High Performance Coaching in Ultrarunning with Guillaume Millet & Vincent Viet #196

Trail and Ultra Runners. What is going on? What's happening? Welcome to another episode of the Coupecast. As always, I am your humble host, Coach Jason Coupe, and I am also without my normal podcasting equipment. It is stuck somewhere in Munich, germany, and got lost as I was traveling back from UTMB last week, but that isn't either here nor there.

This episode of the podcast is about high performance coaching and some of the models that are starting to emerge within the elite athlete spectrum, and I could think of no better timing to put this in front of the listeners. And, coming off the heels of this year's UTMB, we just happen to see some fantastic performances across the board. So, first off, what is high performance coaching? In a nutshell, high performance coaching is wrapping all of the different services that an elite athlete might need into one umbrella so that they have unfettered access to things like coaching, which is predominately what I do Sports, nutrition, sports psychology and things like altitude and heat interventions, and taking all of those different services and essentially making them accessible to an athlete through the lens of a high performance coordinator, who is skilled in sessing up the situation, evaluating what is going on and seeing what services might be appropriate for what athlete, depending upon the situation that they are in. There just happens to be an effort in this area that is being undertaken by the Solomon team, so I took the opportunity going to UTMB where everybody is at the same place at the same time to talk to some of the brass at Solomon that are leading this charge.

So on the podcast today we have Guillemis Mille and Vincent Vett, both of whom are helping Solomon figure out this high performance model within the group of their athletes. I found this conversation absolutely fascinating. It definitely got me brainstorming about how I could potentially do it as a coach to many of the elite athletes, and I hope that it does get your brain churning on how you might be able to do or be able to catalyze some of these services for yourself, irrespective of the events that you're actually undertaking. Okay, folks, so with that out of the way, I am getting right out of the way. Here's my conversation with Guillemis Mille and Vincent Vett, all about high performance coaching. First off, thanks to you guys for joining me. I know it's always hard UTMB week. I literally just came from the finish line. I had an athlete finish at about 3.05 or 3.10. So I'm appreciative of you guys this time because I know how Thank you for the invitation.

Yeah, yeah, thank you Great to be here. We're going to talk about a really cool program. It's something that I was really excited about when you first introduced it to me, guill, because it's something that I've wanted to try to put together in some way shape or form, and it seems like the pieces are gradually starting to come together to get it done. It's not there yet, but they're gradually starting to come together and I can see the writing on the wall that eventually it'll all come together. But to start out with, we're going to turn to Vincent first. I want to know, and so you can describe this to the audience what was the origin story of starting up these sports sciences program for the athletes, for the Solomon athletes.

So first I came the manager of the international team, salomon team, at the end of 23. And 22,.

sorry To forgive everybody for flubbing things for this week.

And this is one of my ideas to provide that for the athletes. When I did my interview, I spoke about that with the manager. So then when I came, the manager told me that the discussion was ongoing with Guillaume on the same topic. It was something that I wanted to provide to all the athletes. So that was interesting, and also I contacted Yad Lamar to do that because I know this guy well and it was a student of Guillaume a few years ago.

So management and you who are applying for the position, we're thinking the same thing and two different silos, and it just happened to come together like this, so you were involved actually a little bit before, or you're at the same time that Vincent had this kind of rumor like rummaging around in his head, hunky.

I think it was quite at the same time, coming from two different sides.

But to the S2A program, the support to athletes or service to athletes program, I think it's older, but before we initiated the way it's done now, it was mainly on equipment. So of course the athletes were supported and I think in terms of equipment or biomechanics there is a good tradition at Salomon. So they have, for instance, three PhD in biomechanics in Salomon and so they are quite recognized for that. But it was limited to equipment biomechanics and they wanted to expand that and since Vincent had the same idea, I think it came together quite well. So I would say that 22 is a new end of 22 is a new dimension to the program, and all the topics that we're going to discuss, I guess, later in this podcast are quite new, probably not like 100% new, but quite new.

You know. So it's funny I've had Sebastian and Marlene on the podcast before about a year ago and I thought the same thing that you just expressed, guy, that why do you have all these PhDs in biomechanics? And I get it is footwear company like you've got to have biomechanics in there. It makes sense for footwear and apparel and equipment company to have biomechanics, but the logical extension of that is other things and I'm assuming correct me if I'm wrong that's how kind of you got involved to help fill some of that gap that was starting to emerge.

Yeah, I was working or collaborating with Salomon before I started to work with them in this coordination job as a researcher, where we were friends, and I was the supervisor of one of the supervisors of my land, john Dallini. So yeah, so 10 years ago I was already working with Salomon. But of course, now it's a new, it's a new topic, it's a new dimension, I would say.

So, vincent, you kind of had an easy sell. You're interviewing for this job. You have this grandiose idea in unbeknownst to you, or maybe you didn't realize how fully baked it was. It was already considered a good idea by the company.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, all the way was on the same, on the good way to, yeah, so I was super happy to when I heard that you was involved on that project. So yeah, we. Then we speak quickly after that to all the athletes and now the athletes are pretty aware about the program and come more and more to to, to give or different topic, about the performance.

So I'm in the position where I see the output right, an athlete comes to Salomon, they go through the battery of tests and things like that and ultimately you and I you and I and the athlete kind of work together to figure out, to try to make sense out of it. But I don't want to jump to that first, because there's a whole array of things that you can do in these types of situations and inevitably you have to tailor them down to what's feasible, what's pragmatic, and also probably get constrained by budget as well.

