Good Interview of Scott Simmons on Men's Racing

Awesome interview!

To anyone reading:

If Simmons should happen to land at your college or university, consider yourself lucky. At the end of his career he will go down as one of the best US distance coaches ever!

Mensracing Interview with Scott Simmons

by Duncan Larkin

It’s hard to find a running coach with a resume as impressive as that of Scott Simmons. As the head running coach at Virginia Intermont College, Simmons has coached his teams to five consecutive NAIA men’s cross country titles and has earned six National Coach of the Year awards. His two standout post-collegiate athletes, American 25K record-holder Fernando Cabada and Fasil Bizuneh, are both 2008 Olympic Marathon Trials qualifiers. Simmons is the co-author of the acclaimed book Take the Lead: A Revolutionary Approach to Coaching Cross Country.

Recently, in a desperate move that signified its financial problems, Virginia Intermont College cut its track and cross country programs and fired Simmons. When contacted for comments about Simmons’s firing, Heather Conley, the Athletics Director at Virginia Intermont College, informed us that personnel issues will not be discussed publicly. There has been speculation that the firing was related to Simmons’s grassroots fund-raising effort to fly 18 members of his team and himself to the NAIA Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Fresno, California. Mensracing.com caught up with Simmons on the first night of those championships.

MensRacing.com: You guys are out at the NAIA nationals right now. I read on your fund-raising website that you were able to raise the money for airline tickets and lodging to get the team

Scott Simmons: Yeah, that’s pretty much where we’re at. The team is out buying their food, but that’s better than not being here at all.

MR: How’s the team’s morale?

SS: As of two weeks ago, none of them thought that they’d be running, so they’re just as excited as can be. They’re out here doing their best. So far the first day has gone better than it’s ever gone before. We’re happy about that. We’ve qualified everyone who’s raced today for the finals or the semifinals. We’re not done yet. We’ve still got the 200, the steeplechase, and a final in the 10K tonight, but so far, so good.

MR: This is Virginia Intermont College’s last season, which puts you in the unfortunate situation of having to find another coaching position and your athletes in the upsetting circumstance of finding other schools to run for next year. Did you ever think that you and your athletes would face something like this?

SS: A lot of the NAIA schools are small private schools and they’re tuition-driven so they kind of go year to year in terms of their financial stability. I think it’s just part of the landscape when you coach in the NAIA. It happens from time to time with a lot of programs and a lot of schools—they hit different kinds of hurdles. Eventually they have issues and they start looking for solutions, and I don’t always agree that the solutions they find are the best ones, to cut programs that are actually generating tuition revenue. In this case, that’s the choice they took to prove they’re serious, but I don’t think it’s going to result in what they want it to result in.

MR: You guys didn’t receive any financial help from the NAIA at all, right?

SS: No. The NAIA does not pay for nationals at all, and the way I understand it, the membership fees for institutions is much less than in the three divisions of the NCAA. But the schools are required to pay for their own travel for post-season. It depends on how successful you are—how much athletics ends up costing you.

MR: What you are going to do after this season? Where are you going to focus your efforts?

SS: I’m not sure. I’m at a point where I just don’t want to jump somewhere to jump somewhere. I’ll take some time and see if there’s anything that suits me. I’m looking at an opportunity to find a better coaching situation—not just for me but for the athletes I coach.

MR:I’d like to ask you about your book, Take the Lead: A Revolutionary Approach to Coaching Cross Country, and certain aspects of your coaching philosophy that you outline in it. You’ve had great success most recently with Fernando Cabada and Fasil Bizuneh. Can someone read your book and glean tidbits that you used with those two standout runners, or are there more advanced principles that you applied to them that you don’t advocate or mention in your book?

SS: The book is basic principles that should be used to direct training. They are applicable to both those two [Cabada and Bizuneh]; they’re applicable for college athletes and high school athletes. It doesn’t matter. They’re very much based in physiology and adaptation. They are useful for anything.

MR: Many reviews of your book state that it deviates from most running/coaching books in that it’s not a formula book—meaning, you address certain principles in it with words versus arming the reader with spreadsheets and calculations. Would you agree with those reviews?

SS: Yes. I think so. I think the book is designed to get coaches to think about their [athletes’] training. I actually just had a really nice conversation with Joe Vigil this morning. He happens to be my mentor and is one of the best coaches in the world to bounce ideas off of. We were just talking about some ideas relative to altitude training and really just looking at them in terms of basic physiology—why things occur in the body. When you understand the theories and you understand why something occurs, you can apply it to training, and that’s one of the focuses in the book—for coaches to evaluate and consider the effect of their [athletes’] training; to continually review it in terms of the specific demands of the event and really think from the athlete’s perspective.

