete is running Western States and UTMB and so even from the start we kind of have this blueprint of when, what we're doing at what time in the season. So we know when things are going to be really intense with a lot of intensity, we know when things are going to be high volume, we know when the training camps will be. Some of those things are penciled in from the start and so when the run coach takes care of that, the strength coach can kind of come in and do the same thing in terms of developing that long range strategy that enhances what we're doing on the running side. And so, yeah, I think, and within that piece, every athlete's going to be a little bit different, and sometimes there's on my side I'm looking at some of their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the weight room and making sure that we're addressing some of those things on our side and and then, yeah, like you said, like Sarah said, the, the, the run programming is all on training peaks.
Speaker 2:I can see actually, for example, if we're looking at John, I can see his comments on the running side too. He'll leave comments on the strength workouts. But really sometimes how I develop, how I do things on the strength side depend on how the running is going right. Like, he says a lot in his communication about how he's feeling, what's going well and what's not, and that can kind of help direct how stressful and how much he can handle. So the comments are really important part of that piece seeing what Jason is saying to the athlete and then going from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it's really one. It's a feedback loop with multiple inputs. So the athlete does the workout and the first piece of the feedback loop is the data that comes through the smartwatch or whatever they're using to actually log it. The second piece of the information that starts this feedback loop are their comments. The third piece of it are the comments from the practitioner. And everybody is queuing off of all of those to do one of two things keep the training the same or change it, and what you change it to has endless kind of like variations of it. But that's really what you're doing. You're looking at all of that feedback and sometimes there's a little bit of back and forth and then you decide if the plan that you had had from this is I plan shorter with the teams than I do without the teams, and it's because I'm going to cue off of the feedback a little bit more and potentially change things.
Speaker 1:I've always I've said for years that as my career has gone on, I've learned that I forecast less. So I started out and I thought I could build six weeks of training out and it would all go perfectly. And then I was like, okay, it's going to be five weeks. Okay it's going to be four weeks and okay it's going to be three weeks or two weeks or whatever, and it probably kind of drives my athletes crazy that I don't plan.
Speaker 1:We have a long range plan, but the specifics of you're going to do this run on Tuesday, I might not get more than two or three weeks ahead of the game and it's a shorter. It's kind of a shorter leash for the teams as opposed to the regular athletes because of this constant feedback thing. Every once in a while we'll put anchor points in, like these are the long run anchor points. It's important from a nutrition perspective, but it's also important for, like a strength, the loading perspective and things like that. But the specifics like I've just learned that this feedback loop is just so powerful and you can be so reactive to it that my planning cycle is much, much, much shorter.
Speaker 2:It's funny you say that, because originally, when we started doing this, I would plan four to six weeks and then like wait for you to fill in and then adjust, but like it just wasn't working. Yeah, you almost have to see the comments and the data and plan two weeks at a time.
Speaker 1:You can only do that if you have the roadmap, because you can't make everything up, otherwise you end up backing yourself into corners and people make training mistakes on this all the time. You have to create some anchor points around the season big, huge volume blocks that you want to do a training camp and things like that and then you kind of aim the training around there volume blocks that you want to do a training camp and things like that and then you kind of aim the training around there. But this whole theme of having I had a individual on the podcast just a few weeks ago that has actually coined a term for it. It's called micro periodization and basically it's just taking more of the individual's individual data to determine what's going to happen going forward or what the plan looks like. Then some sort of overarching.
Speaker 1:I want to do an 80-20 thing, or I want to do strength to weaknesses, or I want to do high volume to low volume, or I want to have a pyramid. I want to do base first and then threshold and then VO2 max, like all the collegiate runners do, and things like that. So it's becoming more, I think, applicable because we've got access to it. So I'm going to turn it over to you, steph. So you and I have worked as coach-athlete for a while and we brought you into these teams, I think, to give you a little bit of a carrot to work off of. I want you to describe how much effort it takes to get this right at this level, because I think that really goes underappreciated when we're trying to develop nutrition plans for athletes and we default to okay, you need to take in 300 calories an hour. Some range, whatever it is 300 calories an hour. It's much more than that. So if you can describe like the enormity of the problem that you're trying to solve in five or three minutes, we'd all be much appreciated.
