How To Build A Valuable Coach-Athlete Relationship with Dominic Guinto, CTS Athlete Services Director (2022) | KoopCast Episode #189

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i am your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is for all of the athletes out there who have gone through their 2022 season you've reflected upon it and you have come to the conclusion that something that you are going to change in 2023 is to bring on a professional coach to help you in your ultra running endeavors so on the podcast today i have somebody that has more experience in that arena and looking at athletes sussing up their needs as an athlete and getting them the right coaching solution somebody who needs no introduction because he is a repeat offender on the KoopCast and that is cts's athlete service director dominant gunto who in his day job does nothing but pair up our incoming athletes with our over 60 coaches that we have underneath our umbrella it is quite a task indeed and he has more experience doing this than i think anybody in the entire world and while this might seem like a little bit of an advertisement for our own coaching and i do have a sneaking suspicion that some people might give me that criticism and that's totally okay because it's my podcast and i can do whatever the heck i want to do with it athletes out

there will be well served to heed the advice that dominic has for you in this podcast irrespective of whether a cts coach is right for you or wrong for you or you go and search out your own coaching solution the framework that dominic provides in terms of how to navigate that whole space is something that each and every athlete i think can take to heart as they undertake this journey because make no mistake this landscape has changed dramatically over the last several years and there are some very good coaches out there and there are also some coaches that are just not quite as invested in it and at the end of the day you all have to determine where you are going to put your money and more importantly your hard earned and not always easy to come by time into somebody that is going to provide you some counsel as to what to do with that time there is no higher calling than to then to tell somebody what to do day in day out with their hard earned extra time as we do with training each and every day so with that as a bit of a backdrop i'm getting right out of the way here's my conversation with cts athlete services director dominic gunto on how to find the right coach and how to build a fantastic coach athlete relationship what have you seen new in the athlete space because once again you've been i mean you've seen the entire

history right you've been doing it for a long time you see all the athletes that come in cyclists triathletes and uh and trail and ultra runners and i always want to get your perspective on what's different this year compared to last year in terms of the people that we're seeing coming in and what they're training for i'm gonna i'm gonna paint some things with really broad strokes here and uh and be as bold to say um nobody does just one sport anymore really yeah i mean i i can't so we changed our like our consult form when people will list a secondary sport um 99 of the time everyone has a secondary sport there's a there's that there's that odd ball that it's pickleball um but but i would say that 50 of ultra running athletes their secondary sport is gravel they've all moved to gravel i mean it's not weird it's funny because i was talking to my my neighbor about this the other day and that i think it's the it's the natural transition of i want to cover a lot of miles i want to be outside i want to be away from the roads not totally committed to something as crazy as mountain biking that i could really get hurt yeah um but it seems like a natural transition to normal bike riding but still doing it away from you know cities and and uh and so forth so i think

i think that's it i also think that that is that's where so many people have come from from a recovery standpoint yeah yeah um so you're recovering but i still want to do something um so the the gravel bike becomes this natural transition i mean we've seen it even in our own coaches yeah there's also a lot of influencer uh influence not to use the same word twice but a lot of like the elite athletes and influencer athletes and things like that yeah i mean they use gravel bike as part of their training or recovery or they go do races uh and other athletes see that they're like oh that looks cool because you know tony kaprychka is doing it or you know whoever else and that grows the community that that's involved in gravel biking as well it's interesting interesting perspective half uh yeah yeah i mean i can't begin to tell you how many people come in with um they want a little bit of both like it's not my primary sport but i'm still i'm doing an event because i'm with some of my other friends that are doing the same thing um or uh they they just want to use it um a couple times a week as their recovery and and i think i think a lot of it is just let's face it it's that that type a like hold on for a second i can do something else and not take a full rest day i could just get on a bike and pedal well i don't want to do that on the road and again just it's this natural transition is too but it's not just it's not just

that so many more people not to say that they weren't doing it before but i think they realize especially that coaching has evolved into a into a kind of a um a true profession where a lot of the coaches out there and our coaches included um if you have the science you can help provide them a plan to assist them with their cross-country skiing they're rowing they're gravel biking they're um a one triathlon that they'll do a year um bike packing hiking you name it everyone has is coming in with a secondary sport um uh and we've talked about this before um i'm always amazed at the amount of crossover in people who have either been ultra runners who became bodybuilders or power lifters or power lifter bodybuilders that became ultra runners and you want to play a game of psychology of it's the what's the craziest transition that i could possibly make to to change my entire physical being i think i'll lose 100 pounds and start running 100 mile races it's yeah you can't tell me that you haven't seen that i met one of those this weekend so one of the people that i that i follow on social media i think they've got a really good game is this guy in the nutrition bodybuilding

and powerlifting space called lane norton oh you sent me his link yeah yeah we we watched his videos in the office one day and and i'm i'm kind of fascinated from a couple of different perspectives one i just think that their content that they put out is super high quality but the second thing is is from a business standpoint they have a really similar business model to us where they've got like a head coach so to speak and a bunch of you know assistant coaches so to speak kind of that that work for this you know one head coach with their nutritionists and uh things like that and i met one one of them actually recently out in montana this guy paulie so i sent him a book and i had no idea you know that he was remotely interested in trail ultra running other than i just happened to run into him at this race and i was wearing a shirt that i'd bought from this guy lane norton he and he had and he happened to recognize it and i just offhandedly mentioned i was like hey if you ever remotely interested in running ultras this is a good blueprint for it he's like oh no i was thinking about doing it and this is a guy i mean he's a huge dude really really jacked guy you could tell he's a you know weightlifter type does not belong aesthetically in like the trail and ultra running category you know because of just his just his just because of his physique but to your anecdote that a lot of people are crossing over from one sport to the other holds true with that one uh pretty well yeah it's uh it again it happens all the time the other thing too i think and i don't know where it comes from and you

