…so, why should you become a coached athlete?…

Training and even racing in endurance sport can be very lonely on a day to day level. It’s an almost monk like experience and can be very solitary but it doesn’t have to be that way. As a coached athlete you become part of a team, a community and a support network.

Although I’ve been a runner since childhood, in the beginning it was never about winning or competition. It was more about the love of being outside and simply enjoying the simplicity of running.

Later however and when I first began taking endurance sport more seriously, I would spend hours and hours pouring over books and magazines. I’d search for anything and everything that would be guaranteed to make me faster, go longer and place higher up the results page.

7 years later and by 2015 I hadn’t really elevated myself up the ladders of success, in fact some might even say that I’d stagnated. It was at that time I realised I had gone as far as I could probably go on my own. I’d got myself to 6th at the European Long Distance Triathlon Championships in Weymouth, but for me that just wasn’t enough, I knew I could do better.

It didn’t take me long to realise that it was time to involve a coach, someone I would learn from, be accountable to, be a second pair of eyes looking in on what I was doing, pushing me on and providing that motivation I needed. I also felt the need to be accountable to someone or something apart from myself and my own ego.

Not long after I started working with a coach I found that I was more consistent, and in turn my training became far more structured and directional. Being coached brought new training ideas through knowledge and experience. This provided a far wider and broader picture of my ability, my potential and the overall scope of where I was as an athlete and what was possible.