Speaker 4:I'll do my best. Yeah, nutrition is a little bit different than the other components, because you eat and think about eating hundreds of times a day, right? So it's not just one thing that we're trying to plan around. It's like what does this athlete need in terms of the season that they're in, that fits in with their personal or ethical considerations, their background just so many different variables. And then we're also working with their fueling piece, which is totally different than their day to day eating, and they're both equally important. And so I'm thinking about a lot of different things.
Speaker 4:When I work with an athlete, I'm thinking about not only what are their energy needs, what are their macronutrient distributions, what does that look like in terms of food? Not just numbers, because we can't just say eat 300 calories, because it matters what that comes from, right. And then in terms of fueling, that's something that there's many different products to try. There's many different strategies with fueling and you really have to be trial and error with it. You start with the science, but then you have to dial it in, and so for me, I'm doing more of just sitting back and reading Training Peak, so reading the comments, just kind of reacting to how the athlete says they're feeling, and I have most of them put their feeling that they take in during their long runs in Training Peak. So we have kind of a match of the data of how the run went, how the athlete was, few, any comments that they put and then what they actually took in. So we use that as kind of a way to like track it over time.
Speaker 4:And then I do read the comments, because I'm really good at picking up on when someone is low energy or they're just not fueling day to day correctly. You can tell in some of their comments, and when they happen a few days in a row, that for me is a flag of like okay, I need to check in with this athlete and see are you eating enough? What's been going on? And so it's very different than the coaching side of things, because I coach as well and I've said this before on this podcast. But nutrition is a science applied as an art. So it's just like there's so much. We could talk about this for an hour, but I'm trying to keep it.
Speaker 4:We'll keep it simple for you, here We'll keep it short.
Speaker 1:One of your comments dovetails into something that I want to talk about. That's been a huge advantage that I didn't fully appreciate or realize until we all started working together with this, and that is is we have more eyes on the athlete and through that collective set of eyes that we all have, we all pick up on things that I would not have picked up on if I am just working on them. There have been so many times where Sarah's brought something to my attention through a conversation that you had that I that was unbeknownst to me, about strength training or whatever that got relayed I was going to say up the chain, but it's not like I'm up the chain from anybody. It got relayed to me, right, relay to me, and then I made some running training program adjustment that I would not have made, or it's even a psychology thing, right, it's some sort of we kind of we can't, we're kind of downplaying that part of it. It's actually a critical part.
Speaker 1:We've got a number of sports psychologists that we're now kind of like drawing from in these teams. But there are things that come to light because you have several eyes on the same person through different lenses and we are all in constant communication, whether it's a group communication or whether it's like some sort of like back channel that we do like individually and that all helps the athlete. And sometimes they don't even know that a conversation that they had with Stephanie, some piece of that got relayed up to me and then I do something differently, or I reinforce something from a psychological standpoint, or we get in touch with their sports psych people or whatever. That's really the power, because sometimes in these like isolated situations you get tunnel vision. Like you guys know, I'm looking at strength training people too Like sometimes you guys get like super tunnel vision, like okay, I got to make sure I get this programming right and so like backing out and I think the team really helps that like backing out process and making sure that we're like focused on all components of the athlete.
Speaker 3:And I think it's such a oh sorry, steph.
Speaker 4:I was going to say for the athlete, it's really nice when something isn't going great. They have like multiple people checking in with them and they feel really supported.
Speaker 3:I was just going to say they were all caring about them deeply and we're all invested, and so to have multiple people checking on them and interpreting kind of what we're seeing on training peaks, and, like Coop said, we all maybe are seeing it from a different lens and so we're meeting the needs of our athletes without even realizing we're doing it in a different way, but we're all able to kind of contribute in that way as we support them.