probably would better but from an ultra running uh space i think um the majority of people are asking more about strength training yeah just i i can't i can't i can't hide that fact that they're asking for for more of it i i don't know where it it originates from again maybe it's those influencers that are talking about you have to do strength training um i don't know but it's definitely become well i think it's so we're still seeing exponential growth in the space and as that pool of people expands with that expansion becomes more diversity and that diversity comes in a lot of different flavors it comes with just the sheer you know male female makeup where they come from around the world their sport background which is what we're you know talking about right now and also their other interests when you have a niche sport the very purest um flavor of that niche sport is pretty self-contained right they do their niche sport and that's kind of all they do but then when you expand it outside of that niche the further and further that it gets outside of that niche the more and more people that you get from various aspects of life and we're about to see a really great example of that and i think this has always been a very good example of that in the leadville trail 100 it's going to happen in a couple weeks where that race in particular has always attracted people that are not your

this is my 100th ultra and then i'm going to do leadville they attract a lot of the first time ultra marathon runners that come from a very diverse background they come from triathlon they come from bodybuilding or weightlifting they come from soccer and things like that and for whatever reason the leadville trail 100 is their like first foray into into ultra running and so i guess we can use that as a little bit of a transition right do you see that that sphere expanding as well and the new athletes that you see come in and and how does that play a role in primarily what you do in terms of matching up the right athlete to the right coach um i'm not totally sure i understand the beginning of your question as far as as far as the events are concerned it's one thing but but but what i will say about that is one thing that i do see is that uh ultra runners to a degree have stayed a little bit more true to that uh the origins of the sport where so many of them are doing the backyard backyard ultras they're doing um small they're still do the smaller races um they do you know they'll enter a race that has 20 people in it and um you know now so for instance that the gravel and the mountain bike community they all seem to to start leaning on all these massive events um what i have noticed in the ultra running world is those that do sign up for

they get into western states or they sign up for leadville or um you know one of the the bigger races they there's something about them requires that the coach that they have has to have done that race it is it's the hardest part of my job i'll tell everybody why i'm laughing because we've had this conversation for ever since i've met you right in terms of how to navigate this and i've always my opinion on this has changed quite dramatically over the years because whenever i used to take the stance that we and i still hold i still hold this opinion although the practical outcome of it is different that we can teach our coaches to coach within any sport we can teach our cycling coaches to work with ultra runners we can teach our triathlon coaches to work with cyclists we can teach our ultra running coaches to work with cyclists and kind of this big whole sphere but you're absolutely right on the athlete side of things there's this kind of inherent buy-in and connection that exists when the coach is not only intimately involved in the sport but intimately involved within the race the race that they are actually doing and to illustrate that i always give this example of you know one of our former coaches nick white who is a fantastic coach he helped me a tremendous amount during the first when i was writing the first edition of the book and he coached craig alexander to not just one but multiple iron man world

championships and that's the pinnacle of that sport an iron man world championship not just one but multiple ones and i remember several years ago an elite ultra runner trying to come on board and i did not have the capacity at the time to work with this elite ultra runner and said listen here's my colleague nick white he knows elite sport very well he's you know worked in you know triathlon and taking craig alexander to not one but multiple uh world uh world championships and nick was not a triathlete at the time either that was a sport that he had to learn right he's he he had not done an iron man yet he coached craig to you know multiple iron man world championships and that was a non-starter for this elite uh never never never kind of even moved moved past it and um and so i understand the athletes desire to have a coach that has done or at the very least has coached athletes for the race or whatever that they're that they're training for because it it it immediately influences the buy-in process which is so incredibly important with a coach athlete relationship if you believe if an athlete believes in what their coach is putting in front of them that's worth like 90 of the adaptation right there and the other 10 is all the stuff that we really worried about are you doing a 60 minute tempo run or a 40 minute tempo run or kind

of whatever so i so so i get that and that's a consumer side i get that and that's a consumer side demand but i still think that if you have a coach that's trained properly they can work with a number of different athletes in a number of different situations and maybe the one thing that escapes them is the one percent of nuance that's associated with whatever event and normally that's not material anyway but you see it come through the door every day how how important is that and do you actually try to de-emphasize that with athletes that are really focused on it i i do try to de-emphasize it because i think there's a there's a an advantage sometimes there's depending on the athlete sometimes there's more of an advantage to going with the coach that doesn't have experience in that event because that coach is going to work even harder to figure it out to figure it out and they're they're really going to so i i know if so if i was the coach and and someone signed up for an event that i'd never done i'm now going to i'm going to go through stage after stage mile after mile and look at the elevation game look where the aid stations are look at all these specific things if i've done the event before i'm immediately going to take the natural approach of i i i know i know where all that stuff's at and i'll just tell you and not knowing who knows maybe they changed it for that year maybe you you can't coach

