Jon Ackland Talks IRONMAN, America’s Cup Coaching, Patents and the Evolution of Arda.
Recently I sat down with Jon Ackland, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer at Performance Lab, to discover how Arda was born and what gets this self-confessed gadget geek out of bed.
So I hear you’re a bit of a coaching guru. How did you get into this?
From the beginning, I was terrible at team sports and when I was a kid I had very low self confidence. My physical education teacher said he thought I’d make a good runner, so I took up running and then that went pretty well but I was never the best.
How old were you?
Oh, that would have been 5th, 6th and 7th form at Rosmini College in Auckland, so I would have been around 16,17,18 years old. And then I think in 6th form, Mike Stanley, you might even know who he is…
Just assume I know nothing, cause I’m not really a very sporty person — I’m a good project for you guys.
Well, he runs the Millennium Institute of Sport.
Oh okay.
He was a really good rower and he turned up to the school and he had this really simple pitch to get people to take up rowing. He had this big pile of medals that he’d won and he said, “If you want some of these you should come down to rowing” and I went, “Okay”.
Hahaha.
So I took up rowing and was pretty good at that. I ended up just off winning Junior Nationals and one North Island lightweight competition and then won the National lightweight rowing — which is the slightly smaller guys, not the hundred kilo guys.
Mhmm.
So that went pretty well until I got glandular fever and got really sick and couldn’t do any exercise for about a year. And while I was sick I watched these crazy people on TV doing this thing called a triathlon. And I thought “Oh I gotta have some of that”. And so when I got better the first thing I did, which is kind of crazy, was an IRONMAN triathlon. Which was a bit of a big call because I was just off New Zealand lightweight selection at that point.
For the rowing?
Yeah I chose IRONMAN and back in those days, there was no way of understanding that, or training.
And where was the IRONMAN held?
In New Zealand, the second place in the world to have an IRONMAN after Hawaii. So I started that and I had a really good ultra-marathon runner who coached me and really looked after me, called Gary Regtein, a Kiwi. He had the world record for 256 kms of running in a 24 hour period.
Oh wow!
Yeah who would do that? And at the time I was doing a science degree at University of Auckland but not in sports science because that wasn’t around at that stage. So I was quite lucky that I was at the beginning of three things:
1. IRONMAN — so I would have to really think about how I was training.
2. Exercise monitoring devices — I think I literally had the first two portable heart rate monitors that ever came into the country (because I’m a gadget freak).
3. The dawn of applied sports science — which up until that point was incredibly lab-based and ethereal.
With the combination of those three things I was really lucky to be around at the time. I did an exercise science course at the AUT and then in 1987 I went and applied for a job at the New Zealand Institute of Sport and at the time being completely naive I thought that, “well, surely they’re gonna employ me, right?”. But there’s always going to be well qualified people and the guy in charge at the time was Jim Blair. He coached the All Blacks, did the Whitbread Around the World Yacht Race and the America’s Cup. He interviewed me and said, “Look I reckon you’ll be good, you do the first 11 weeks for free and then we’ll see what happens”. And I went, “Sure!”, so I worked in two jobs for the first 11 weeks and he said “Yup, you’re in”. I’m eternally grateful to the guy and there’s a bunch of people I feel really grateful to actually have had faith in me. So anyway, I was working away there and then one day, this guy comes in — who I know — and he says, “I would like you to write a chapter for this endurance training book that’s coming out.” And naively I said, “I think I can write the whole book”. Which was like stupid crazy.
Bold.
The naivety of youth.
Yeah.
He took me seriously and then I went and next thing I was in front of the publishers and they’re asking me questions and it’s a bit sort of surreal. They asked how many pages I could write and I said I think I can write 60. And they still took me seriously, because you don’t write a 60 page book, right — they end up around 300 pages in the end. They said “Right, so you’re writing a book.”
And next thing, I met this person who was a world Karate Champion and I was quite smitten [Jon’s now wife, Kerri McMaster]. And then Kerri went off to England and I was heartbroken. So I had a choice between writing the book and going to England. So I did both.
I like the way you manage to do both.
After our OE in England for a year, The Institute of Sport got in touch with me to come back and take over as the Director. So I got on the plane, came home and they’d closed the place up! Damn!
What, completely?
Yeah. Shut the doors. But they had all their gear so we bought it for a much reduced price and that’s how Performance Lab started. It was really Kerri that said, “I think we can start this”. At the time I think we were the first commercial testing lab in the world which meant that we had to survive on people wanting to come and see us, not relying on government funding at all. We just had to be good enough that people were interested. So that went reasonably well and I wrote a bunch of books.
So who came in here for testing — what sort of people?
Mainly people who were up for big challenges that weren’t elite athletes. An example was a business guy called Kevin Biggar who wrote a book about his experience, ‘The Oarsome Adventures of a Fat Boy Rower’.
