Your Coach's Experience

The most important aspect of your coach's knowledge is his ability to speak from experience, but what does that mean? If your Ironman coach broke the tape at Kona, does that make him a worthy coach? No, it makes his coach a worthy coach.

Many athletes confuse the difference between experience. If you want to pay someone a hefty price to teach you what it is like to experience winning an Ironman, go with the athlete. If you want to pay someone to get you where he was, go with the coach. One never ending phenomenon in endurance sports, or any non-mainstream sport, is the onslaught of successful athletes that write books on how to train to be like them. Has anyone ever thought to talk to the person that gave them all that information!?

Sure Tiger Woods, has (at this point) won 5 straight tournaments, but he has a coach for a reason. To many people are quick to grab the book from the famous athlete and fail to realize that his/her coach was the one to get the athlete on the right track. If you are looking for inspiration or connection with that athlete, fine, but don't let him tell you how to set up your training program.

That is not to say that there are athletes that cannot coach, but don't credit his athletic career to his coaching experience (think Larry Bird). When you finally make the decision to hire the right coach remember to then analyze his coaching experience. Has this coach trained amateurs or professionals? Is he trained to improve professionals or take you to the professional level?

Specifically at the longer distance level where, for 75% of the people, finishing is more of a feat than a competition, decide whether your coach is about winning or finishing. There is nothing better or worse about either coach, but you need to understand your goals. If you are competitive, do not hire a finishing coach, regardless of how much fun you think that team may have, you'll end up hating it.

I am more of the competitive type, working on who I am competitive with, but training and racing are not a party to me. Turning every training session or race into a social event is havoc for my motivation and my performance. I enjoy the people at triathlon events, 99% of the time they are a great crowd, but I don't want triathlon to be my social life. I'd just assume take triathlon seriously and use other events to socialize.

Outside of that rant, make sure you really take the type of experience into consideration, understand where there experience is and what type of experience it is, but never just assume experience is the sum of all numbers underneath the major category. If it were that simple, Joe Paterno would be coaching me, for IM FL.