somebody else the same way that you ran the race um so it really is allowing the coach to come in with fresh eyes and and provide that that information again from from a coaching and scientific standpoint so um i i think that there's really something to be said for that um but then again there are also athletes that there's just again it's it's a non-starter so i'm going to search for somebody that that did the event that has done it i got caught in that just this week with leadville coming back to leadville for whatever reason because i was talking to an athlete who is doing it for the first time and so he's leaning on me not only for the training component of it hey go run five hours today and stuff like that but also for how the race works because he's new to he's new to ultra running and this year they took out the may queen aid station just on the outbound section so it's the aid station at mile 13 and i kept talking about how his crew needs to get there early and this that and the other he's like this is not in the race packet for this year and i was like holy crap i didn't even realize that they had changed that for this year because i was relying on my experience right not only running the race but also coaching however many you know dozens and dozens of athletes for that race as well so to your point of trying to figure things out with a fresh set of eyes is i think really not relying on past experience is really well taken that's something that is probably a small oversight but you can easily extrapolate it to how it could be a big one if you're solely relying on that

previous experience right and how long ago was that experience yeah you know my memory of a 100 mile mountain bike race 10 years ago is my memory of a 100 mile race to 10 days ago is really not that i'm missing like eight hour blocks somewhere here's so along those lines here's something that has come up up recently on some consults that i've done specifically that i want to get your perspective on we get kind of consults in a couple of different flavors but two of the primary ones are the athlete is coming in the door and they're surveying the landscape they want to know what we have to offer with our coaching staff versus another coach they're going along this this process of making an informed decision about getting coaching for whatever they're whatever they're training for and getting a consult with our coaches is kind of one of them the other flavor and this is kind of more pertinent to for whatever reason of what i've been experiencing just in the past few weeks i had one just this morning that that rang along these same lines where an athlete is currently working with a coach and feels that that that current setup between the coach that they're currently working with and them has been kind of a copy paste of either what that coach does personally they're usually it's usually an elite athlete type of situation or whatever so they're just taking their program

and kind of kind of uh translating it to another athlete or a copy paste of some other marquee athlete that that coaches worked with and now is just using that template as or essentially as a template across their entire across their entire athlete base and this this theme came up so like so frequently over the course of the last few weeks it's the only consult that i've that i've done i've almost kind of got all my answers you know memorized and you know rinse and rinse and repeat them are weak is that something that you're seeing more broadly like come in the door in terms of these athletes are evaluating their current coaching situation and just saying hey wait a minute there's something messed up with this i'm getting the same thing that johnny's getting that susie's getting this jack is getting that i've seen over here i don't think it should be that way yeah i don't i i personally don't see it as a as a heavy trend i do see it come in the door and i think it has um very specifically has to do with the same thing that we've experienced in in any coaching especially in the surgeon coaching is that um there are lots of uh i should say surgeon coaches and coach availability um coaches that are out there that have decided to hang the proverbial shingle and say i'm a coach um and i i think that with that they're not coming in

with the science they're coming in with just i've i've done a bunch of old experience and and experience and um once they start getting into the reality of the science behind ultra running and what's available now too they feel like well this plan worked for somebody else and again i can rinse and repeat i can i can make it shiny in a few areas and it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work for that athlete um and that's you know that ends up being you know the real difference in in in what we do and then the team of coaches that we have you you can't get away with that um in a continuing ed with our you know uh our group of coaches you can't just you you imagine if one of our coaches just showed up and showed you a program that that they had copied and pasted from someone else yeah or this is this is what i did for ludville so i'm going to do it with this athlete right they would get eaten alive they would get shredded in in you know within uh within our you know our they wouldn't get hired in the first place that's what i would say yeah you're right yeah yeah and i tell people all the time it's hard enough to get a job um you know at cts or at a real quality coaching company um i i can only speak for us but um it's hard enough to do that i mean you've you've got to come in the door and trust the fact that your coach has the ability to to you know provide you what you're looking for so just find the relationship that works so you're the master at that find the relationship that works

seriously like you're really freaking good you're really freaking good at it i was going to start with why is it so important but i'm just going to skip over that how do you go about figuring out where like when it's going to work the best i know there's a lot of like secret dominic you know sauce and all this i don't know i i and as silly as it sounds i just i think i think i have a good read on people um even and that includes what they write in their consults um if i can speak to them on the phone i definitely get a better idea because i also know our coach as well um and that's and that's important um i've definitely been thrown by a few we're like wow i didn't see that i didn't see that coming um but probably no different than uh probably no different than finally going on a on a date after you spoke to someone three or four times on the phone you could spend hours and all of a sudden you get face to face with them and and realize like wow this is this is this is not working out the way i had planned i want to make it translatable to the audience that out there though because they're they're going to be people in various stages either they're self-coached or they're thinking about getting a coach or they're currently coached and you know in kind of everything in between what what would be a very realistic example of something that you picked up on our consult form and to set this up a little bit we have a consult form on our website it's got several different questions what are you training for

what are you looking what are you looking for in a coach and things like that and then we use that as part lead generator but also part of the initial conversation process between you and the prospective athlete in order to help direct what the best coaching decision is for them but what's a realistic example of something that routinely sticks out that will say to you oh i know what direction to to to i know what direction to take with this particular athlete in terms of matching them up with the right person it honestly it's the details so and if one of those details is um specific to um the science or the data and and those things are definitely going to go to certain coaches and not go to others i i already know that there's not going to be a match there um but the the probably the biggest part for me that i want us i would like to see more from athletes is more of just the human side of and we've had this conversation before i i know this sounds terrible to an athlete because it's somehow so important to them i don't care what kind of shoes you run in i don't care that you have 200 hokas or sock knees or i don't care what kind of bike you ride i don't care what gearing is on it how much it costs you know whatever um and none of none of that matters with the coach i also it also