Speaker 1:Well, and sometimes with the athletes, what has happened is the athletes feel more comfortable communicating certain things with one person, for whatever reason. Everybody has different personality and stuff like that, and I just know I'm not going to reveal everything, but I know you guys' personalities are different than mine and the athletes that I yeah, no shit, I know, I do know and I this is one thing I appreciate with all these teams is we've let that flourish, because if there's something that is just easier not that they wouldn't communicate it, but it's just easier in the context of it or the texture of the conversation is much better because of that personality match or the difference in personality or whatever. To your point, sarah, we just serve our athletes better because inevitably in these teams and this is a good and a bad part, by the way, and we're going to talk about the bad parts in a little bit One of the advantages of these teams is you come with practitioners that have different personalities and that's good in the sense that you need to have different ways to communicate and different ways to gather feedback, as we were talking about earlier. It can be bad because sometimes those personalities clash and we're all kind of like sitting on our high horses right now, like thinking about how good these are, but we should bring up like how they can go awry.
Speaker 1:I've got the king and queen pin of it all, so I'm going to save that for the end, unless somebody else brings it up. But you now have been involved in this for a while and anybody can jump in here. It is challenging at times, right. I mean it's not all training and sports. I mean we just witnessed the men's field kind of get demolished at UTMB. They don't always go perfectly in training, for this stuff doesn't always go perfectly as well. So if anybody has any like just a really quick example of why it goes awry, just so everybody can kind of learn from it, jump in before I come in with like the apex one.
Speaker 4:I think the obvious one is we are all coaches as well, right? So we see programming from you which we may agree or disagree with. I mean, I don't take that as negative for me I'm, it's a learning experience but that gives a certain bias, right, and I'm like, oh well, I wonder why he had him still do that. Maybe I should ask, I don't know. So that that is one way that it could go awry.
Speaker 1:Always ask, always ask, by the way, always ask Noted.
Speaker 1:I would say I'll say one once. One, one piece of it is I started with you all because I work with you and I've worked with you for a long time and I trust all of you immensely. I just mentioned I don't check sarah's work, I don't check stephanie's work, I don't check nicole's work, and that's just because I trust you. Sure, I look at it, but I'm not like checking it for errors, like a spelling test or an essay or something like that. Like I trust the work that you guys, I trust the work product that you put out. We're going to have to bring on people that are that, gradually, are further and further outside of our network, and that's already happening. Because we have athletes that are in this program, that have a nutritionist that they've worked with for years, that they love Great, keep them. We'll figure out how to fold them in, we'll figure out how to fold them into the mix. But that, in addition to just building capacity, is it takes a long time because you need to make sure it's ultimately my recommendation that that kind of comes down the pipeline and I'll describe how the whole team gets set up in the outro. You guys don't need to be kind of involved in that. But my point with this, with that is and Stephanie was mentioning, as you start to, as you start to widen that sphere out Stephanie's sentiment of, oh, I wonder why Coop is doing this I just trust him comes from a long period of working together. When you bring somebody else in that has that exact same sentiment, then it's like hey, are you? They talk to the athlete, hey, are you sure that you should be doing this? Or whatever it is. And that is a really common piece of feedback amongst these high performance teams that have all these individuals is everybody thinks they're a genius about everything or they think that they're smart about everything and they start to like drift out of their lane, so to speak. I don't drift out of my lane with nutrition and strength training because I know I don't know shit.
Speaker 1:Okay, so the apex one since y'all are being quiet about this the apex one is not relinquishing control, and I've seen this play out in professional sports and the league sports. I can't tell you how many times when we come in and we try to provide like the endurance or the physiology side of it, inevitably what happens is the strength training coach has to give up a little bit of their control or their coach over here has to give up a little bit of control. And when they can't do that and start to meddle with what's going on with the domain experts, it doesn't fall across. It doesn't fall or doesn't fall into pieces from a programming side, because the programming always gets done, but it falls to pieces because the athlete loses confidence in the prescription. And this is where it becomes really tragic, because one of the biggest advantages of these teams is, if you do it right, the athlete has the utmost confidence in every single thing that they're doing. They have the most confidence in their nutrition. They have the most confidence in their run training. They have the most confidence in their equipment. They have the most confidence in whatever expert you're bringing in. If they're able to silo off and give their best professional opinion, they don't have to second guess it. They can just go out and do their work as an athlete or whatever.
