Morgan Leaving OAC

Make sure he avoids Jerry.

To Jordan Donnelly and Andreas Almgren.

Who is Jordan Donnelly? I've heard he "coaches" a lot of runners but is he actually a coach? Only person I know he 100% coached was Kristian Ulriksen aka Kristian from Norway

Who?

I heard it is all but comfirmed he is joining Mike Smith's group. Word on the street in boulder is that he has been training with Woody and is looking fitter than ever before

Makes sense. In a previous video he was working out with Woody and Woody was essentially teaching him all the in's and out's of double threshold, using the meter, etc. Based on the level of control and presence OAC and Dathan have had in the past (not a dig, Dathan just doesn't miss many workouts) I was surprised to see it so willy nilly. Makes more sense if he is with Smith/Woody properly.

He's not a Nike athlete he can't do that. Remember the article about Mike's Nike group said Nike made two exceptions only for Luis and Nico. No way, unless he switches to Nike

how would he as an On athlete? Mike Smith Elite is now Swoosh TC

Oh sad. What will this mean for the coffee club ? Will Oliver be next ? So many questions. So few answers.

It was interesting to hear him attribute the total lack of flexibility in training to being part of a team, as opposed to a coaching disconnect. It makes me wonder if hes actually discouraged from doing any work with a club at all now, or if he was just sidestepping saying he doesn’t get on well with Ritz's style of coaching

He should join Ben Thomas. I understand many people are pointing to Almgren and how threshold has enabled him to be consistent, but do you really think he can triple digit volume? I’m not saying it is a guarantee he will be injury prone doing double t, but it has to be far higher than if he supplemented much of his volume with cross training as he would be with Thomas. He also gets to train with the reigning 5000m world champion, in addition to Cooper Teare.

Reminds me of the explanation Grant Fisher gave for leaving Bowerman:

The pros have been the training is very customized. It’s just me. So if a pace is a little fast, we’ll tweak it. If it’s a little slow, we’ll tweak it. If the volume isn’t quite right, if I feel like I can handle a little more, a little less, it’s an instant tweak. It snowed a little bit in Park City, so I drove to Flagstaff. There were no logistics involved. If it snows too much in Flagstaff, I’ll go to Phoenix.

When you’re on your own, what you lose in the social setting and the advantages of just having guys to drag you around, you do gain quite a lot in flexibility.

Bowerman, when I’ve been on the team, has been anywhere from 12 to 25 athletes. And each one of those 12 to 25 people all probably have slightly different requests. So you can’t accommodate every single person’s request. And like I said at the beginning, there is a massive advantage to training as a group. But the thing you lose when you train as a very big group is that individuality, that really fine-tune tweaking for an individual’s needs. Because if you’re in a group of 10 guys and everyone’s doing mile repeats, but their reps are one second per mile different, what’s the point of having the group in the first place if everyone’s running individually with minor variations?

I see both sides. As a professional group, Bowerman for the men’s 5k has had more success in the US than pretty much any other group. If you look at the list of sub-13:00s, you look at [World/Olympic] teams as of late, the Bowerman system has produced tons of really good athletes in my event. And there’s a reason for that. It’s a system that works. And when you have a system that works, you can’t change it based on one person’s request. I understand that. But I was ready for those little tweaks in training. So that’s one of the reasons why I’m trying something new.

I have no idea how long this swoosh group lasts but I think you will see more and more of the top runners working with a coach and having training partners and not joining a “team”. It honestly makes way more sense than beating your brains in everyday with the same guys who require different training.

Jordan Donnelly is a good energetic man in the sport. But he has zero coaching pedigree, and minimal characteristics suited to leading an athlete. He is however a good person to have on your team, like a cheer squad.

Morgan had success as a junior with an experienced coach, then more success with an experienced coach at college, then he bombs with Bosshard a beginner coach, then bombs with Ritzenhein a beginner coach.

Wherever he goes, I hope it's with an experienced coach

Easily my least favorite runner.

Easily.

It seems ideal to have a hyper-individualized program with a few domestiques to support. Isn't that basically what Jakob does?

If he leaves Boulder, does this mean Coffee Club is toast?

And Jess Hull