technically doesn't matter that you have 10 years of data in training peaks the only thing to me that that that offers a coach is hey here's somebody who's committed to their sport and they've done this but especially if you've had a couple of years off i don't care what your mile pr was in 96 like it reaches it really just it doesn't matter again it's it's some information that gives you a little bit of background on on the athlete but it's not going to help you train them any any differently um but uh the emotional side of uh and the real life side of of running um as it relates to how they're going to train whether they have a family and a full-time job do they travel a lot are they looking for lots of changes in their uh often have their their workouts change because they have to travel do they have weight that they want to lose do they have nutrition that they want to focus on um are there um i oftentimes will um certain coaches are better with um uh classic injuries or uh diseases or you know what i mean somebody's specific use cases absolutely so yeah i i definitely have those coaches um or or athletes that are looking for that and i often just go out to coaches and find out who may have experience with that um but uh that the best information that somebody could provide us with is is exactly what the coaches should be the

first question and we've been we've been doing a lot we actually recorded a ton of our consults over the last couple of months and it was really interesting to hear how they flow um and the questions that are asked but there should be one question asked um and answered by the athlete and then responded to by the coach and that's simply why do you want to coach what what brought you here and what are your expectations from coaching that's it um there you know there were a couple of consults where you know the coach says you know tell me a little bit about yourself and what your goals are and how long you've been doing this and and where you want to go like that's way too much too detailed yeah why what what are you looking for in a coach what are you expecting from this whole experience um that information provides me a lot because it also it also gives me the opportunity to decide are you at the right package level yeah expectations are are a big deal and you've probably seen it in in events even now um where especially if you get a new athlete and their only event that they've done is you know leadville yeah and next thing you know they sign up for the you know cheyenne canyon 50k and there's there's just a there's a piece of crepe paper hung up this is start you know between two trees and they're immediately going like where's the dinner afterwards and don't we get a free shirt and a hat and a pair of gloves and um and a massage therapist at the end and they have all of these expectations for uh these events

um but the same thing comes from uh uh from coaching a lot of times um and in in the opposite way like you said i'm coming from a coach who didn't give me feedback didn't give me the why to what i'm doing or uh they they just copied and pasted a plan and then they come and they they work with us or they they have the opportunity to work with another coach and and they realize wow i had no idea yeah yeah we've had that conversation before about about when a coach leaves and they and an athlete gets assigned to a new coach yeah um and they say oh i can't leave you know i can't leave jason he's been my coach for five years and um i used to use the analogy about dating and uh and i still do um how often you know you think if somebody you know gosh if she breaks up with me or he breaks up with me i'm never going to be able to live and next thing you know two weeks later you meet somebody else and you think oh my god what was i doing with them all this time this is amazing so uh uh oftentimes that happens with with coaching where they come from one experience and they they they come to you know us again or or elsewhere there are other there are other good coaches out there well but starting out with that question what do you want to get from coaching and letting the athlete direct that that is so insightful because they're going to tell you the first thing that comes to mind and that first thing that comes to mind is normally the thing that's the most important to them and it gives you

this this kind of sliding scale of technical to emotional to general to specific of where the athlete is coming to the decision with if they cut if they answer that question with i always have gi issues that makes the answer quite easy we need a coach that has a specialist in or that is a specialist in nutrition i'm always getting injured right okay right there i would need somebody to help me get out the door okay we need some of our more kind of like emotional cheerleader type of coaches right you've talked about that a lot between our drill sergeant coaches drill sergeant and cheerleader those the two categories that we get yeah um and so like i said i think directing or having the athlete direct that and picking up on the very first one versus having a whole list and then choosing what the rack and stack order is or whatever is it has always been quite quite insightful because i know that i've been on several consults where i've oriented my first question in somewhat of that fashion and i've gone hey i don't think that i'm the right solution for you i think that this coach over here based on what you've just told me and how you know how passionate you are about this kind of one area this coach over here is a much better solution for you versus what you what you think is the best solution for you which is in some cases they for whatever reason they think that i'm the right coach for everybody which i'm not

which which is funny because there there haven't been a lot of times where you've said that and somebody didn't take that seriously and move on to another coach but um it really is it's really interesting to see the ones that don't and they just they're just they get so focused on again they get they get focused on the product it's like it's it'd be like going into a car dealership and saying i want a mercedes and they're like what do you want to do with it well i need to load hay in the back of it and cart bikes around and stuff like that okay you want a pickup truck like nope i want a mercedes because i need to have a mercedes right i love that and uh so but and they're not they're not i'm not even sure if they're listening to what they're saying um so uh it it's really okay to not have Jason Koop as your coach but have you know uh you know ryan anderson or or just because they're actually going to be a better coach for you yeah um and that's the thing that i think that's the thing that most people don't realize or is kind of like underappreciated because i see that this when i'm out in the kind of out in the field as well is that you and i we can be agnostic right between athlete going to coach a coach b coach c kind of within our ecosystem because from your perspective you have this orientation and this is what i've always appreciated about how you kind of look at things where you want to make sure that that coach athlete

relationship is the best setup for the long term so not just get them in the door right you're still the sales guy at the end of the day you've got a fancy you know fancy title that tries to dodge the sales question but the end of the day you're a salesperson but that that quote unquote sales cycle for you is how long how long should this coach athlete relationship last for not just was what is going to create the initial splash so to speak yeah i mean again we we've had this conversation before that this is there's still a business side of this and the truth is if i can set up an athlete with the two most likely matches for them and then for the athlete to be vested in that decision in speaking to both of them there's definitely a better chance in that athlete sticking around longer than just i mean you remember you sign up for coaching you're like oh jason's a runner he's going with yeah yeah this person this person because they're a running coach and that's who's available and now the coach actually or the athlete actually gets to be involved in that in that selection process and ultimately it's the best setup for the athlete they're going to reap the most benefit out of it because they as i mentioned earlier they wholeheartedly believe in that coach's plan their communication

