Where Do We Go from Here?

I was always uncoachable. The few coaches I've had would tell me what the day's workout was and I'd ask why we were doing it; either they had just made it up and had no reason or it was something that seemed to work for them or someone else said it had worked for them. They were idiots, I decided.

For that reason, probably, I've always been a teaching coach. I want my athletes to know why they're doing what they're doing, and not be a dictator or cheerleader like so many others are. I've always coached one or two athletes, those deemed uncoachable, who had odd aims, or strange plans or simply were risky for one reason or another.

I just lost my last athlete.

She'd been training to race 5K. After signing up for a major local race, I pointed out an older woman who always finished a little ahead of her. I told her "Unlike you, she runs extremely even pace. If you stay right behind her and let her do all the work, there's a downhill near the end where you can kick and pass her. It'll give you a PR and feel easy." She told me that nobody thinks that way but me, that she was going to run her own race.

So now it looks like I'm coaching myself from here on. And that leads to the questions of what I plan to do, how I plan to get there and what I'm going to write about. Blogs are dying out, but they should be aspirational and relatable. Not many can relate to those who are going for wins and records; I think I'm going to focus on one race that's always been a problem for me (I got a third place age-group award there once, long ago) and just try to get into decent shape, slowly and methodically. The journey might be worth following.

An unexpected lesson from an unexpected source

I recently ran across Fred Rogers' rules for writing on his show. One of them was to eliminate anything prescriptive, directive or instructive. Because I've been a "teaching coach," I've done a lot of: here's the facts and ideas, here's what I think, here's how that can be used. I'm going to try to stay away from that and perhaps I can teach through example.