Blog One

Always happy at the races

It came upon me today that a blog would be a good medium to get my current coaching thoughts and state of mind out to anyone that might be interested in what I am working on / thinking about.

Having to guess what a coach is thinking is a bad place to be and for me to be able to communicate in this way can be valuable.

I will write these up in blog rather than email format and they will be available on the website under the Menu item “Coach’s Blog”

So what is currently ticking away on the coach’s hamster wheel of a brain?

Given that I am always looking ahead in a planning sense but executing on a current sense I am mainly planning and thinking about our base season and developing the athlete’s ability to progress training loads.

On an execution level it’s all about the upcoming races and hitting good sessions that will prepare the athletes for what they can expect on the day. Writing sessions and delivering them, providing relevant feedback and direction, and tracking where we are at.

Training Loads:

With a relatively simple Training Peaks Chart callout I’m able to get a snapshot of how many hours the athlete has completed in the last 365 days. There’s no surprises here of course (well relatively few anyway) and for the most part, the faster the athlete, the more training they do. From a causality aspect, is the higher training volume creating that speed ? or is it just that the quicker athletes like to train more?

That’s hard to tell of course, but one thing we do know is that to get stronger, we need to gradually progress the training load. There’s plenty of nuances of course when it comes to load but on a simple face value we can say that if an athlete is doing 500 hours a year and wishes to get stronger then we can at least guide them towards a 525 hour load next year. If they are maxed out in terms of available time to train hen we have to get down to tier 2 of the loading paradigm, intensity.

Race Prep :

In our squad we have a good mix of athletes. Right now being May we are almost at the end of our season but also we have a World Class Para athlete that has just entered their season proper with their first international race for the season just two weeks ago. Basically we are always in race prep mode - we just have to make sure we have a high focus on the A races and not every single smaller race that pops up.

I am a big believer in session prescription being more important than people give it credit for. It has to be simple, easy to see the focus of the set and importantly it has to motivate the athlete. If they look at Training Peaks and it paints a bleak picture of a set they hate then they won’t be motivated firstly and secondly they won’t execute on it.

The set starts the moment an athlete reads it or is told it by the coach. First step is the mental assessment of it. Hard? Easy? Achievable? ok … let me at it. Then we get execution. Then we get a response. Physically and mentally did it stretch us? Finally we get feedback. A simple conversation at the session or maybe a swap of post-activity comments by the athlete and coach.

Cheers

Coach