‘Couch potato to Atlantic rowing race winner’.
So he came along and I helped him train to win the Trans Atlantic rowing race and I started dealing with lots of New Zealand athletes mainly in cycling, triathlon, mountain biking, rowing — all endurance type sports. And then another guy that came along because he wanted to do a marathon was Grant Dalton so I trained him up. That went very well.
And so you did that for years.
Yes and very early in the piece, one day I thought ‘Wow, maybe you could automate all of this and turn this into something that’s like a virtual coach’s brain [Arda].’ And Kerri said, ‘Yeah, isn’t that what we’re doing?’ (She’d already thought of that).
She’s quite a visionary.
Yes. So we just got on with that and over the last 20 year period we’ve been working on putting that all together. And part of that is making sense of the tangle of information. The next thing was simplifying it to a point where you could actually go, ‘Ok, that’s the rule, that’s the rule, that’s the rule.”
So when did you start developing the software?
I wrote a spec for how you could produce a training system. And then around about the same time, Grant Dalton approached me and said, ‘Hey, want to come work for Team New Zealand?’ and I was like “What am I gonna do?”. Because I’m not a sailor, right. And he said something like, ‘Just come and be there and work out what you think needs to happen.’
What year was this?
2003 because I trained Grant for the 2003 IRONMAN. And he came in for his final chat with me about an hour after the mast broke on the 2003 challenge. And Grant ended up going to Team New Zealand after that and said, “I want you to come along, Jon.” So I did. It was an incredibly eye opening and massively high performing culture and I’m incredibly grateful to Grant and the people that I ended up working with there for having faith in me and teaching me an incredible amount of wonderful new stuff. So we ended up living in Spain for the 2007 America’s Cup.
So what do you think you contributed to that?
I did some of the planning where in that month we’re going to sail this many times, we’re going to have a day off this many times, we’re going to have maintenance this many days… and some work on which plan to do depending on the wind state.
So training plans similar to those you’re building in Arda?
Kind of, yeah. But not my information, it was getting their information and looking at a process. I made little movies about particular sports psychology aspects that were good for the team at the time. You had to get to a point where you understood the team, its language, what they needed at the time … so trying to present them with a thought in their language for them to think about.
Give me an example?
A good example of that is the concept of process focus which is that you get to a point where you’ve trained all the parts of the action you are going to perform and that’s the thing you think about and focus on in training and the outcome/result (the medal) kind of takes care of itself. And the reason for that is if you are Dean Barker and you’re going into a pre-start and this is the America’s Cup and it’s a $70 million funded campaign, how do you behave normally and how do you focus in the moment? So presenting concepts like that that were relatively new at the time for these sorts of teams.
And how did they take that?
Really well. I have an incredible love for Team New Zealand I think they did some amazing things, amazing people amazing culture. They do a really good job with the people that they have there in terms of being a very high performing group of people. I’m a big fan of Grant and Kevin Shoebridge and those guys do a really good job to keep the whole thing together and we’d never have won an America’s Cup without those guys.
Were you still running Performance Lab at the time?
Yes and consulting. At that time we probably had about about three of us but as a consultancy we’d have six to eight people a day when I was there in our old Birkenhead office. And then Gary Nicholson, our developer, came on board and turned the thinking into something that we could demonstrate and we basically went off around the world demonstrating that to various companies. It was a hell of a big job for Gary but we managed to get it going as a prototype.
What would that software do?
Basically very similar to what it is now but now it’s more robust as it’s been tested and refined. And one day in 2010, Kerri spotted the key piece that was missing in our IP, which was the context and we patented that. We realised you can’t just have heart rate because what’s the heart rate related to? It’s all about the relationships otherwise you can’t actually create anything. So now we have two patents from that.
Tell me about your patents.
What we ended up with was a provisional specification which is something that is secret at the New Zealand intellectual property office and after a year it went to PCT which is a worldwide provisional patent. After that we applied for a patent in the US for contextualising terrain and effort together and that specification also has a whole lot of stuff in it about health so it’s got things like contextualising blood pressures and EKG or ECG and so what happens when you get awarded a patent is then you can go on and create continuations. So the patent that we got then became another patent which was a slightly stronger than the first one around the same area.
Don’t you have a patent for ‘Teams’ too?
Well, because of the contextualisation stuff, Waynne Dartnall [the CEO] and I were sitting in a bar in Portland one day and I said I’ve got this really weird idea I’m sure it’s never gonna work which was that if context works for people in terms of their physiological data, it will probably work for teams as well. Except the difference is that in teams what you’re looking at is the relationship between the offensive team and the ball and the defensive team and all those distance relationships and what happens with those relationships creates classifications. And those classifications are like team behaviors which is when you hear of someone breaking the line in rugby league or you see somebody scoring a goal or you see an assist, these are behaviors and you can classify them if you’ve got more context, so you get more clarity.
