Coach/Athlete Communication with CTS Coach Ryne Anderson | Koopcast Episode 115

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is with one of our fellow cts coaches coming to us all the way from the beast coast in tennessee it is ryan anderson who is a two-time offender of the KoopCast and i wanted to bring ryan on the podcast today to talk about something very specific and something that is probably one of the most important aspects of a coach athlete relationship and that is communication and how to get it started on the right foot i spend a lot of time during the course of this podcast talking about the x's and o's and different training interventions whether it's altitude or heat or dietary interventions and i probably don't spend nearly enough time discussing this aspect of communication and that is going to change with this podcast right here i wanted to bring ryan on specifically because the ultra lottery season has commenced we are starting to see athletes set their seasons up and as a part of that they are signing up for coaching and droves and ryan just happens to be right in the thick of it all and he's got a very good perspective on how to set up coach athlete communication very

cleanly succinctly and in a way that will improve your performance but if you're not a coached athlete if you're self-coached fret not because there are tidbits in this podcast that are for you particularly around how you can harness your post activity comments year after year after year to take advantage of your your individual strengths and weaknesses so that you can progress that's what i wanted to say progress as an athlete from season to season to season all right folks with that as a preamble i'm going to get right out of the way here's my conversation with coach ryan anderson all about coach athlete communication like i mentioned off air the thing that i want to try to communicate to the listeners here is to peel the curtain back a little bit on a really practical aspect of the coach athlete relationship and that's community that's communication um we've both had had the experience and this is really pertinent right now this is going to come out in the middle of february and athletes have just kind of like survived the lottery process and a lot of them have laid their seasons out and as a consequence of that they look at that and they say okay i'm gonna need help and so we get a lot of new athletes coming in the door in january and february and most of the time they're coming in the door because they're trying they're trying to like shore up some part of the like physical preparation

right that they that they're going to undertake to get them ready for these events and when we when we when we take them on as new athletes they want the magical workout right that you're going to give them tomorrow or maybe even later that day that's kind of that that's going to you know automatically transform them from where they're at to where they're going to be but what we try to do as coaches is we try to one of the bigger things that we um that that we focus on on some of the initial coach athlete uh consults and calls and pieces of communication is to set up the communication from the get-go so that it helps facilitate the training process as efficaciously as possible and all too often athletes don't realize how how important that actually is and so what i want to try to do during that the course of this conversation is is to peel back that practical curtain on how we try to facilitate that and then why that ends up being important to the athlete on the other kind of on the other other end of the computer screen or on the recipient end of the actual workouts in terms of how that actually manifests itself into uh training changes and training architecture and things like that so you've been taking on a lot of new athletes january and february let's just start out with that really practical point of view of when you get a new athlete you know you're going to start to work with them what are the first few p what are the first few things that you are communicating with that athlete

about and doing with that athlete to set the whole relationship off on the right foot so first thing is determining why did they seek out a coach in the first place um is it oh i need to be held more accountable which is a very common answer or nutrition always goes wrong i can't figure out the pacing determining what they need or want from a coach then sets the foundation all right and then i like to at the end of every like initial like they fill out a questionnaire with me we go over that and at the end of that initial phone call and it's like okay what do you expect for me and that question usually throws them for a loop because they think it's gonna it's okay the athlete has come to the coach and i'm going to i'm going to learn i'm going to do what they say but i want to know what are your expectations for me do you do you do you need me to give you tough love do you need a cheerleader um what do you need for me and then i feel like that builds trust from the get-go so they're gonna they're gonna buy in more to the relationship rather than just like okay i'm gonna see all my workouts on training peaks i'm gonna do my best to execute and i'm gonna improve but are those other factors uh the counting for life are we practicing nutrition all the other x factors of ultra running are we taking those into account um so i feel like that's the first place to start from and i also define my expectations for them like okay we're

going to communicate you've got to fill out your comments and training peaks um i'm not i'm not your therapist but i want to know what's going on with your life what's work like how's parenting going um because that's going to give me more insight into how to structure your training when are certain times of the year we can get more training in when do we need to back off and just always think in big picture so i can be the the eyes in the sky so to speak to see like okay three to four weeks down the line this is where we want to be you're very much stuck in the now as you should be but i'm i'm overseeing the training we we have a long-range plan and that's what we're following let's take those first two points and peel them apart a little bit you know you've got this kind of like two-pronged approach with asking the athletes first off what what do they want and most of the times in my experience at least and i think dominic or athlete services manager who's been on this podcast before and i'm trying to get him back on again for this very topic he he will say that that answer usually comes about fairly easily with the incoming athletes they always kind of know i mean that's that's the reason coaching is a considered purchase right people just don't like walk through the grocery store aisle and you know pick it up like a pack of gum as they're like checking out without thinking about it they've typically thought about it and done research and maybe even called and done you know some initial kind of like consults with coaches and things like that before they determine who the right one is for them so that my point with that is is they have this initial framework in their head of

