Be a Good Coach

You may never think of yourself as a coach. You may never coach another. But unless you have hired a personal coach for yourself guess what, you are a coach, your own.

You are the one who has to motivate yourself to go out and train, be it running, swimming, cycling, lifting weights or whatever your sport may be. You are the coach who has to make or find an appropriate training plan for yourself and your goals. You are the one who has to follow that plan to the letter to reach that goal.

WAIT! Say what?

Do not believe for a second that you cannot deviate from your training plan. Part of being a good coach is being able to adjust plans to fit what is happening while still reaching your primary goal. Many things may happen that can cause us to alter our training schedule; you may not be hitting your intermediate goals so you need to step back a couple of weeks in your training to build your base. Your kid might have a birthday party at the same time you should be working out. You may be sick and need to rest a couple of days to get better. These are all things that can and do happen during training, we just need to adjust, adapt, and continue on. The training plans are not etched in stone never to be deviated from. They are flexible.

While training for my second marathon several things happened that caused me to miss basically 3 entire weeks of training. Upon returning I had 6 weeks until the marathon. I adjusted and tweaked the training plan so I could rebuild what had been lost in 3 weeks. I kept my race goal the same but changed the strategy to achieve it. I was nervous on race day but adjusting my training to the circumstances and altering my race plan and running with a pace group allowed me to accomplish my goal for that race.

So be a good coach. Listen to your body and your circumstances. Adjust and adapt. Take an extra day off if needed. Switch the order of the workouts if you have to.

Remember to keep it fun and be flexible coach!

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