Speaker 1:But when they're getting the kind of the stinky eye from the other practitioners or whatever, it actually has the opposite effect and that is not easy to avoid. Like that is a really extremely common problem, because to coach at this level in any capacity, whether it's the single sport, or whether it's the nutrition capacity or strength training capacity, is exceedingly rare because you have to be good enough to do it, and that is not everybody. We can't go. I mean, you guys have been in gyms all the time. We always have these conversations about these gym knuckleheads that have no idea. You can't get any gym knucklehead to coach a professional athlete. You can't get any nutritionist to work with a professional athlete. They get't get any nutritionist to work with a professional athlete. They get in those positions very deliberately and because of that strong, that typically strong-willed personality of those practitioners they tend to. We don't we haven't yet we don't drift into other people's lanes and that can be kind of the demise of everything is my only point.
Speaker 4:Well, to that point, coop, I think when you're a professional in your area, you realize, like, how small your scope is. The more you learn, the less, and I think all of us being professionals in our respective areas, I know how to strength train. I would not program strength training Like I have the utmost respect for these two and like same with coaching I coach, but like the athlete best. And I think when you have a team, like finding the right professional who their personalities match right, and then also that they are really a professional in their field, because there are lots of people who do nutrition but they're not going to maybe do it the same as me, and some of that is fine. There's differences, but you want someone who is really good at their craft.
Speaker 1:They're good at that craft and I'll go back to the original piece of it they have the time and the bandwidth to actually do it. So this is like a totally fictitious example. So I've been very transparent about this through my entire coaching career and I think that this is a. I do think that this is an important point with any service provider. I work with 40 athletes at any one point in time.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's 38, maybe it's 41, but it's certainly not 20 and it's not 200 or even 50. It's right around 40. And the reason for that is I can deliver the coaching, the run, training and that amount of time for that amount of people. Once I start to drift into the nutrition thing and the strength stuff and even the sports psych thing, it starts to chew away. At the time that it starts to chew away at the time that's actually available for all of that. So it's a double win. Not only do you get a more specific provider for it, you also have the time and the capacity to like actually care for it, because you're sometimes Stephanie, your job takes longer than mine does.
Speaker 1:Probably all of the time Like seriously like for me to program stuff and give feedback and analyze the files and things like that. I know what that takes. Your stuff takes like much, much more time. So I guess my point is like not only can you not do it all technically right from an expertise standpoint, you can't do it all from a bandwidth standpoint, like it's just like not or at least me for my practice. And even if I brought myself down to 10 athletes, I still wouldn't be able to do it as good as y'all do be able to do it as good as y'all do.
Speaker 1:All right, we're going to wrap it up there. So on the outro of this, unless Nicole has something smart ass to say, which you always do, you won't. Okay, no smart ass comments. So on the outro of this, what I'm going to describe is how an athlete comes into the system. I'm going to kind of peel back the curtain on the whole thing, how we build these teams and stuff like that. I didn't go through that whole deal. Everybody kind of know what it is. But before I sign off and do that cause, we're all going to go have dinner and maybe a few drinks and sleep.
Speaker 1:Sarah's really tired. I'm going to do one more day.
Speaker 2:We'll sleep when we're dead. We'll sleep when we're dead Chamonix.
Speaker 1:Before I'll do this, I just want to say thank you all From me and the athletes that you work with. This is not the only conclusion of the season, but it's kind of like a big one and I'll do fantastic jobs with your athletes. They don't always win everything. That's never going to happen, but I'm really thankful for you guys as colleagues and for you guys to step into this kind of not knowing how it's going to like, how it's going to pan out, even not only on the athlete side, but also on the contract side of stuff, as we've been working through stuff. I just really appreciate you guys as professionals. You're the best and it's an honor to call you guys colleagues.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Coop. It's an honor to be on a team with people like this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, likewise no-transcript.