what what what what do they want out of it um but the real interesting thing to me about that question is it's actually comes in two parts it's first one is they don't know what they don't know right so typically they have this view in their head of how the coach athlete relationship is ultimately going to work either from uh what am i going to do from a day-to-day standpoint or a communication standpoint or whatever and then the second thing is this is like well why what about that aspect right i want to i want the cheerleader right well what about that aspect is actually driving the fact that that's what you want out of a coach do you need to be pumped up do you need some sort of like emotional engagement within your training program in order to facilitate it and i and i'm wondering how how how you create that like deeper dive with the athletes that are coming in the door in order in in why that is important to to do so as opposed to just taking the blanket answer and just kind of running with it because coaching is meant to be individualized and it's yeah it's very easy to say like oh yeah if you just want a training plan you can find one on the internet um but like you said you're not just going through the grocery store i'm like oh that looks good i'm gonna buy that with the coach it's a it's a financial investment nearly every ultra runner who does this it means a lot to them it's a lot it's

maybe it's a way to to escape from life stress work through things they need a goal outside of life to be a better husband wife employee all that stuff so they're they're coming to you and like hey i'm i'm gonna trust you with my training i'm gonna trust you with this thing i'm really really passionate about how can we get the most out of this and kind of let them do a lot of talking at the first like okay what's your athletic history like did you come from a previous coach why are you no longer with that previous coach what worked well what didn't work well and it's just it's a lot of listening and and figuring out like okay it sounds like they respond really well to to knowing why are we doing all these workouts so they can buy in and go execute or they they need a lot of back and forth to account for a fluctuating schedule here's how yeah here's how i've always approached it is is like once again they they they know athletes will typically come in the door and they have a very clear vision of i want this i want account it's usually like one or two things i want accountability i want some sort of structure i want to improve when last year i did not improve like those types of things but when you find out what the like the value system is behind all each of those wants i actually write that down in my coach athlete notes and i go back and i re-reference that during like really

critical training phases and say hey listen remember you came to me and this amount of accountability was important to you because you wanted to free your emotional resources up so that you can kind of focus on your family so you're redirecting the amount of resources that you were previously allocating to figuring out your training you're offloading that on me so that you can put more on your family and i'll kind of i'll use that as a little bit of like a little bit of this something like the logs that i can throw on the fire with uh uh with athletes but regardless of athletes if athletes are self-coached or if they're looking for a coach i think flushing out that initial answer of what what you ultimately want from it is is a really important one because i also think that that can drive who is the right coach for you because as you and i know right we we work in a coaching group and although we try very very hard to get everybody on kind of the same level playing field at the end of the day coaches are going to have their individual strengths and weaknesses whether it's communication or they know this area physiology better they know nutrition better or whatever and a lot of times that what do you want and why do you want it question can drive this is going to be a better solution for me whether it's coaching or figuring it out by myself or whatever it is then it would be if you just kind of ignored that question the second part of this that you mentioned always gives me a chuckle and i've had the exact same experience that you have had where athletes get stumped on this

and that is what do you expect of me as a coach and i think the reason that athletes get get stuck on this is because they don't know what they don't know and their their interpretation or their vision or their only experience i guess is the best way to put it their only experience with a coach or maybe even their predominant experience with a coach is it as a high school basketball player high school swimmer or something like that where the coach is standing on the sidelines with the clipboard and whistle and that is not the situation that we are in as remote based adult coaches that uh are coaches for adults that uh have a much different kind of kind of role in their lives and um i've always found that i've had to kind of like not lead the athlete into that question but let them sit on it a little bit and flush it out over the course of time because they don't know it and i don't know if that's been your experience as well or if you can enlighten the audience on why that question or how that question actually affects the the coaching that you deliver yeah i think like the athlete history if they grew up playing team sports that gives you some dynamics and to they respond well to to structure and being direct and honest and if they're not coming from an athletic team sports background where they've worked with coaches a lot of the time uh then it allows the coach to be more explicit and like hey this is how it works because yeah