that they're getting the right thing if they're if they have that initial investment and going back to my earlier example while i'm getting all of these like consults from athletes that are working with another coach the failure point is only partially like the what i would call the training architecture that's behind it i can i can always nitpick those things apart i mean that's what we do a lot in our continuing eds but moreover that failure point is that the athlete has lost the belief that whatever they're doing is the right thing for them if they still had the belief and even if the training architecture is correct that's very easy to point out i can say listen you know you're doing all the right things you don't you just don't believe that you're you know you just don't believe that you're going to improve because of them but i can look at this analytically and say yeah these are these are basically all the all you know all the correct things to do so i think like coming for full circle on that is that for the athletes out there that are listening like don't ignore that belief component when you're assessing either the coaching setup that you're looking for or the coaching setup that you're in that you really do have to believe in your training in order for it to work yeah and believing in your training is believing in where it's coming from and that's believing in your coach um it it makes all the difference in the world i i say it in every consult every discussion

with an athlete it always i always will say it's going to come down to who you got off that call with them thought yeah that's who i want to talk to each week that's okay so that's always a fascinating component because can you can you like paint the picture of how obvious it is or isn't once an athlete goes through this like two-pronged consultation process so they reach out you do an initial assessment you say hey i think coach a or coach b is a good one for them how at the end of the day how how how obvious is it to the athlete where they should be going and or how much do they struggle with it i am confident that the athlete has all the right answers but they get sucked into the same thing that all of us do and that is for instance um you want to buy a a bike and uh and you've got the the famous i don't know specialized stump jumper here and then you've got the you know i don't know mongoose rock jumper here they have exactly the same parts on them they exactly and but the difference is is maybe a thousand dollars chances are that person's just thinking all they're all they're thinking is all i see on social media and advertising and in articles and everything is i need to buy the stump jumper for all we know that the bike is way better the other the

other one is and and they get into this so perfect example maybe i put you up against addison yeah um in a console addison awesome coach he's he's one of our newer coaches um but he knows this stuff he's super hungry he's well-educated and someone's going to come off the call and they call me and they go you gave me two really good coaches and i just i don't know which one to pick and i hear what they're saying they're like i really enjoyed my conversation with addison i really look forward to talking to him we had this in common we did this the same we run the same races we live in the same area he'll be able to meet me sometimes all these things but then there's jason cooper like you haven't said one good thing about the call and then the conversation that but i don't want to say i'm simply saying that they they've made their decision but they feel like they should be doing something else just because of what society it's almost like a trust your gut and not the influence absolutely yeah if that works for you then if it's not broke don't don't fix it right you know if you had a you know a pair of i don't know converse shoes that you've run all your races in and regardless of all the new technology that's out if it's not broke don't fix it like if that's they work for me why would you change that so based on that i think we should change your title from like sales guy to like guidance counselor because really ultimately right that's what you're doing is you're like guiding people into the right

decision versus trying to like sell them a product you know and i if i'm i'm i'm as human as anyone else and i get frustrated sometimes when people will call me and question me and again i'm not trying to be a dick but i mean seriously like they'll go well you i looked at their bio and why did you assign me these two coaches and i and i and i and i want to talk to like we talked about this and they're like wow they're really different they're they're their communication styles are different but their coaching it they're the philosophy and so forth is all the same and i wanted to give you an opportunity to figure out which one works for you and i've been and i don't have a problem sending a third one if that's that's where they where they come from but um i typically will talk them through that initially and say go through the full the two consults and then let me know and i've i've yet to to have anybody say i absolutely don't like either one of those i have to talk to someone else um go through the process the process really it really does work and you you learn so much from talking with uh with the coaches this uh i was trying to think about when we originally started doing the consults and um we were discussing this the other day about how many other coaching organizations do this now and it's almost like we we kind of started

yeah we're definitely one of the first out of the gates with it yeah um and uh and i think it originally started with me getting athletes just being more inquisitive about like do you have a coach that's like do you have this and i'm not sure about this coach and i remember just saying why don't you pick how about i just schedule a call with with both of those coaches and um like i said it's um it's a great experience for the athletes and no one ever says that they they don't enjoy um the opportunity to speak to well it puts the athlete in the real life situation of what they are going to experience when they're actually working with a coach right so just think about the way that you could pick any any type of consultant right whether it's an accountant or a nutrition consultant or business consultant or a coach you're going to have some sort of you know interpersonal interaction with them you're going to call them on the phone you're going to meet them in person you're going to have a whole string of text messages and things like that and the best way to get a flavor for how that communication is going to work is to actually get in that venue right our coaches call their athletes on the phone about once a week in most cases so let's get them on the phone during consult phone skype whatever virtual technology we want to use it's almost impossible to replicate that with a bio that's sitting on a website which is another way that you could you know kind of select whatever consultant you're trying to select

