Smoove wrote:
I haven't had a coach since I ran for the club right after college, and as a Daniels guy I'd be useless tonyou as a coach, but I can share with you what I do as a coach from a process perspective.
I start with a questionnaire to get as much background on the athlete as I think I need, and then I usually follow it up with a 30 minute phone call. I use that to talk through training philosophy, strengths, weaknesses and expectations. I then use the questionnaire and conversation to create a customized plan for the athlete.
When I do that, I lay every day of the training cycle out, including easy days. But then the key is that I explain to the athlete that the plan should be viewed as a roadmap and directions. Just like when you use a roadmap and directions to get someplace, sometimes you have bad traffic or detours. When that happens, you need to find a different route than is set forth in your roadmap. Generally, I asked my athletes to check in with me after their workouts and let me know how they are going and how they are feeling. I will also proactively check in on them usually once per week, sometimes a little less often depending on what is going on. I also invite them to a private Strava group so that I can track what they are doing fairly easily.
I use all of those things as ways to monitor what is going on and adjust as things move forward. More often than not, the adjustment is to back down volume, or slow down paces. Occasionally, we will decide to drop workouts altogether or to change the work out to something less intense. Even more commonly, I find out that the athlete has a new race that they didn't know about early on in the process and we rearrange the schedule to accommodate that.
So the end result can be a fair amount of back-and-forth or very little back-and-forth depending on the athlete. Where I think a good coach adds value is coming up with the customized plan that addresses races, number of weeks until goal race, etc. and then customizing that plan in response to the athletes feedback as things progress.
I think the key is that you should be able to have a free conversation with someone upfront to set expectations so that you know what you are getting. If they aren't going to spend some time upfront with you, then you probably shouldn't hire them as a coach.
I would also say that I view and imperfect local training group as likely to be better than a perfect online coach. I would rather be with two or three other guys doing the same work out even if the workout is only 85% as good as a perfect workout that I have to do alone.
Along the the lines of my question before I guess, what process do you go about to then determine weekly mileage totals? I know a lot depends on experience, but obviously you're not going to be running 15 miles in singles every day. Is there a magic number you think is valid for high level marathon training?