Tell me an example.
So if you’re scoring a goal and you’re in the six yard box and there’s no one in front of you except for the keeper then that’s a pretty easy goal. But if you’re scoring it outside the 18 yard box and you’ve got somebody marking you and there’s more angle and you’ve obviously got more distance and you score a goal, those two goals can’t be compared. So what it does is it creates this series of classifications of all the things that are happening on the field.
So what does that tell you?
So potentially you take a Messi and a Rinaldo and you say which one is the best at x? Because you can measure all of those things. So low and behold we just got a US patent for that. We just call it teams but I think it’s called “classification of activity from multiple locations”.
So who else in the world is doing this?
We’re kind of a bit odd because nobody is really doing it. Either people are doing statistical analysis which is kind of after the fact and one off, they’re just collecting data and graphing it or they’re trying to interpret information based on just one parameter, for example heart rate goes up. But Arda’s thing is that well heart rate can go up for 6 or 7 reasons, which one was it? So basically it’s this context thing which is different.
Why is this interesting to you?
I’m just curious about how you’d get to a point where you can understand how people perform better in exercise and the second thing is that I see that the market needs a bit of a rev up. And the reason I say that is that there are some amazing devices around but they are quite fractured in what they do. So for instance, people say, “I don’t know what my plan is — it’s on the fridge”. As long as I can remember it I know what I should do but if I forget it the watch is not going to tell me what I should do, it’s got no way of understanding what I did (it’s got no context) and it’s got no way of understanding how I went — so how I performed. So the three basic questions for a coach are:
1. What should I do?
2. What did I do?
3. How did I perform?
Once you answer all of those you keep going around in that little loop. I believe there could be a much, much better product than the market’s offering at the moment. And I want our first consumer offering, our Arda app for the Apple Watch, to do that.
And why is it important to you that people can perform better?
What I found was that exercise was a way to feel confident, that I could do stuff that I didn’t think I was ever going to be worthy of doing. And I just want to give that to other people.
Does it come down to self esteem? Confidence?
I want people to be surprised about what they can do and to feel good about themselves. Because in the end it’s that quote, ‘People don’t remember what you say or what you showed them or what you did, all they will remember is how you made them feel.’ I think fundamentally that’s why Performance Lab has been successful — we care intensely about the person that we’re coaching and we’re doing our best for every single person and we want them to blow their own minds when it comes to exercise. If you blow someone’s mind it’s all about them, and if it’s all about them that changes their perspective of everything. It probably goes back to the people who have said to me over the years, “You know what, you can do it Jon.”
It’s almost belief in yourself.
Yeah and exercise is a process to achieving that. If we’re on that I’m going to rant about one little thing…. there’s a Japanese word called ‘ikigai’ which is finding your purpose in life. And if you can find things that you love, that you’re curious about and you develop skills in and if that’s a 10 year process (or a lifelong process) and all you’re interested in really is just getting better, (mastery, process or focus or whatever you want to call it) and a whole lot of cool things happen to you — then isn’t that just the best thing that you could possibly give anybody? And that’s kind of in our own small way what we’ve tried to give people, consulting at Performance Lab in a manual setting, and what I’d love to give people all around the world through our Arda Smart Training Community. So the person that can’t imagine running, ends up running a marathon. That’s the goal.
Few things are more satisfying than that, aren’t they?
What I’d like Arda to be is almost a gift. Giving people the opportunity to feel great about themselves and their potential. For instance you do a 10k or an IRONMAN, depending on where you started from, then suddenly the world’s different and hopefully that impacts the rest of your life too.
And I think what’s really important is deeply caring about the customer and trying to understand things from their perspective so that you try to make it as easy a process as possible.
And is that what a good coach has — a lot of empathy for people?
Absolutely, you have to really care and you’ve got to have some intelligent process that takes them from one place to another and also teaches them how to get there. So it’s not a case of ‘wow you did it, you don’t know how to do it again’.
And what else does it take to be a good coach?
You’ve got to be able to listen, be very respectful of people, you’ve got to care a lot, gotta be able to explain things well, you gotta be patient.
Mmm a lot of soft skills. As well as the smarts of the process.
Yes because if they don’t feel that you are connected to them and you understand them as an individual then they’re just another sausage on the machine.
So where do you see the future of this?
I think about it more on the little scale which is making something — a gift for people — that they go, “wow this rocks my world” and then making more of those.
And then Kerri’s works on the big scale, so it’s a good match.
Yeah she can see stuff that I can’t see and then I’m kind of the technical nerd. I’m the gadget freak, intensely curious — probably still dealing with a childhood issue.
We all are!
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