they don't know what they don't know um you can explain it out for them and it's just a way to to get get to know the athlete and then once i just feel like putting the onus on them and this is this is a relationship for the both of us i don't expect you to follow blindly what i say and just execute what's on the plan not ask questions about why we're doing what we're doing um and and be be scared to communicate like i didn't get that run in because of this reason um i i don't have the time i need to get that run in they they feel like they're letting us down but yeah we're we're both adults we understand the dynamics of life and the balance and everything and like hey i'm your coach i can swap i can swap that stuff around very very easily um and we can make this work yeah don't be a training robot right that that's the vocabulary that i use is and i caution people with this is yeah i like i i'm honored that you trust me to do to like put the right training in front of you and evaluate it correctly but you're still an integral part in this entire process so don't be a robot if for whatever reason you're tired that's not a sign of weakness you got to tell me about it and we're going to get into this post activity comments part and that that's a very specific vocabulary within the technology that we use but i think that that is a neat little window into the communication part between the between the

coach athlete uh relationship and what i'm referring to is is we use a we use a piece of technology called training peaks which has been around for a long time and in most people's opinion is the de facto piece of technology that coaches that endurance coaches and athletes use to prescribe analyze and give and give feedback on workouts and there's this section there's this section within the tool itself and all the tool itself for the uninitiated is an interactive calendar where the coach can post workouts and then the files from your gps uh watch and or your heart rate monitor and then also all of the other metrics that you can upload through your activity trackers and things like that get uploaded to this website they get matched to the workout and then the coach can go in and evaluate it and look at the pace and look at the heart rate and look at the elevation gain and things like that and it's this interactive training log that um between the coach and the athlete and there's this one particular section of it that i always highlight as something that's very critical because all too often when athletes start to interface with this piece of technology they get overwhelmed with acronyms and with data right there's all these different colors and shades of you know blue yellow and red and uh stoplights and acronyms for different things and you know it'll total up everything in any number of different ways but one of the things that i think is is probably the thing that is the most powerful and that whole

structure is the is what they call post activity comments and it is exactly what it is it's just comments in an open text box that the athletes can kind of put anything that they want to into that into into into that field and it gets attached to the workouts and you and i have both had this experience and we've talked about it a number of times and in our coaching group some athletes don't do anything with it and other athletes it is a novel and everything in between and it's always been really fascinating to me because the data piece of it has always been consistent it's just what's on your watch right but these post activity comments depending upon the athlete and i also think depending upon how the coach is trying to drive it as well can be wildly variable in terms of depth and the amount of content and the type of content it also how illuminating it is into the athletes like personal life and athletic life at the same time so i want to use that as a little bit of a window to kind of further this best communication practices and so what guide posts do you offer to your athletes when you first start working with them and they're a new athlete they're unfamiliar with having a remote coach right they've now have this new tool training peaks and part of that new tool and training peaks is not only all the data that it gives you but also these post activity comments how are you guiding them through how to navigate that post activity comment piece and what and what things are ultimately

going to be the most important for you as a coach and first what's most important for me in reading those comments is they are consistent and how they record those comments some can be very succinct in two to three sentences and if they're consistent and how they're describing their run or how they felt in those one to four sentences i'm going to get what i need from that others yeah like to write the novel okay i like reading those novels if they're consistent if it's if it's one week it's like man i felt great girl going into this workout and finish strong and then the next time it's it's a long novel their inconsistency then will allow them like oh they just finished the run they don't have time they're just going to put the one sentence thing and they may skip out on all the the subjective feedback they need to relay so i think the first thing is like figure out your way of communicating what you need to on the subjective side and then be consistent um and then in those first couple weeks if they're completely new to it it's just like that's in our weekly phone call like what did you mean by this can you elaborate this is what i'm looking for in your post activity comments we talked about this in the coaching group yesterday of how there's a completely different set of comments people put on strava versus what they put in their post activity comments on training peaks because it's something like i'm going to share with with my my followers on strava some sort of clever witty thing and i don't want to be

vulnerable and like the run felt bad um but then on training peaks they they can do a deeper dive of like this is kind of why the run didn't go well and it didn't feel good and if if they're coming from a heavy use of those those comments and feedback on strava they may need help and pulling more out of them on training peaks to get to get the feedback that's going to be most valuable for us um so like for example like a one to three sentence summary could be like i felt great going into this workout but by the fourth and fifth interval i was absolutely dead i was like okay you felt good and you didn't feel so good well okay yeah that's that's our fourth interval workout of a period of 10 days that's what we're expecting but if they're coming off a recovery block and that was their first workout and they're feeling like that it's like hmm we need to know more we're going to talk about that on our next phone call and that's going to guide um do we need okay we may need to back off or we may need to space things out more that's super insightful ryan because the post activity comments they are what they are and just like training data you have to put it within the context of everything that's going on around it just because an athlete felt like crap during a workout or in your example during the last couple of intervals of a workout doesn't mean that they're necessarily over fatigued or need a recovery day