i could go and i could look at all the accountants in colorado springs colorado and i could look at their bios and i would have no sense of how they are going to be when i pull up with my shoebox full of receipts and i plunk it on their desk and i ask them to make sense of it and tell them you know how cool would it be if you could do two 15 minute consults with a new primary care doctor i'd sign up for that totally i mean how many times do you just go i don't know so you know yeah dr freeman's available at this day and i'm just going and you show up and you're like this is what i got yeah um and and there's been often times and then you you you leave the office and you think he didn't ask me if i was active my exercise my diet anything he just walked in and prescribed me with something and again you would you would get an idea of that through a through a consult that's it we're changing the whole world everybody gets a consult well i think that the the like the like the hero piece of advice and all of this is that for people considering coaching coaching don't be afraid to reach out to all of those options that are out there and say hey can i talk to you on the phone for 15 or 20 minutes in advance first off i think anybody who's coaching should be willing to do that if they are truly oriented in making sure the athlete has the best solution whether it's them or another another person but ultimately it's kind of a considered purchase

right i mean you're investing the most important commodity that you have which is your time you're asking somebody what should i do with this 10 hours a week or whatever that i have to train and i want to make the most out of it i can't think of a more kind of important delegation than delegating to somebody else what i should actually do with the finite amount of time that i have to i have to i have to train so everybody out there who's listening could can like really really take that to heart that you know be deliberate with it and don't be afraid to get people on the phone and ask them a few questions and to see if you believe and there's some sort of you know match there that you can wholeheartedly get behind yeah it's it's um talk talking to people isn't dead it's not dead it shouldn't be and uh it's uh and i find myself in the same situation i mean there was a time when somebody knocked at your door and you're like oh great who's at the door somebody knocks at your door now you're like what are you trying to sell me really who could possibly be knocking at my door you know i'm not even answering it i'm staying right here nobody told me that they were coming to knock on my door or even calling you on the phone anymore even my friends will text me like is it cool to call you right now they text you that yeah they would text me like yeah now's good just call me just call me it's okay to just call all my athletes know they can call me out of out of the blue i'll usually pick up if i'm not sleeping yeah well that's why you and i often don't text because i'm up at four o'clock

too sure i try not to text you and bother you because i know how much you value your personal time i'm usually on strava so i can usually see that you've finished your run at 5 45 and then at that point i could start sending you messages i appreciate that yeah i appreciate that you usually run past my house you could just stop and throw a rock at it and you know see where you're at okay so we talked about kind of a couple of different things it's first off this flavor of consult that we've seen where people are kind of comparing and contrasting and i do think that in the trail and ultra running space the supply of the coaching market is getting a little bit saturated and the reason i say that is because i'm seeing the exact same things you we haven't talked about this maybe we will when we're offline i'm seeing the exact same things that i saw in the early 2000s in the cycling market like it's almost playing out and what are those things the biggest thing is the price points the new coaches coming into the trail and ultra running market want to race to the bottom of the price point bracket because they feel that's their that's the only way that they can kind of compete and so they're offering what they will advertise to be whether or not it's actually what it is or not is a different story but what they are advertising to be fully customized individualized coaching programs for like a hundred dollars a month which both you and i know that

that's completely impractical just based on the time allocation that it takes for the for the coaches second thing is is there so that's the first thing is is the is the price point second thing is is they're trying to they're they're forgetting to adopt technology that is readily out there that will enhance the athlete and most most specifically just using training peaks to coach there's a lot of coaches that are still trying to do it in spreadsheets they're still trying to do through strava which we like strava you just mentioned it's a great tool but it's not built and they will admit this it's not built to coach athletes and analyze athlete analyze data in the way that coaches need to analyze right and analyze data and the mirror image of that was going on in the cycling industry in the early 2000s where we had the power meter kind of revolutionize that and some coaches knew how to use it and other coaches didn't everybody claimed that they knew how to use it and a lot of coaches came into the space and started trying to offer a hundred dollar a month coaching eighty dollar a month coaching seventy dollar a month coaching and things like that and that model very quickly broke down in about in about 10 years but if you know this is going to go on air so i guess i'm going to get stuck with this prediction 10 years from now that will course correct meaning that market that marketplace that over saturation of coaching will eventually dry out because not enough people can earn a living off of it and everybody's going to have to raise their prices and raise their entire game up and

that will change the landscape for the better the athletes will be better served which is the most which is the most important thing um and people can make a kind of a full-time living coaching versus having to like side hustle for it i i would counter that by saying it'll happen faster than that faster than 10 years yeah because i mean within the next 10 years you're going to see more ai you're going to see um and and a lot of people are just going to get filtered out yeah um but uh it's um yeah i i think you're i i think you're right it's interesting on the price point thing um when you think about you you say it's not feasible to do it for for a hundred dollars and i want and there's so many people especially people that that purchase coaching are typically i'm not going to say more affluent but they they understand some some business or they have their own they have their own business and they've seen things just put those shoes on just step into our shoes and you know we sell a a you know a one-hour consult with a coach um you know maybe you're not coached maybe you write your own program and you'd like to go over your program with a coach see if you left any gaps and and so forth it's a hundred dollars and um which is very reasonable a hundred dollars for an hour of uh of a professional coach's time our select coaching package is 197 a month and with that you get to talk to your coach each week we don't put a hard number on it but it's an

hour per month 15 20 minutes a call so that's an hour there's your 100 bucks right there and 97 left to play with that coach hasn't written you a plan yet hasn't reviewed your data hasn't analyzed it hasn't talked about your nutrition hasn't written a strength training plan if they're doing anything like that so now you've got 97 to play with and you've got a full and you've got a premium training peaks account there's not yeah there's not a lot in that number so to say that someone else is doing it for a hundred dollars what can you really expect once they have more than three athletes exactly so that's the other thing too is uh it's interesting this came up um during one of the consult calls um about how many athletes does a coach have yeah and um i don't want to just say that it's not important but you have to remember you for instance have a lot of ultimate level athletes they require more communication they're requesting more communication more frequent data analysis on a daily or or every other day basis looking at each one of their workouts so with that you can only take so many of those i mean for instance if you're if it's you know if you're two or three hours a week with an ultimate athlete i don't know i'm just making up numbers you only have so much there's only so much time that you can you can work with so then you work with 20 of those

