Can Endurance Athletes Truly Learn from Other Athletes & Coaches? - Coach Tip Tuesday

EIGHT years!  For the 416th Tuesday in a row, it is Coach Tip Tuesday!

Eight years ago, my friend, colleague, and mentor Coach Brendan Jackson died suddenly and unexpectedly while running the Seneca7 relay race.  I was devastated when Brendan died, and I dealt with my grief in one of the most therapeutic ways I know: I wrote about it.  I decided to write about something Brendan taught me, and in doing so, I felt like Brendan wasn’t truly gone.

For the past eight years, I’ve made it a tradition to share something that honors him, his spirit, and the things he taught me and so many others on the annual anniversary of Coach Tip Tuesday.  Here’s a recap of what I’ve shared in those anniversary posts:

• Some of the kicks in the rear that he used to dole out
• How fundamentals are the foundation of any and all athletic gains
• How running laps to get a “good” distance on your Garmin is just plain silly
• How we should all write ourselves a letter
• How important it is that you have something do you do in your leisure life whose only function is joy
• Why duration-based training is better than distance-based training
• What if you fly?‍

Eight Years of Coach Tip Tuesday

As I considered what I wanted to write about for this year’s Coach Tip Tuesday anniversary post, I reflected back to that first Coach Tip Tuesday that I wrote eight years ago.  Eight years simultaneously seems like such a long time and such a short time.  While eight years is not the longest period of time ever, it is certainly enough time for us to grow and change as humans, and I’m no exception to that.  The person and coach I am today is an evolved version of the coach and person who wrote that first Coach Tip Tuesday article.

Reflecting back over those eight years, I started really thinking about the nature of that evolution and growth.  While the foundational elements of my coaching style are the same (my coaching practice is rooted in honesty, treating all athletes with dignity, and supporting athletes where they are), I can pinpoint many things that I now do and approaches that I now take that are vastly different from how I was thinking and coaching back in 2017.  I’ve learned from all of the athletes I’ve coached and the experiences I’ve had over the years, which has collectively added up to manifest as some significant evolutions in how I approach coaching and how I guide athletes.

The Most Significant Thing I’ve Learned as an Endurance Coach

Of all of the changes I’ve been able to appreciate over the years, there’s one thing that stands out to me as the most significant thing I’ve learned.  Are we able to learn from the teachings, experiences, and mistakes of others, or do we have to make mistakes for ourselves to learn life’s lessons?

I’ve thought about this countless times over the years, and it’s something I’ve really been thinking about over the last several months.  An endurance sport and the training for it is often a mirror for life, and the lessons we glean from our training are often about much more than running, swimming, or cycling.

After 15+ years as an endurance athlete and coach, I’ve come to appreciate that I will never stop learning about endurance sports.  And that is a mirror for life; I will never stop learning about life and I will never stop learning the lessons that life has to teach me.  But when considering that learning process, how do we have to learn those lessons?  Because I do believe that we will learn the lessons that both life and endurance sports are teaching us.  So it’s not a matter of if we’ll learn the lessons, it’s a matter of when, and how. 

The longer I am both alive and an endurance coach and athlete, I realize that a big piece of the how is the struggle and cost that it takes to learn the lesson.  In my early coaching years, I tended to try and prevent athletes from doing unwise things…to an extreme.  I didn’t realize how important the freedom to make choices - even unwise one - is for all the athletes I was working with.  A big part of my entire job is giving solid advice to athletes.  But what I’ve learned is that my telling an athlete to do something or not to do something is often not sufficient for them; they need to have the experience themselves to understand why I’m recommending what I’m recommending.

Endurance Athletes Must Feel the Costs of their Choices

Coming to realize this made me evolve my approach to coaching.  While I still absolutely dole out advice to athletes (literally every single day), I realize now that my job is to give athletes information so that they can make an informed choice about what they would like to do, and to support their freedom to make whichever choice they do.  It is not my job to make a choice for them or to be hard-handed toward them and to try and force them into a choice.  Even if I see them making a choice that I wouldn’t recommend, I realize that athletes need to “play it through”, and that this (making a choice and seeing how it turns out) is actually what is going to help them learn the most, about endurance sports and possibly even about themselves.  

This is hard (very hard) for me because I care deeply about each and every athlete I work with, and I desperately want to see them remain safe (injury-free) and to succeed at reaching their goals.  To watch athletes make a choice that I know may lead to an end point that they will be unhappy with is quite possibly one of the hardest things I do in my job.  I am not a parent (and I’m not saying that coaching endurance athletes is the same as raising competent humans), but I imagine that the angst I feel about this must be similar to what parents feel when they are raising children.

When I was working with my first coach, Karen Allen-Turner, she tried to gently steer me in the direction that would lead me to success.  I was a combination of both ignorant and arrogant back then, and I thought I knew more than she did…about a lot of things.  Nevermind the fact that she had 25 years of experience in endurance sports and working with athletes.  Me, someone who was new to endurance sports, surely knew more, right?  

Wrong.  It took me crashing and burning (sometimes multiple times…I can be quite stubborn, and I was even more stubborn when I was younger) to learn the lessons Karen was trying to teach me.  I had to feel the cost of my decisions, and see how things actually worked out (or how things actually didn’t work out).  Hearing about Karen’s experiences wasn’t enough.

When thinking about my own experience and the experience I’ve sometimes had as a coach giving out advice to athletes that gets ignored, I often think of a line Glinda the Good Witch says in The Wizard of Oz: “She wouldn’t have believed me.  She had to learn it for herself.”  I had to learn things for myself.  And it would be arrogant and ridiculous of me to think that the athletes I coach are any different than me.  They are not.  So these days, I appreciate this…that all of us need to count the costs of our choices ourselves, and that this is how we learn and grow.  

I realize now that my job isn’t to stop athletes from making unwise choices before they happen.  Instead, my job as an endurance coach is to be there for the athletes I coach, to support them along the way, to give them as much information as possible, to give them the freedom to make their own choices, to celebrate with them in their successes, and to be there to support them if they do stumble along the way.  And it’s this support through the stumbles and setbacks that might be the most significant thing; to be there to tell them that it’s okay, that we all stumble, that this is how we all learn, and how this is part of the larger process is an important part of their ultimate growth and success as endurance athletes.

The Bottom Line

Coach Brendan was excellent at supporting the athletes he worked with.  He may be physically gone, but the impact he had on my life and the lives of countless other athletes and coaches in the endurance sports community continues to ripple all of these years later.  In fact, I feel like I’m still learning the end lessons of some teachings he planted the seeds for when he was still alive.  What a marvelous thing…to see how we can still grow, evolve, and how those we loved can still live on, even when we are temporally past something that looked like an ending.