How to Find a Running Coach

How to Find a Running Coach

WHY YOU NEED A COACH

LYNN JENNINGS HAD A SUCCESSFUL YEAR running in 1988. She made the American Olympic team at 10,000 meters. She placed sixth at the Games in Korea. She set a personal record of 31:39. She achieved all this as a self-trained athlete, having run the three previous years without a coach.

The following season, despite those achievements, Jennings decided she needed a coach. She contacted John Babington, an attorney, who in addition to coaching at Wellesley College directed the Liberty Athletic Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jennings explains: "The emotional toll of creating a training program, making it work, and calming my self doubts was too much. I'd stalled out. I felt I needed that objective second eye that only a coach can provide."

Babington, who once had coached Jennings in high school, began directing her workouts. Under his tutelage, Jennings went on to even greater success, winning three world cross-country championships between 1990 and 1992 and placing third in the 10,000 at the 1992 Olympics, lowering her American record to 31:19.

"Every athlete has doubts," says Jennings. "Elite runners especially are insecure people. You need someone to affirm that what you are doing is right, and that's one of the job descriptions for a good coach."

Francie Larrieu Smith finished fifth, one place ahead of Jennings, at the 1988 Olympics. "If anyone seemed to prove you could run fast minus a coach it was Lynn," comments Larrieu Smith. "But look what happened after she got one!"

Larrieu Smith similarly feels she benefitted from a coach's advice. "I learned a lot over the years as to what one needs to do in training, but I didn't trust myself to follow through. It helped to have someone who studied and learned about new ideas and also followed old ideas to put it all together and help me reach my optimum performance level.

"The average runner thinks we are always motivated, but we suffer the same pains and problems as everybody. Having a coach helps you through the rough spots."

Kim Jones of Boulder, Colorado, had personal bests of 34:10 in the 10-K and 2:48 in the marathon before she sought guidance in 1985 from Benji Durden of Boulder. Working mostly by phone and fax, Durden helped Jones lower her times to 32:23 and 2:26. States Jones: "A good coach is someone who gives athletes workouts and explains why they will help. When I go out the door to run, I don't want the stress of thinking what I have to do that day and why I have to do it."

Durden describes another reason to have a coach: "Athletes sometimes tell you they want to do one thing, yet their behavior tells you they want to do another. In coaching, it helps to be able to read minds. I think of myself less as a coach and more as a facilitator."

Babington, who served as one of the women's coaches for the U.S. Olympic team in 1996, has another view of the athlete/coach relationship: "I think of myself as somebody who has responsibility for a super powerful race car, and part of my job is to keep it pointed in the right direction. Just correct the course by a degree or two. Not a major function, but arguably an important one."

Jim Huff explains his role as a coach with Detroit's Motor City Striders: "Someone with experience can look at a runner's training, discuss goals, and develop a program to help that person accomplish realistic goals. A lot of people don't have the basic know-how to progress toward a goal."

It matters little whether the athlete involved is training for the Olympic team or is a beginning runner hoping to finish a 10-K. The basic needs are the same. Runners at all levels can benefit from good coaching.

PERSONAL CONTACT
Francie Larrieu Smith had a series of coaches. As a teenager, she raced for the Cindergals in San Jose, California, guided by Augie Argabright. While she attended California State University in Long Beach, her coach was Preston Davis. Even after moving to Waco, Texas, Davis continued to coach Larrieu Smith by phone. Before the 1980 Olympics, however, Larrieu Smith felt she needed more than a long distance coaching relationship and moved to Waco, where she met her husband, Jimmy Smith. They moved to Denton where he studied for a Ph.D. in exercise physiology at the University of North Texas.

Larrieu Smith, however, no longer felt comfortable training with a college team. She recalls, "A friend on the team suggested her former age-group coach." That was Robert Vaughan of Dallas. Larrieu Smith made contact with Vaughan who agreed to supervise her training. At first, she commuted into Dallas for workouts; eventually she and her husband moved there.

"I considered it important to be near my coach," says Larrieu Smith. "During base training, we might not see each other for a couple of weeks, but doing intervals, Robert would be there to watch. I trained better that way. He could look at me and tell, just by watching my stride turnover, what level I was at in my training."

Vaughan explains: "Francie did not need a coach, but she liked to have one. She could have designed her own workouts. Her husband was an exercise physiologist. But sometimes you can coach somebody else better than you can coach yourself. It's good to have someone to rely on and talk to whose advice you can respect."