Physiology is great; it’s a science and science is very useful, but physiology and all the sciences, what they truly are, are external measurements. When we’re talking about athletics, what’s really happening is inside the athlete. And that’s what’s real to the athlete. We can talk about lactate levels, we can talk about energy systems, but the athlete perceives things in a totally different way and [we have to put ourselves] in their shoes: thinking about what their challenges are from the start line to the finish line in terms of everything: physiology, biomechanics, and the nervous system. Thinking about all that is what should drive your training. And being willing and able to continually reevaluate what you are doing, looking at it every year, and saying, “Does this make sense?” In terms of what the actual challenge of the event is, sometimes it takes a long time and there are things right there in front of your face that you’re just not considering in that way and suddenly you say, “Aha! Why did I do it this way? This makes no sense whatsoever. There’s a much more specific way to train this system than I considered before.”

MR: You mentioned external and internal measurements. Along the lines of internal measurements, do you ever work with your athletes on the mental aspects of training and racing like using positive imagery techniques?

SS: My undergraduate degree is in psychology, and I have to say that by the time I finished my [masters] degree, I wasn’t so much a big fan of psychology anymore. I think particularly in terms of sports psychology there’s a disconnect, in that we send our athletes to sports psychologists to fix them. “Mental” has a negative connotation if you say, “This guy’s mental” or “has mental problems.” What we’re really talking about is very simply preparation—the skills. Are these athletes prepared with the skills they need to compete in their event? I think it’s easy for a coach to say, “Well that kid’s got a mental block” or “a mental problem” as opposed to actually looking at the training and saying, “Maybe the training’s making him fit, but not making him capable of executing these skills during the race.” And that’s what we try to do in training: We try to bring those skills into the workouts themselves. So when [the athletes] get to the race, they aren’t hoping that they’re going to compete well and hoping that things are going to go well; they already know exactly what the challenges are. They know how their body is going to respond and they have a good idea of what to expect in the competition.

MR: Along the lines of knowing what to expect in the race, do you advocate a lot of goal-specific pace workouts then?

SS: Goal pace for sure, but there’s more to it than pace. You have to be prepared to run at a certain speed for an event, but I think there’s a little bit more to it than just the speed. When we go back to the experience of the athlete from start to finish, the whole challenge of distance running is somehow managing to run fast or faster as you have a buildup of fatigue or, as a physiologist would say, lactic acid, or in the case of the marathon, you have a depletion of glycogen. Either way, these physiological aspects are experienced by the athlete as, “Man, I’m hurting; I don’t feel good anymore. It’s getting hard for me to continue at this pace.” And in addressing that in the training, I think that is the race-specific attribute that we need to focus on.

MR: I recently read an interview with Fasil Bizuneh. In it, he talked about what you had him doing that led to his success. It sounded as though you’re not a big fan of the taper.

SS: It depends what you mean by “the taper.” Again, when we go back to the specific demands of distance running, and we realize how large a component the aerobic capacity is, why in the world would we want to get away from that at any point in the training? I think when people taper, they’re hoping for some magic bullet; they’re hoping to make something out of nothing in essence; they’re hoping for some great physiological change to come about by doing less than what they were doing before, and that’s not how the body adapts. [People] think, “Well. I’ve trained so hard for so long, now the body needs this recovery and this regeneration.” But that recovery and that regeneration need to go hand in hand with progression and hard work—whether it’s volume or pace or whatever. If they’re not recovering as they’re training through the training period, then adaptation is not happening, and to think that all of a sudden when they can take two weeks easy it’s going to occur is kind of foolish.

MR: I think from a workout perspective a lot of serious athletes know what they need to do. I’m wondering then what your philosophy is on recovery and what you have your athletes run on easy days. What kind of advice do you give to your athletes regarding this aspect? For example, they just completed a hard interval workout. The next day, what are you telling them to run? Are you giving them a pace recommendation or just telling them run as slow as they want?

SS: I guess it comes back to looking at the training you are doing—what kind of training it is, so that you can figure out what that recovery is. Obviously if you’re doing very long runs and you’re depleting glycogen then it means not running that afternoon and eating well. If you are looking at recovery from the standpoint-as you mentioned-of a hard interval workout then obviously not doing something that’s producing lactic acid the next day is definitely a help. By the same token, doing anything that’s aerobic is certainly going to help you recover. I think again that’s one of the fallacies when coaches look at doing a taper at the end of the season, they think they’re giving their athletes more recovery by cutting out some of the slow, easy aerobic runs, when they’re actually cutting out a very important recovery component. Going out there and doing anything that increases the aerobic content of your blood and increases the circulation to your muscles, you know, helps bring oxygen and nutrient-rich blood to your muscles, is a benefit for the athlete. There’s no doubt about that.