the next day or just simply wussing out sometimes that's an intended byproduct of the entire training cycle right they should feel like that and the way that i have always viewed that and let me back up just a second to how you orchestrated that initially i've always i've always told the athletes that are not used to putting this down and not used to having a training log just do whatever's comfortable and it's precisely because of what you mentioned earlier the consistency aspect is critical then once they get it consistent then i use coaching to try to get i try to like lean them into the things that would be more or less valuable right tell me how your legs felt tell me how your lungs felt tell me how this was going what whatever just kind of shade it one way or the other based on specific things that i find more valuable but initially do whatever's comfortable and felt good two words felt bad two words tell me just as much if not more in a lot of cases than some elaborate you know seven or eight paragraphs or anything like that so my point my my point that out my point that i was going to is is that the comments need to be taken into context with the rest of the training and a lot of times it gives you you you're either using it as confirmation that the training is going as planned or some sort of

counter indicator that is that pops up something unexpected so if they're feeling really good at the end of a training cycle that tells you as a coach that you could have placed more load or there might be room for a little bit more load that doesn't mean automatically that's what you're going to do but it's an indicator that you could that they could actually handle more load and the opposite is also true if they're feeling really crummy in the middle of a training block that you designed okay what else is impacting the total load that's making them feel crummy did you did you design too much is it too much for them to handle for their particular stage of development are there other things going on are they not sleeping well is there stress at work and stuff like that so that that's how i've always viewed the post activity comments is you're looking if they are aligned with what you're expecting from a programming standpoint and if they're not aligned with what you're expecting from a programming standpoint why and then adjust the training from from from from from that point and you know i don't know what your hit rate is but mine's probably 80 20 80 they're lining up 20 they're not and then out of the 20 they're not it's kind of a 50 50 shot of whether i'm actually training or whether i'm actually changing something at the end of the day or if i'm actually keeping things the same and those of you that have had like high school math that can reduce that will say 10 of the stuff i'm actually changing meaning i get it wrong 10 of the time i get some part of the

programmatic element wrong it's probably more than that if i'm being honest at least 10 of the time and i think that's where coaching can really kind of come through because that's a whole month month of training out of a whole year you know when you back that out and that's actually ends up being uh being being quite meaningful um so let's dig into this a little bit further we're going to get into the differences in strava versus training peaks since it's quite topical we talked about it the other day uh in our coaching group but what other like do's and don'ts from from the athletes that you work with do you give them when you're kind of helping them navigate through these training peak uh comments in these post activity comments don't don't put life updates in there or change of plans in there like that's that's a good email because if you say on on your at the end of your thursday run it's like oh yeah i can't get that run in on saturday that would have been nice to know like earlier in the week so we can shuffle things around as needed because then the athlete's going to be frustrated and to like we we had four hours total of running this weekend and now i can't get that in what does this mean for my training plan what does this mean for my development so communicate big picture things in the phone call or in the email start there um and then here let me yeah no that's good let me let me let me peel off of that really quick

i think the way to think about it is the post activity comments should be attached to the activity itself not necessarily to other things that are around the activity so for example you go do a workout you felt like crap okay great i felt bad during this workout blah blah blah next week this is happening the next week piece is not attached to that particular workout so it shouldn't be included in those post activity comments and it sounds rather like it sounds like well you should kind of read them anyway or rather trivial but i think compartmentalizing things and attaching the post and making the post activity comments actually attached to that particular workout is extreme is extremely valuable and then leaving the other things to another type of communication channel if it's immediate send a text that's what i tell my athletes hey if you wake up in the middle of the night and you're sweating bullets and for whatever reason you feel like garbage the next day don't put it in your post activity comments but like send me a text and we'll change things for the next day there's no there's kind of no problem with that life updates as you mentioned send an email like make sure that the channel i guess that was what i'm trying to say make sure that the channel is actually the most compatible communication channel to filter those things through yeah it matches the immediacy on which a response is needed um because yeah the theme of this is good

communication how can i get the most out of this coach at the relationship and if expectations and guidelines aren't clear on what we communicate where then we're just kind of going in circles and that's not what we want yeah so we're going to tackle now the the public facing strava conundrum i just made up that term we'll see if it sticks but anybody who's been coaching for an appreciable amount of time especially since and i i mean i've had the experience of i coached before strava existed and now strava has existed kind of alongside the same tools that i've used for years and that compare and contrast has actually been quite stark but we all recognize that with certain athletes that are that are that also use strava um that there can be differences between how they are communicating their workout experience on strava versus how they've been communicating their workout experience within training peaks and once again for the uninitiated training peaks is more of a one-to-one channel like nobody else is seeing what's going on in there except for the athlete and the coach and for whatever reason if that athlete has like a coaching team of two or three people maybe it's a nutritionist or strength trainer training coach or whatever they're the only people that's seeing that it's not public facing like like it is on strava and i've ever since strava