Ken Martin, America's fastest marathoner in 1989 with 2:09:38 for second at New York City, used a coach even while serving as a coach himself. Operating out of his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Martin helped to support himself by providing coaching aid by FAX for several dozen runners. Their ability levels ranged from 33:00 to 56:00 for 10-K. At the same time, Martin was being coached by exercise physiologist Jack Daniels, Ph.D., the track coach at State University of New York in Cortland.

Martin and Daniels actually had begun working together when both were living in Eugene, Oregon. Martin had attended school in that city at Lane Community College and the University of Oregon. At about the same time, Daniels was working as an exercise scientist and adviser with the Nike-funded team, Athletics West.

After Daniels moved to New York, he continued to advise a number of athletes, including Martin. Daniels concedes their long-distance relationship was far from ideal. "The primary reason to have a coach," says Daniels, "is to have somebody who can look at you and say, man, you're looking good today. I've coached a lot of people by phone and mail, some successfully, and the thing they miss most is personal contact."

Among runners coached long-distance by Daniels was Diane Busse, a top-ranked 10-K runner, who lived in Boulder, Colorado. He also advised Vicki Mitchell, one of his former team members living in Buffalo, New York, and Cathy Vascon, an Olympic Trials qualifier from Jacksonville, Florida. When Martin got out of the coaching business because he was too busy with his own training, he passed several of his clients on to Daniels. Two of them lived in Santa Cruz, California. Daniels notes that the only time he saw them in person was for 15 minutes in the San Francisco airport while he was en route to Hawaii. Daniels normally works with elite athletes, but also enjoyed working with people of lesser talent, which he felt offered a different challenge. How fast are the Santa Cruz runners? Daniels says of one who was 62 years old: "He would be delighted if I could coach him to break 50 minutes for 10-K."

SCIENTIFIC ADVICE
In working with Daniels, Martin felt one advantage was his coach's extensive scientific background. Daniels, who did his doctoral dissertation testing swift Olympians such as Jim Ryun, George Young and Bob Schul, stands among the top ranks of exercise scientists. "It gives you confidence to be able to rely on someone whose background combines training and physiology," says Martin.

Vaughan also feels coaches need to be well grounded in their scientific knowledge: "Like gravity you can't violate the basic laws of physiology. Some people try. Their experience may be limited to their own case, and they're not observant of others. A coach can bring information from a great number of sources and explain why something works and why something else will not."

Yet despite his scientific background, Daniels states: "The more I coach, the more importance I tend to put on the psychological and personal as opposed to the scientific approach to training."

According to Gordon Bakoulis, a 2:33 marathoner who now coaches other runners: "There are so many intangible ways that working with a coach helps on a day-to-day basis. A coach provides support, and shares decisions, and offers a plan you can stick to--then is around to praise you when the plan pays off."

U.S. Olympic Committee consultant David Martin claims that as athletes get more accomplished, they get a good feeling for what works best in terms of certain details: intervals, reps, long runs. It is then that they need someone to bounce ideas off, as well as someone to moderate the intensity of their efforts.

"Two things happen," says Martin. "First, you need to do more and more work for increasingly smaller gains in fitness. So the injury risk is very high, the burnout rate is very high. Second, the better the runner, the higher the stakes. More money in prizes. More pressure to perform, both internally and from the press. Your motivation becomes extreme. A coach needs to tone this down."

Martin feels that it's difficult for any athlete to step away and analyze his own training. "That's why the athlete needs someone to trust. My idea of a coach/athlete relationship is that of a very small and powerful team."

Keith Brantly, who trains under Martin's guidance, adds: "Putting in the work is easy for a world class athlete. The hard part is knowing when enough is enough. That's where a coach is most useful."

Bob Glover of the New York Road Runners Club works with runners having a variety of ability and experience. He believes the needs of the ordinary jogger are similar to those of the elite athlete, and that includes knowing how much to do. "When in doubt," says Glover, "the coach should do less, and I've gotten softer every year. By minimizing injury and gradually increasing training, a runner will improve."
Why do you need a coach? In summary, there are ten reasons:

1. MOTIVATION: Getting started is important for beginners; keeping going is a necessity for even experienced runners. A good coach can provide the necessary jump-start in the first case and continuous pushing in the latter. Reporting on a regular basis to a coach/mentor--even only once weekly or by mail or phone--can provide an important keystone to any training plan. "Your `average' athletes aren't as highly motivated as Olympians," explains Robert Vaughan. "They work 9-to-5 jobs and can't be expected to train twice daily, or get a massage four times a week. But given their limited time, a good coach still can motivate them to achieve their best."