Speaker 1:I kept it tight, like I was, just like I want to work with these people. I'm going to start here and then we'll go from there. It's going to happen the more you expand it out. But I had the expectation that would be relatively low friction not this low friction, relatively low friction. But anyway, thank you all. You're going to do an awesome with your athletes and we're going to do even more of this and it's going Woohoo dot com.
Speaker 1:Forward slash coaching, forward, slash, high dash, performance dash program. A link will be in the show notes as well, as you can navigate to it just from our home page. All anybody has to do to sign up is to fill out the very simple questionnaire at the bottom that details a little bit about what you're looking for and maybe some of the people that you have behind you already. That form goes directly to me. I look at it, I then interview the candidate and I determine what the best solution for them is.
Speaker 1:A couple of things to note. First off, one of the principles from the onset of developing this program is I wanted to make sure that we had the capacity to build unique teams around each individual. What that means is when somebody comes in, they are going to get a team that is not only customized to them in terms of what they're training for, what their personality is and how they match up with different members of our teams, but also a team that they can kind of call their own. And the reason that I wanted to do this is I realized that a lot of the people signing up for this program are going to be competing against each other and they want some sort of advantage, some sort of alpha, and they might not want to share the exact same members of all of the other people that they are competing against, because there's no uniqueness in that. That's the first principle. The second principle that I really wanted to convey when we're forming these teams is that you can come to the table with existing service providers. If we have an athlete that comes to us that already has a crack nutritionist that they're working with, I am not one to upset the apple cart, and what we would rather do is integrate that person with the team as long as they're already working well together and build more people around them. All of these teams are managed by me personally. They will be managed by me personally. I'm going to have my fingerprint on them. They will receive an individual CTS coach and individual practitioners that are wrapped around them strength training coaches, sports psychologists and things like that, depending upon what they actually need.
Speaker 1:I believe that this is the future. There are already athletes that are doing this on their own accord. We're going to see more and more athletes do this as the sport becomes more sophisticated and more professionalized. Athletes do this as the sport becomes more sophisticated and more professionalized, and what we're trying to do is to try to add a system behind it and also give athletes the assurances that the practitioners that they have available to them are of the highest quality. And, let's face it, that's hard to actually figure out when, inevitably, what happens when somebody is looking for a strength training coach or a nutritionist? They're asking for a recommendation from a friend of a friend, and while that oftentimes works, at the end of the day, the lens that they are looking through are just that singular person's, that person's individual experience. Hopefully, what we can offer as professional coaches and professional service providers is the lens of working with many athletes over many years and therefore we know who the best people are in these individual areas. We have a list on this website that I just mentioned, of the initial set of service providers that we are using, and I'm actively seeking for other service providers in these areas to continually expand the teams, because I do expect that we have an influx of elite athletes kind of come to us and we're going to have to build the team around that accordingly.
Speaker 1:But as of right now, this is live. I'm stoked about it. I hope the elite athlete community takes note. I hope the brands take note. I hope other athletes take note because this is live. I'm stoked about it. I hope the elite athlete community takes note. I hope the brands take note. I hope other athletes take note because this is something that I'm quite proud of actually building. It's already been in, we've already deployed it across several athletes and it's worked very well.
Speaker 1:I think the results speak for themselves and the proof is in the pudding. But mark my words this is just the beginning and it's something that I cannot emphasize enough. I am quite excited about. So y'all go and check it out. I appreciate the love and the support you guys and also appreciate the athletes that we have already folded into this, into this program. While we were working it out, you guys took a little bit of a leap of faith at building a team around you. I know that's a novel concept for a lot of people out there and it can be a little bit intimidating at first, so we appreciate the heck out of all the athletes that have initially participated in this. All right, folks, that is it for today and, as always, we will see you out on the trails.