You mentioned in terms of the pace as well. I recommend that after a very hard day, the athletes at least begin their runs easy. By the same token, I don’t want them running a totally easy run unless they really need it, unless they really had a knock-down, drag-out workout. This is where I feel the athlete and the coach need to work together. I always consider that there are two coaches involved: the coach and the athlete, both working as coaches, looking at the training and thinking about things. But if the workout was something more anaerobic-threshold in nature, like longer intervals or a tempo run, they’re going to recover much easier than that, and it’s probably better in that recovery run not to do it completely easy; once the body’s warmed up, once the athletes feel loose and are able to pick up the pace a little bit, they [should] minimize some of the very slow, nonspecific training. The aerobic component is fine, but it’s way far away from the specific demand of any race, which is to run fast. So it’s always good to finish at a faster pace as opposed to just a plodding effort for an entire run.

MR: It sounds like you like to have your athletes progress from session to session in the number of repeats that they do. This must pose challenges as a coach, getting your athletes motivated from week to week throughout the season to do more. How do you get them to give one or two more in each successive workout?

SS: When you tie it in to the specific demands of the race, let’s say you are training for a 10K, then the volume of your workout must be at least 10K. Now, if you haven’t progressed to a level where you can do 10K, then you probably shouldn’t be racing one, and you need to take that time to develop. We had a freshman who came in, he pretty much came from zero. He was brought in before I was hired, and I asked him, “What’s the longest you’ve run at one time.” And he said, “The two-mile.” I said, “No, not the longest you’ve raced, the longest you’ve ever run?” And he said, “Right. That would be the two-mile.” He had never run longer in training than the two-mile race. He came to college and was he supposed to run an 8K as a freshman? There’s no way. We just had to start at ground zero, and it was going take as long as it took to progress him to be able to train for that 8K distance. We pretty much tell the athlete, “This is what you have to do in the race, so we need to progress to be capable of doing this in the race.” They understand it. They understand that it’s a challenge and it’s going to take time—maybe longer for some and shorter for others.

Interview conducted on May 24, 2006, and posted on June 7, 2007.

definitely agree with his view on tapering, by keeping the mileage relatively consistent, even at the end of the season. A different philosophy for sure, but a good one.

The man can straight up coach.

dude is teaching kung fu - "you must feel kung fu, not think kung fu" - this is why there are no formulas.

Willard: Could we, uh... talk to Coach Simmons?

Photojournalist: Hey, man, you don't talk to the Coach. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet-warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he'll... uh... well, you'll say "hello" to him, right? And he'll just walk right by you. He won't even notice you. And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you in a corner, and he'll say, "do you know that 'if' is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you"... I mean I'm no, I can't... I'm a little man, I'm a little man, he's... he's a great man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas...

darkinlunkin wrote:

Interview conducted on May 24, 2006, and posted on June 7, 2007.

Hmm.

Looks like Wejo has been working at Mensracing.

It is intersting how they both knew that he was getting canned a year in advance.

A very interesting thought, who would you put in your top ten or even just top 5 coaches?Hudson? Simmons? Vigil? Mahon? Salazar?

Zemax-EE ODP wrote:

Awesome interview!

To anyone reading:

If Simmons should happen to land at your college or university, consider yourself lucky. At the end of his career he will go down as one of the best US distance coaches ever!

I think he should do a seance and interview dead World War 1 poets who ran sub 15-minute 5Ks in no man's land.

The dude is a poet. Saw him read in ND. Different kind o' guy.

You guys are lemmings

lemmings or lemons?

Wetmore - but only for college types, seems to be tuned in to coaching in college.

Vigil - what more needs to be said?

Bowerman - ditto

Dellinger - ditto

Sevene - ditto

Simmons - he still has some refining, but he is getting there.

Salazar - honestly, I just do not trust the guy as a "coach" - there have been too many rumors and accusations throughout his career as an athlete and coach.

Hudson - opportunistic, jumped in front of the parade

SriLanks...

That's not really fair about Hudson. Yes, I've met him and he's a bit goofy, but who is not opportunistic? There's a saying that goes like "There are some mistakes you need a PhD to make." Likewise, you only learn how to coach elites by coaching elites, and making mistakes.

And the parade thing? What does that mean?

(PS Let's not fall into Hudson bashing here)

Who does Simmons coach?

If one jumps in front of a parade - the impression is given that the jumper is in fact leading the parade.

so maybe then hudson is leading the parade. if he's coaching ritz and ritz is running fast, thata's the start of a nice parade

I don't want to bash Hudson. I just have to wonder why he's mentioned in the same breath as coachs like Vigil, Wetmore, even Salazar - all coaches that have proven themselves for decades, handling a variety of athletes and talent levels - and Hudson has only essentially taken 1 guy (an already superstar talented elite) and ridden the wave of this young man's success. He has not dramatically taken him to the next level (in fact he has been hurt continually), but has at best kept him exactly where he was when they started (give or take a few seconds at a any given distance)...So though I have no ill will toward Hudson, I do not think it appropriate to mention him in relation to these other very noteworthy and successful coaches.