whereas if somebody has select level athletes and they spend a half an hour a week with them you know writing their plan or talking to them they could take 30 of those uh again i'm just making up some people you know coaches have a mix so it doesn't specifically lend it to you know how much time or how many athletes specifically can someone have and if you have this many athletes you can't handle coaching me well i think the the big thing for the consumers to understand is is that there's there's a range to where it works really well there's a range where you can be in this sweet spot where you coach enough athletes to get really good at it and i'm not saying that people that coach part-time can't be good coaches but it certainly delays their development as a coach versus somebody who does something full-time they're going to develop a whole lot quicker you just take any any any sort of other profession you're a plumber right if you work as a plumber or electrician 40 hours a week for 10 years that's a lot of experience yeah that you have you've seen every single problem you know how to fix every single drain you know how every you know component of all these old houses that we live in work versus if you if somebody is working or just does plumbing part-time five or ten hours a week it's going to take them four times longer to accumulate the same knowledge base as that person that's only doing it part-time you can hear my dog in the

background she wants to go play instead of us recording a podcast i know unbelievable um but my point with that is is that coaching coaching is the exact same way there's a skill and a developmental component of it where sasha quit it come here come here there's a skill and a developmental component of it that takes repetition in order in order to hone and this range of coaching that we're talking about we get too caught up in the nuance of it is it 30 or 40 but really the important part is it's tens not single digits and not hundreds right that really makes it work and so when i see what i try to steer coaches and i do i do do consulting with other coaches outside of our outside of our own internal coaching department when they're kind of like setting up their business and i meet people at training peaks conferences and things like that what i encourage them to do is to try to find the sweet spot of their athlete count that they feel the most comfortable with and steer them away from the i'm going to coach over 100 people at 100 a month or i'm going to coach five people on the side and just try to make it work neither one of those serve the athlete very well right because neither one of them gives the coach the right amount of time to develop that to develop as a professional and that ultimately

gets reflected on the athletes and all these you know errors and mistakes and problems and things like that that we see come through the pipes and and and with that again not not to sound like a i'm pushing a product here uh and your sales guy guy specifically but when you think about you know that that 197 there's a few bucks in there that goes towards a management system a mentoring process that ensures that we don't have coaches that are taking on yeah more than they can handle from either a load or a skill perspective exactly exactly um so it's that's that's important and again that's that's another that's another part of of my job is is i i make decisions based on what i know about the coaches and their availability and um you know the the attention that an athlete is looking at at a particular package level and i am confident maybe like the the coach that looks on paper like the right coach for them is not the right coach for them right now because i know what their you know what their obligations are and what they and that's um that's i take into consideration those things all the time yeah and a lot of that mentorship i think it doesn't get as appreciated in the the amongst the consumers it probably should and i know that sounds bad considering all the consumers

are listening to this but i have i have coaches ask me all the time like where do i go to get xyz knowledge base and i have a hard time answering that question because there really is no established consistent pipeline for it yeah you can get a certification but certifications only go so far yeah you can attend this webinar but those webinars go so far the the real way that you would do it is to have a community of mentors around you that can listen to every phone call that you that you make that can scrutinize every workout that you put on the calendar and that community of mentors represents maybe a hundred years of coaching at the highest levels i just was very fortunate that i had that in my 20s and we've tried to replicate that to the extent that we can with our current coaching group but outside of that it's honestly really difficult because it's not an established profession it's not like you go to college it's with very rare exceptions that are out there it's not like you go to college for it and there's this typical professional developmental pipeline it really is left to the practitioner the coach in this case to take it on their own accord what they are going to actually do and not everybody but most people are going to take the path of least resistance and just do the very bare minimum or nothing in that area as opposed to really building it out what would you choose if you had the choice

between a uh a coach that had uh two masters in exercise physiology and sports nutrition um just graduated yesterday or a coach that doesn't have a degree in either one of those things but has been a coach with cts for 10 years and has coached hundreds of athletes um is active is an active runner um um has kind of self-taught but has been actively coaching 10 to 30 athletes every day for 10 years i put them both together and we have that we do have that but what would what would what would you where where would you stand on that do you do you feel like that experience or the education or a little bit of both well both of those could work and the way that we've always looked at our like our hiring process for our coaches is they have to meet a we're not a university we're not set up to educate people on exercise physiology for when we talk about it in a classic university university setting so they need to come to the table with a bachelor's level understanding of exercise physiology does a master's degree help yes does two master's degrees help yes does a PhD help yes and we have all of that right we have that

whole range of bachelor's level understanding maybe even not the degree to PhD level from a classic education standpoint and then what we do is we layer on the experience and we layer on the experience with not only um not only the actual work experience of getting to work with dozens and dozens of athletes across many many years but also the collective experience of the rest of our coaching department that can scrutinize that work product that they put out and the coaching that they that they put out that they would not have otherwise gotten unless they're 30 or 40 years down the line so in many ways you mentioned addison earlier so we'll pick on him a little bit more addison's a great a great kid and a great coach he's going to come to the table a year from now after being after have been a full-time coach for a year or two years he's going to come to the table for his athletes with experience four or six times that length of time because of the collective experience of the people around him that he actually has and i don't know how other coaches do that like i i don't profess to know how they gain that i look at other coaches out in the space and this is all with all due respect to them that are working with high profile and elite athletes that really do not have in my opinion the right amount of experience to do that and i scratch my head and i bang my head against the table a little bit