came around and start to got and start and started to get really popular i've been kind of fascinated with this discrepancy because i see it within my own athletes and our whole coaching group of you know nearly 2 000 athletes that we work with annually um they they see this as well across all kind of all endurance sports and we had a couple kind of interesting revelations in our coaching group the other day that that can that i guess are just enlightening and i think more important to this conversation is what things should you actually be relaying to your coach that you may not want to put on strava and how the coach actually uses the discrepancy or the potential discrepancy between two of those to actually to actually drive training so i'll i'll like turn it over to you ryan like what like what have you noticed in the athletes that you work with that that kind of use both platforms and and we'll try to generalize this as much as possible as to like not like you know not to like call people out or anything like that but how how are you using that as a coach yeah so like you definitely want to separate and understand what you're using each for if strava is your your social way of interacting with your friends and finding joy or the struggle and training then yeah use it for that and then training piece over here is where you're communicating with your coach and it's more about the structure of your training what you're getting out of the training based on the workload

so for example on strava if we're giving them a lot of work they may take pride in how much work they're doing so they they really want to rise up to the challenge of workout after workout or their their friends see their their snag they're getting crown after crown or pr's and segments their friends are probably commenting like hey man good job good job that's awesome and they may want to keep pushing or when they get to a recovery period or they get tired when they're not getting that positive feedback from the social aspect of strava it it can get them down and then that's where you can go back to training peaks and communicate that side of just like being more vulnerable with your coach and then your coach can as we were saying earlier confirm like hey this this is where we want to be with the training um okay your your data may not be what it want your your pace your heart rate whatever it may be but again this this is where we want to be um so figure out what you're using each for and then maximize your utility and each of those because strava can be fun for a lot of people yeah um but then also it can be stressful for some people and they don't even know it um so then that can be a conversation of like hey maybe maybe you just go to put all your runs on private because you you may be like the way the data is presented on strava so you don't want to get rid of that um and that's that can be a way to take another set of of mental

energies social emotional energies off their plate and then some can see like oh wow i really like not having all my stuff on strava um because it's just me and you and and like this like you know exactly what we're trying to do i don't have to communicate that on strava so people are questioning like oh man last year you were running 60 70 miles a week why is your mileage so low now well that's 60 to 70 miles a week may have been all low intensity no no structure with a purpose and then now yeah we're we're doing interval work so we have to back off the volume and so there's there's not this like okay i'm trying to buy in with my coach but my friends are perceiving a difference in my training therefore it's not the right training here i mean i've found that i have to tell my athletes that i'm not going to comment on their strava like i have to lead in with that because for whatever reason it's like an inherent expectation and i'm and i'm not saying that that's the right approach for every single every single coach out there but here's here's why i do that is because i want the coach athlete channel within training peaks which is the mode the primary mode that we use to deliver and analyze training i want that to be unadulterated meaning i don't want any filters on it i don't want anything i don't want it to be encumbered in any way i want it to be you know as pure as the white blowing snow that just came through colorado springs last night um and i feel that if there's this like

duality of channels of whether a different message is being communicated in a front facing fashion and another message is communicated in more of an internal one that that automatically mud starts it starts to really muddy the water so to speak um and so i honestly i can't remember the last time i've commented on an athlete strava i might have never done i don't think i've probably done it in like seven years it's been it's been a long long time um and and so anyway it just kind of comes back to the point that you mentioned earlier is that make sure that you're using those tools and this is what the athletes can take to heart make sure you're using those tools for this for a specific purpose and that you identify that purpose if you want to use strava to keep track of your friends and have fun and chase down you know the local legends and things like that great training training peaks or whatever your coach is using to deliver training whether it's an excel sheet or training peaks or uh final surge or whatever it is that's built for coaches and for athletes right it is not it is not intentionally built with kind of some rare quirks within some of those systems as more of a social platform that uh that everybody can see and i think that there's great power in in in harnessing that and making sure that there is this unadulterated communication channel between the athlete and the coach that can that can remain continuous that i think is

really actually really important because we just went through the importance of post activity comments it's super important that those are just raw you know that then i i always tell my athletes all the time like it's going to take 10 seconds for your watch to go for for the file to go from your watch to your phone to training peaks take that 10 seconds and log into training peaks and put something down you can come back later and fill in the blanks but just put two two three fours i felt good i felt bad this was average there's nothing to report here i have an athlete that does that all the time nothing to report here i love that i love seeing that i actually love seeing that that tell that's just as strong as a directional arrow as i was talking about earlier as any elaborate physiology tests that you can uh that that you can look at so anyway my point with that is is since there are all these multiple platforms popping up and there will continue to be more your point ryan is well taken that you need to define the purposes of each in the actions that you have around all of those platforms should be very very tailored to those specific purposes don't let the need to perform on strava be a detriment to your training if you if you're a visual person and you love seeing those bar graphs go up and down having having a nice pyramid um or just staying flat don't don't look at that and be like oh man i gotta i gotta get

