Endurance runners sometimes ask why it is beneficial to go to the trouble and expense of having a coach.  They’re thinking that it might be just as good (or maybe even better) to forgo the weekly or monthly tutoring of a real-live human mentor and to follow a high-quality “canned program” instead.  After all (the thinking goes), if you’ve got a great schedule to follow, isn’t that enough, especially if you are the kind of runner who doesn’t need or like “hand-holding?”

What is forgotten during such cognitions is that working with a good coach is like having a 10-year-old checking out your training, a check-out which can lead to some notable PRs.

In one of his memorable films, the great runner Groucho Marx, portraying a soldier-like commander of some sort who was examining a chart of military movements, uttered the famous line, “A child of three could understand this map.”  After a moment of reflection, he followed up with, “So bring me a child of three, as soon as possible.”

Groucho was admitting his cartographic shortcomings, but he was also acknowledging the fact that a set of innocent, naïve eyes, unaccustomed to looking at things in the usual way, can often understand complicated situations and produce important insights.

That’s certainly one reason why I like to take my 10-year-old daughter grocery shopping with me: She locates important things in the store that I would never see.  Just the other day she found “pinwheel picks” in a spot within the store which I had walked by scores of times over the last few years, without ever detecting the presence of these unique items.

In case you are not a regular pinwheel-pick user, pinwheel picks are simply extra-long toothpicks with brightly colored pinwheels at their ends, and they automatically help kids reach PRs in the fruit-consumption segments of their meals.  Put a fork or spoon next to a bowl of fruit, and your child might eat about half of what’s in the bowl, if you are fortunate.  Stick a pinwheel pick in one of the pieces of fruit, and all of the fruit will soon be gone.  It’s just a lot more fun eating fruit with something which has a colorful pinwheel at one end, compared with stabbing the stuff with the same implement used to ingest chicken.

My daughter could see something in the store which would instantly double her fruit consumption - but which I would never see, because I didn’t know how to look.  I knew how to search for high-quality fruit but not how to seek the key to the achievement of my goal – greater consumption of that fruit.  In effect, I was walking through the store with blinders on.

A good coach knows how to find things which you can’t see.  That’s why I say it’s like having a 10-year-old take a close look at your training.  A helpful coach can “see” counter-productive self-talk during races, self-talk which might seem completely normal to you.  An involved coach can also detect other problems which you might not think about (or might not know how to assess), including low carbohydrate intake and an overall mental approach to training which precludes major improvement.  These are difficulties that a “canned program” can’t address.

A good coach also knows how to define the problem at hand correctly.  In the case of the fruit-eating, I had defined the overall process as: Go to store, acquire high-quality fruit, drive fruit home, present fruit to daughter, daughter eats fruit.  The most-important part of the process for me was the acquisition of the “high-intensity” fruit: If that were achieved, “daughter eats” should become reality, I thought.

My daughter (the actual fruit-eater) had defined the process correctly, that is, in a way which would help her actually improve her fruit stamina.  Her conception was simpler, too: Make fruit-eating fun, daughter eats fruit.  It contained the key element – make fruit-eating fun, the factor that I was too blind to find.

A great coach can make training simpler and more fun (and therefore lower in anxiety) and can define the improvement process correctly for you.  He/she can identify the key elements of training which will optimize your improvements in performance.  And, he/she can guide you through the correct progressions of training, so that you’ll not only acquire high-quality “fruit” (training sessions) but will also arrange the various mangoes, apples, and oranges in exactly the right way for you.

With my coaching program, you’ll get a set of eyes which will look at you and your running in a completely new way.  I’ll help you find the things which have been missing in your training and guide you carefully toward some very exciting running performances.  It will be an exhilarating experience for you as you feel your running capacity soaring, and it will be a great thrill for me to see you transform your running.

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