Stepping Outside The Box
Why Coaching Is So Much More Than Training Theory
It’s easy to pull out a piece of paper, or a new Word document, when you have a great idea. I’m doing it right now, even. And when you have so much information available on the internet, it becomes almost too easy to read something and publish your own thoughts about it. Platforms like Twitter have become almost coaching utopias where everyone’s doing fancy new drills, following sports science to a tee and always moving on an upward trajectory, never facing adversity.
But that’s not what coaching actually is.
If people could just write a blog post or a training plan and their athletes would just magically get better, there would be way more successful coaches in Track & Field, and in almost any sport. But a final product is always messier to produce than the initial sketch, and coaching is no different. Coaches make mistakes, athletes’ lives aren’t always under our complete control, and sometimes the ideas we come up with in the coaching incubators of blog posts and Twitter just don’t work with unique and special athletes. When you show up on day one of practice, you have no idea what you’re going to get. You could’ve just spent the whole summer writing posts about training like I did but you’re still going to realize that coaching is a place to think on your feet. You need to have a database of knowledge to call on, which should be the purpose of the online coaching communities we have created, but the most important skills for a coach are the application and communication of that knowledge in a way that applies individually to each athlete.
Coaching is adaptability, a patience when adversity appears, and choices that lead to more than just seeing an athlete achieve a personal best, but also seeing them become a better person. These are all skills you only get to learn in a real coaching environment, not in a Twitter discussion. Will you draw on some things you learned from a post or discussion at a later time when trying to figure out a problem an athlete is having? Absolutely. But great coaches are known for the intangibles, and those intangibles are created at the intersection of knowledge and relationship building.
Look at Joe Newton of York High School. Joe Newton developed an unbelievable training program at York and knew a ton about distance running. But I would argue that Joe was known much more for the special relationships he developed with every kid on the York team. From knowing the names of hundreds of kids over the years, to shaking their hands every day before practice was over, Joe developed the trust with his athletes to believe his training would work.
Developing these relationships with your athletes won’t just help them believe in you, but they’ll help you figure out how to coach them. I’ve had the privilege over the years to watch my dad coach professional runner Peter Callahan. Peter is an incredibly unique athlete because he needs to be trained differently than many traditional Lydiard-based training programs. When some coaches look at Peter’s training, they may think that he does less work than other runners. That’s a big mistake. Peter works just as hard as any other professional runner in the world; he just works hard differently. For example, instead of a 15-mile run, a field circuit gets the volume he requires and also works on the parts of his running he needs to succeed at, such as his power and ability to change pace very quickly. Without the relationship Peter and my dad developed after many years, figuring out the ways that Peter needs to train, so he can be the most successful runner he can be, would be extremely difficult. Peter is a great example of how training theory you read online won’t always be the way to get the most out of an athlete. Think about it. If you don’t develop these relationships with your athletes, you could be depriving great athletes of reaching their true potential. My dad wouldn’t have known about field circuits if he hadn’t learned about them in the past, but, because he used his knowledge with his relationship building, Peter and he were able to figure out that he had so much hidden potential that a traditional by-the-book training plan wouldn’t reveal.
When you’re tempted to use a piece of paper, a scientific study, or a blog post as a coach, remember that’s not why you’re important to athletes. There’s not adaptability in a paper coach, and there’s certainly no sense of adversity. But, besides just the acknowledgement that training isn’t always an upward trajectory, a paper coach misses the most important part of coaching: the connections you make with your athletes. Success in athletics comes from those connections. You can know every detail ever written about training, but, if you don’t gain trust from your athletes by developing a personal relationship with them, they’ll never be as successful as they can be. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never developed trust in a piece of paper and I don’t think I’m going to.
Look at programs like Bowerman Track Club and the Ingebrigtsen family. These are programs that are pioneers in training but also in relationship building. The Bowerman women’s team has developed a totally unique culture of success almost unheard of in distance running. The special relationships that all of these women have with each other has pushed them all to new heights. And I’m telling you now, if Jakob Ingebrigtsen didn’t have the special relationship of having two older brothers who are elite runners to help teach him and guide him from a young age, he would not have been the European Champion this year. Have these programs faced their setbacks and challenges? Of course, every program will. York High School had two teenagers put in jail for arson in 2006. Many athletes at Bowerman Track Club have faced their fair share of injury, and Henrik Ingebrigtsen who was fourth at the European Championships this year had hamstring surgery in late 2016. No place is perfect. But the next time you read about awesome training or coaching theory, you’ve only done half of your job.
When you try to apply this theory in the real world, you’re going to face adversity and setbacks, but that’s when your job as a coach really starts. No book is going to have a script for how to do this part of the job. Will you make some mistakes along the way? Definitely, but you’ll find yourself developing not just good athletes but also good people.