wondering how that how that actually happens because i know as a coach even when i had a decade of full-time coaching experience this was in my early 30s a decade of full-time coaching experience with people like dean golich and jt kearney who's one of the head physiologists over at the olympic training center jim layman who's coaching how however many olympic medalists that he that he's actually coached a dozen people like that looking over my shoulder every single day scrutinizing what i what i was doing a decade of that i still did not feel adequate coaching elite athletes at that time i can't imagine some other coaches with half that experience and none of the mentorship doing doing the same thing yet it happens all the time i just can't i honestly like can't wrap my head around it so anyway my point with that is is that to answer your question we try to put that education and experience together and there really is no quote-unquote perfect candidate we just make sure that we have the tools available to take people that have the potential to be great coaches and mold them into those great coaches however long down the line it actually takes yeah it's so it's something that i see i i should say i hear from athletes all the time and that's um when when they come to cts they're because they're coming for they feel like they're not just getting one coach they're getting 12 coaches

or or or 70 coaches if you want you know or 60 coaches if you want to include our our cycling and triathlon coaches they're just getting um you know a coach that has the ability to turn their you know their chair around and and ask a virtual chair yeah their virtual chair now and just and just ask um and ask another coach question and let's face it we all have situations that we haven't been up against um there's probably for you if there's there's less and less year after year but um i'm sure you're still always surprised that wow i i haven't had this type of situation or how to get an athlete out of a uh out of a a peaking jam or you know what i mean they've they've reached a they've reached a plateau that i can't can't break through and you at least can turn to all these other coaches and say what what have you guys done and i oftentimes you'll find whether they've done studies on it or they've just have had a series of athletes have had the same you know uh affliction if you will you know what's interesting is like for a while i was actually like struggling a little bit so to speak on where to get where to kind of like continue to get that mentorship and advice and trust me our coaching staff does a large they carry a lot of that load for for me for for me specifically professionally but the podcast has been such an amazing outlet for that and i never would have anticipated it just

by talking it through or just by talking dealing with other professionals well because i bring with the exception of you dominic i bring people on the podcast that are way smarter than me wow and uh and uh i end up orienting or like orchestrating the conversation to answer a lot of the questions that i have in particular about something that i'm trying to like manage with an athlete or whatever just for selfish reasons pretty much pretty much just for selfish reasons but um but i guess my point with that is is i never would have anticipated that was going to be the case of the podcast i thought it was going to be kind of like something else but it served as not only a good mentorship ship opportunity but also now i have this like professional network that i've built up sure of people that i've had these awesome conversations with that i can go back to and say hey will you help me with this so a great example that of this is nick tiller i've had on the podcast like four times he's one of our big he and you are like the biggest repeat offenders and um when i initially reached out to him as for the podcast i wanted to talk about a specific paper that he wrote and things like that i ended up reaching out to him when i published the second edition of the book specifically to give it a scientific review of the book i would have never have had that opportunity had i not initially invited him on the podcast to do this thing it was something that he did a freaking fantastic job in the in the book is uh ended up being a much

better product at the end of the day because of his counsel and also stephanie howe who uh did the exact same thing in in parallel so i think that we're kind of going off the we're not going off the rails as i anticipated here the big thing here is is i do think that there's a space for all of this collective mentorship and education that exists out there in the space although it is extremely difficult to catalyze if you're out there just by yourself doing it it is not an easy proposition yeah i have an idea for your next book so let's talk about this later okay let's not bring it up now because then i'll get it's too soon man it hasn't even been out for a year i already know what i'm going to do with it though so it'll be four years from now comic book version not a comic book word i'm not going on tour all right man what else you want to say ah i don't know um the gist of this kind of the bottom line on everything else that i i always say and i know that you were in the office all the time you hear me say this all the time you know you can you can you can do anything you want as long as you let everybody know what you're what you're doing and just be honest with people just be honest with yourself too don't buy a product because that's what everyone says that you should do do some research have a coach consult look at other websites talk to other coaches uh listen to podcasts like this gather some information share some honest information about what you're looking for in a coach and we or someone else will will find the right coach for you

but otherwise um don't ever hesitate to give me a call to you i'm always happy to talk to you i always appreciate that man never the hard sell always the guidance counselor that's going to be your new title i hope we can get that on a business business card for you but uh yeah man good words to take to heart yeah be honest be nice to people man thanks man it's pretty easy all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to dominic for coming back on the podcast and entertaining my series of questions making the journey all the way from two miles away from my house back into my living room to record this podcast i've always appreciated your counsel and your friendship over the years and as i said from the onset i do think the athletes out there that are trying to navigate this space should heed a lot of dominic's advice in terms of how to actually do it because he has seen the whole range over the course of his professional career at cts how it works well when it goes awry and how athletes can set themselves up the best for success if you think that one of our cts coaches is a great coach for you you can talk to dominic personally all you got to do is go to www.trainright.com put something in in the contact form and somebody from our athlete services team probably dominic will be in touch with you and help you navigate this whole thing in a manner much akin to what we went through during the podcast i appreciate the heck out of all the listeners out there if you think this content is valuable for someone you know a training partner

a friend somebody you run with please feel free to share this with them or share it on your social media networks that is it for today folks and as always we will see you out on the trails um