the miles in i'm gonna have to sneak in miles from my coach to get this in and then if you're if you're not meeting those previous expectations you have placed on yourself nobody nobody else has it's it's all within you then yeah maybe maybe you don't use strava um maybe you yeah you're just locked in on training peaks and yeah you're being you're being raw with those comments and the insight um because i think yeah once people decide what they're using both for they can decide what the pros and cons of each are and then maybe eliminate something they didn't realize was stressful and preventing them from enjoying the training 100 yeah i i i use that within each of those tools to the extent that i'm looking at all like the different offerings i'll put it that way so whether it's the freshness and fatigue curve or whether it's the total amount of vertical or whether it's the total you know whatever that that is that is getting displayed i've always asked athletes like hey which one like when which ones are you noticing right and using that as a kind of a community communication point going forward to make sure that that they just have it in the right context yeah this is like you're noticing this but here's the meaning behind it is it meaningful is it not is it actually going to drive training and things like that some people get we've we've both had this comment or we both had this uh experience in training peaks people get super

obsessed initially with their cumulative training loads and the acronym for that is ctl and that's because it is being colloquialized within training peaks is vocabulary as quote-unquote fitness it's really not fitness it's really training load and then you hope that the training load translates into fitness but for whatever reason because it's called fitness and this graph is called fitness and fatigue it's easiest i always want that number to go up i mean why wouldn't you right i always want the fitness number to go up and so sometimes wrapping around as coaches this part of our role the correct context behind a lot of those words and are they meaningful and why they're meaningful to athletes is like super super important so we come going off of this theme of pitfalls that we mentioned uh earlier starting with make sure the communication is fit for purpose if it's immediate text if it's something life email if it's if it needs to be attached to the particular activity use of post activity comments what are some of the other communication pitfalls that athletes need to avoid when they first start working with coaches and you know you can take us through like a practical example since you've been taking on a lot of new athletes recently so i think holding back in what you're communicating like use the phrase earlier don't be a training robot going back to our initial phone call or when you when you submitted that consultation form of why you wanted

a coach we need to always be mindful of that and also realize it's going to evolve and how is that communication relating back to what you wanted from a coach were you wanting more insight were you wanting to learn about the process of training were you really wanting to figure out um hydration nutrition um do you need that accountability piece always remember back to why you wanted a coach and being able to communicate that and if things are going good don't just fall off the face of the earth and stop communicating or those post activity comments become even shorter um because if you get in that habit of not communicating it's hard to get back into that habit of talking with your coach and being vulnerable and being self-aware of of the highs and lows of training so i'd say lack of consistency in how you communicate is a pitfall um because i mean it's it becomes a habit like anything else if you fall into a bad habit it's hard to break out of that you you mentioned something really really poignant that i don't want to gloss over is that things can evolve you don't have to get it right right out of the gate and i think that that's the tendency within training right i always use this analogy where you know athlete hey what do i need to do this afternoon like what is the workout this afternoon

you have a consult in the morning you start this new athlete in the morning what is that what is the workout in the afternoon i want to get started right now and that's awesome enthusiasm we love we love to see it but it doesn't happen like that things don't happen in these in these like one-shot deals and the same thing is true with communication and we've all had the experience of coaches that typically it gets better over time just like fitness just like racing capacity just like your nutrition program if you continually just do it and sometimes you only have to like conscientiously work on it but if you continuously do it you're going to get better at it and then if you continuously work at it between the coach and the athlete in this case that's when it even gets better the trajectory curve actually gets even better than it would on it on its own accord and so i always encourage athletes to not and this is true within a lot of aspects of their training and their coach athlete relationship is to expect things to evolve and get better over time and try to avoid drinking from the fire hose and trying to make everything part trying to make everything perfect and like everything at a level 10 right out of the gate it's going it's it's just going to take time and that goes from this aspect of communication that we're just talking about all the way to the scheduling piece where okay i've i've just figured out wednesdays are a better day for hard workouts for whatever