2. SYSTEM: "Good coaches are like chefs," claims Gary Goettelmann, a coach in Santa Clara, California. "They have a methodology and a system. A disciplined athlete who follows his coach's system is bound to improve." Often, the details in any system are secondary to its mere existence. Jack Daniels claims you could use eight different systems to train the same athlete and achieve the same results. He says, "Having confidence in the system is more important than the actual system itself."

3. PLANNING: "Proper planning can help sharpen a person's goals," says Atlanta's Mary Reed. "A person who would like to break 40 minutes for 10-K and three hours for a marathon may fail at both goals because they're too diverse." A coach can help pick goals that are realistic and design training plans to achieve those goals, both long- and short-term." Goettelmann adds: "This frees the athlete to concentrate on the activity rather than the planning of it. That provides better focus."

4. ADVICE: Once a runner has been working for several years with a coach, the training plan becomes obvious: long runs on Sunday, intervals on Wednesday, rest Friday before the race. But even dedicated runners need advice. Benji Durden worked with 2:26 marathoner Kim Jones for nearly a decade. "I don't do as much coaching as I did at beginning," says Durden. "I've gone from being a coach to being an adviser. Kim developed to the point where she didn't rely on me for every decision." Jones concurs, adding: "Every athlete needs someone there to guide them with those decisions." One key role for coaches advising elite athletes is that of picking races, particularly knowing when to say no in this era of run for the money. But average athletes need similar help to avoid over-racing.

5. INJURY PREVENTION: A coach who carefully monitors an athlete's progress can recognize when the athlete begins to show signs of the fatigue from overtraining that often precedes any injury. A coach standing beside the track during a hard interval workout can call halt, whereas an uncoached athlete might plunge ahead. If and when injuries do occur, a coach can chart a course of rehabilitation and call upon the best medical advice to affect a cure. According to John Babington: "A coach's most important role may be preventing overtraining, which leads to injury, which puts you out of commission."

6. PLATEAU BUSTING: Sooner or later, all runners reach the point when they fail to improve. How to get off a plateau is a common problem. "When I was self-coached, I felt I got stuck at one level," says Lynn Jennings. "I had accomplished all I could do alone." Jennings' first world championship in cross-country came after she began working again with Babington. The same advantage is available to average runners who find a coach. "New runners only do what's fun," explains Reed. "If speed is fun, they train only on the track. If distance is fun, they never do any speed work." A good coach can suggest different types of training that may allow the plateaued runner to climb upward to a new level of performance.

7. CHECK LIST: A good coach keeps an athlete on course by making certain the athlete follows the system and plan, as above. According to David Martin: "A coach who is doing his job remembers where the athlete is heading. He will have a check list of what's important about different phases of the training plan. So when it comes time to do a specific workout, the coach can remind the athlete what they are trying to achieve. This frees the athlete to concentrate on the actual training itself."

8. FEEDBACK: Most runners have a hard time evaluating their own training. Keeping a diary helps, but still is no substitute for a good coach. "Runners tend to doubt their training," confesses Jennings. "If they are worried that they haven't quite done enough they think, `Gee, I better do more.' Having a coach circumvents that, because a coach is an unbiased observer. A coach can look at your workload and evaluate it more objectively than the athlete. That's positive, because a coach can say your mileage looks pretty high, time to do faster work. Or too much speed, you need more of a mileage base."

9. CHEERLEADER: Runners' muscles run on glycogen, but their minds often run on praise. They need encouragement. According to Gordon Bakoulis: "A coach can be emotionally helpful particularly when you have a bad race. The coach can offer a pat on the back, for starters, then later after you've digested your disappointment, the two of you can sit down and analyze: why the bad race?" She adds with a smile: "When you've had a good race, it's also nice to have someone to celebrate with."

10. FUN: Finally, a coach can make training fun by varying what the athlete does--even where they run. The coaching environment offers an opportunity to interact with other runners working with that same coach. "Athletes do need coaches," says David Martin, "but how do you define athlete? Even the everyday jogger, whose only goal is to have fun, can benefit from a coach." For those who run for enjoyment, that may be the best reason to seek coaching help.

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