reason your whole life circumstance you've got you know this going on on tuesdays that kind of precludes it or whatever even that aspect can evolve and get and kind of get better over time as long as the coach and the and the athlete are communicating so don't feel like it has to hit on all eight cylinders kind of right out of the get-go don't let the lack of an objective metric on the coach athlete relationship make you wonder if it can evolve right because yeah you just mentioned there's the fitness metric on training peaks and like oh the number's going up i am getting more fit there is no metric of i communicated with my coach and was able to say everything i wanted our relationship is trending up or i'm getting the most value out i'm getting the most value out of this coach athlete relationship um versus like we we haven't really talked about um the race and how i'm really concerned about this big climb because it's destroyed me in the past why aren't we talking about that it's just like hey we'll get there voice voice those concerns with me and just be like hey trust me we'll get to that everything's serving a purpose to work to that so just just because we can't track the the the utility of the communication whether this is going on the right track yet it's if the coach and the athlete are doing their job correctly you're going to learn from each other to get the most out of the coach athlete relationship so i'm glad that you brought up tracking because i want to bring up this final aspect of something

that is this is probably my favorite feature within the post activity comments and it might be my favorite feature of training peaks overall it's not not very many people use it but i think it's a very it's a very it's very clever you can so within training peaks you can search for any number of different things of uh across the entire athlete's training history you can find runs that are in between an hour and 30 and two hours you just want to search for that time frame and see what those runs look like great you want runs that have six thousand to eight thousand feet of gain you can go back and you can search the you can put in that search term you can search for the entire athlete's history of those runs that had that type of elevation gain elevation loss same thing with all the other hard metrics training stress score heart rate intensity factor all these things that kind of get all the attention but one of the unknown that one of the underutilized things in that within that whole search console that you that you can use is you can search by words and you can specifically search by words as they appear in the post activity comments and i've done this before with athletes just search for the word good bad felt like crap like those kind of things those kind of like normal things that each athlete has their own different vocabulary of using and i will use that and i'll see where the clusters of those are and this works the best with athletes where you have a long training

history with so two three four years and i happen to be in the fortunate position where i have a lot of those and you can absolutely pull patterns out of that you can pull patterns out of time of year where they are just mentioning the word good more you can pull patterns out of what types of workouts elicit that type of that type of feedback or those specific words within the feedback it it's a fascinating little piece that if you have athletes or if you were doing your this yourself over long periods of time if you can search that that post activity comment history just for simple keywords it's it's it's it's it's extremely insightful for what workouts make that athlete tick which ones they might find more challenging and or what types of year or what around what time of year elicits different emotions like for example i can very i i did this with a with with an athlete a few actually this is uh kind of like last season they were putting in more like i would say kind of like anxiety provoking words in the eight weeks leading up to the race and what that was telling me is they're looking at the course profile every day they're they're opening up their computer is probably a save tab the course profile is probably on there and they're reworking their aid station splits for the umpteenth time when they when they kind of like really don't need to and i use that as one of not the only but one of the

illustrative points of you're focusing on the race a little bit too much let's back off of that go do something else with your time if you find yourself going to the race profile for the 10th time today go do something else with your time go pet your dog go for a walk go do something else but it literally shows up in the post activity comments that you can that you can search for certain words and i've just i've ever since ever since that feature launched i've just loved looking into it and trying to track some history with athletes and extrapolate some data from you can use that to plan out their season maybe they they always try to force this one race every time of the year and it just never goes as planned or they're in a certain part of the country where they try to force training through the winter where it's just there's so much snow and they can't get the gains they want everything is hard the lack of sunlight is is getting to them they're always running with the headlamp it's like okay let's take all that into account and back off training have a shorter race goal what goal is going to get you through this time of year or or yeah it's i man there's all these awesome races in july and august but i can just never get to a point where i'm ready and say okay well maybe the kids are home from summer break and you're you're taking on a bigger workload um and watching your kids and trying to trying to make sure they're occupied or it's really humid and it's just hard to train and get out the door we can use all that to then fix correct certain times of the year in which your relationship with running can stay a

positive one because you're planning things out properly to to account for your life and your motivations because yeah our motivation is going to ebb and flow and you have to recognize that you can't just be a training robot to use that phrase again i'm just like i'm going to be on all cylinders throughout the year whenever i pick out a race i'm going to have the perfect training blocks to build to that and i'm going to pr at that distance that race or whatever now it ebb and flow so if you can use if you can look through those those adjectives the way they're describing their runs i'm just like hey you're forcing this race every year or you're you're forcing your training through this time of year let's change that up a little bit um so next season next month whatever it is that that you're all in you're stoked for that because that that excitement that emotional investment is going to be very very beneficial in your performance and training and what you get out of that ultimate angle whether it's whether it's a self-supported route you've come up with a race you've been playing for yeah i mean needless to say the post activity comments i think are that should be a hero metric right i mean we we use that that's a kind of a specific vocabulary within training peaks they have like certain you know there's a thousand metric i wonder how many metrics there actually are but anyway there's there seem to be a thousand of them but there's five duration average heart rate average power total amount of

of of distance for a runner yeah cadence those those types of things uh we we kind of call the hero metrics and they rise to the cream of the crop i think the post activity comments should be one of the hero metrics so much so that i've over the course of i don't know however many years i've lobbied training peaks such that they're uh the email that coaches get when the athlete has uploaded their file and inserted some post activity comments so that's part of the communication loop for many coaches and athletes that use this tool is you know you get an email notification whenever whenever anything has been whenever anything is done files uploaded post activity comments enter and things like that i've lobbied training peaks over the last few years to to be able to because i realized this is my framework not everybody's framework to be able to switch the email such that the post activity comments show up first and that's the first thing i see and all of the other hero metrics come up second like just in the order of how i'm reading things currently what it is is you see whatever you've picked duration time distance you know average heart rate kind of whatever you see all the numbers first and then the post activity comments by default or underneath that i've always i've always wanted to switch that and i so anyway i read the email from the bottom up that's how that's how i've kind of switched that's how that's how important i put the post activity comments especially from a trail running perspective because the actual data is super fuzzy absolutely and i'd say if you're a self-coached

athlete just because you don't have a coach doesn't mean you can you can make your own comments and everything you can provide a lot of insight into making your comments and you don't have a third party to to talk through that with you but be consistent in your comments if you're coaching yourself designing your own training and then maybe at the end of a month you go back and read through and just you gain a lot more insight and self-awareness into yourself you know what's funny is i know a lot of self-coached athletes that track their training but do not track their post activity comments they'll always go back and look at i needed 10 000 more feet of vertical in june or i could have like done another workout this week in july or something like that these they'll they can very they're very keen to scrutinize the architecture of their previous training in order to find ways to improve now whether or not that's right or wrong that's you know that that takes a pretty keen eye to do but they're very very apt and looking at their previous training and kind of like finding the holes in the design training they're not very good at and i know very very very few self-coached athletes that do this looking at their post activity comments to glean some sort of information because it's weird right i mean it's weird it's like your diary right but in a training format which makes it even weirder the the like proliferation of um journaling and um just carrying around a physical notebook which a lot

of people do just to kind of like write their thoughts down for whatever reason i i don't think right this is i this is an opinion statement i don't think it's kind of quite translated to the training world and i wish it would because it's super insightful even for as you mentioned for self-coached athletes yeah there's just so much data there you you think you're getting all the answers from the data but as the constant theme of this conversation is the subjective feedback completes the whole picture that that is a brilliant way to leave it my friend subjective feedback completes the picture that's going to be the audiogram right there we're going to pull that out and blast it out to the world man dude thanks for your time man i i i could i can think of no better way to leave it just as a quick wrap up man tell the listeners just a little bit about you and your coaching kind of like where they can connect with you yeah so um on instagram is ryan r-y-n-e my name is spelled a little differently one anderson i also have a website ryanandersonruns.com and then yeah going through the cts channels there um but yeah always happy to work with new athletes reaching out always humble um it's very exciting for me of just sharing in those highs and lows of training and we get to the end result did it go like we wanted to cool if we didn't well on to the next thing so to

speak let's learn from let's learn and then keep working yeah and i promise i'm gonna get out to the beast coast this summer that is my resolution for the year is to do more running and racing out in that area you've been saying it a lot so i know it's gonna happen i know your subjective feedback has been trending that you will make it happen so yeah i love it man all right man i appreciate a lot all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to coach ryan for coming on the podcast today i always appreciate his perspective and as i mentioned during the intro of this podcast he has been taking on a lot of new athletes and if you think that you are a good candidate for coaching you want to make the most out of your hard earned training time send me a direct message either via twitter or via instagram i'd love to answer any questions that you do have about coaching or you can check out our website which is www.trainright.com forward slash ultra running and i'll leave a link to that in the show notes you can see all of our coaching packages there second note for those of you that are watching the youtube version of this you will notice that the background is different than the background that i recorded the podcast that ryan with and that is because i had to jump in my van right after that podcast ended and i had to head down to arizona to get in some training on the cocodona 250 course as well as

and more importantly i will be at the black canyon 100k so if you're out at that race either as an athlete or support crew come by say hi i have the adventure van set up you can record a question for the KoopCast that will get read live on the air i always love it when i get to answer those questions all you have to do is pop in the van hit the little green button say your little piece and off you go and i'll be happy to answer those questions on a future episode of the podcast appreciate the heck out of all you listeners out there and as always we will see you out on the trails