There's these out there, all these elements that kind of get woven into it and you guys can kind of go back and forth on this one. I'll leave it up to you. But I want you to go through what that process actually looked like that culling of the different tests that you can do, and also who was going to get the tests and when, and things like that. To what, what we actually what. At least I see what we're going to describe later. How did that? How did that process go?

First we did the interview with the athletes which we got chat with the whole the athletes. We don't do a Guillaume don't don't do, doesn't do a test for nothing. So this is a.

You got to pay the man.

But this is a discussion between the athlete, his coach and and us. So the idea is to yeah, to work together and do this thing for for the good reason.

But initially to encapsulate that a lot of it was athlete driven, I think is what you're getting at. It's not you sitting in his you know penthouse suite trying to determine what the tests are. You're reaching out to the athletes, which is just kind of like asking them hey, what do you guys want?

Yeah, yeah, like a view to view to test or also other topic like a nutrition program or we can provide a lot or speak about a lot of topic is not only about tests, about performance and how we can improve the performance all the the topic around the performance to the athletes.

And so you took this feedback from the athletes and you know the landscape better than the athletes in terms of the testing and what they actually can do. What was your next step in looking at that initial feedback and eventually coming up with the, with the proposal, and saying this is what I think we should do?

Yeah, so I think this program should be seen as an ecosystem to enhance performance, broadly speaking. Right, so we are talking about view to a lab testing, but of course this is much more than that and actually, if we talk about view to view to test or a lab test, it's actually more than just a simple view to test. We can do quite a few things in the lab.

Only, would say, seven out of the 18 to 20 athletes were interested to do a lab testing, which is the one third, which is actually a reasonable number. I was almost expecting, because we are talking about trial runners here and they like to run in the nature. They are not super interested in going to the lab. So I was quite happy with the with seven people tested in the lab. But then it's of course it's much more than that. So the keyword I would say for this program is individualization. So every athlete is different. They are not at the same level of maturation in their career. They don't have the same age. They have males and females short distance ultra trial. Of course it's impossible that they all have the same needs, and indeed they don't, and so it's a very, very like. Each athlete is is different, and that's why we try to adjust to their, to their need.

So the different topics that Vincent and the answer was talking about and the interview that we conducted at the very beginning was okay, we can do this and this and this. Where are you interested? What are you interested in? So, for instance, we talk already about lab testing, but where we can talk about data or variables, do you have data? You're interested to collect more data in the field later on, etc. Etc. Nutrition, as Vincent said, sleep, like the general fitness core, training, etc. The recovery process. So what are you using? Do you know this, this, this technique? Are you interested? Of course, the environmental condition. So altitude training, heat acclimatization, jet lag strategies and basically any other request that they could have. We at least, of course, we agreed to think about it and see, provided of course, we have the expertise and the money we could try to put in place.

And that's what it always comes down to. I've been trying to try to flush out this model. That is in the US predominantly. You see it in the, you see, you do see it internationally, particularly with like soccer clubs and things like that. But it's called a high performance coaching model, where an athlete comes in to an ecosystem of things that they can kind of all a cart choose from. And that's coaching, it's strength training, it's orthopedics, it's nutrition, it's psychology, it's logistics, it's equipment, you know, equipment choices and things like that. There's a whole basket of things that can kind of go into it. And the way these high performance models work is they put one person in charge, the high performance coordinator, to work with the athlete and suss up that what's going on there, and then they go into their portfolio of providers, of service providers that they've built up, and say this is what I think you need, what do you think athlete? And then they try to work it out from there. It's almost akin to.

that is when I- this is exactly what we try to do, so I'm in charge of the coordination. Of course, I don't have expertise in all those fields, and that's why we are and I guess this is one of the reasons why they call me is that I have, I guess, a network of people I have experienced. So that means that I'm old, but it's a different story.

But I think the network. So we can. Yeah, I can. If I have an athlete who is interested to do heat acclimatization, I know I can work with, for instance, Sébastien Rassinet, and, of course, if the athletes wants to work with another expert that is not in our portfolio is, of course, very free to do that. Obviously, there is nothing mandatory and they don't have to work with our nutritionists, they don't have to work with our expert in attitude training et cetera, but we are offering expertise from people that we think are the best or among the best in their field.

Yeah, so you guys, we're not recording this, the video part of this but I'll explain this to the listeners. I've got this shit in my face right now because you mentioned something that is probably the critical catalyst for a program like this, and it's the experience and expertise to know who the experts are and who they are not. That is not easy. I mean it's you know, we kind of take it for granted because we read an article in the magazine and we automatically think they're an expert or whatever they're really filtering down. What it would is, in your case, a worldwide portfolio of service providers that range in physiology and coaching and heat acclimatization and altitude and nutrition and everything else. That's a really like daunting task, even with as much experience as you have.

Yeah, of course, it's difficult to say who is the best expert, and even if we contact someone, sometimes they just don't have time or they are not interested, or so, yeah, it's difficult to find the right people. But this is I guess this is part of my task is to try to convince people that this is going to be super interesting. This is just the beginning of the story and in the future it's going to be fantastic, et cetera, and I have to recognize that, yeah, we are a force on international team. Most of the experts are in France, but this is not limited to France, of course. But, for instance, one of the issues we had, a few athletes were interested in doing mental training, working with a psychologist, and it's very difficult for me to find the right person. I know a couple of good person who can do that in French, but in English it's a different story. So I'm still struggling about that. So I'm still working on that, to be honest.

I got your people in English, we'll talk about that later and then we'll combine lists because I need the French side. So you mentioned the cell, right. You've got to kind of pitch it to the athletes, and I might throw it over to Vincent on this. What was initially the reaction from the athletes when you said, hey, you've got all this stuff available to you. They've been working on it for a while. What's the reception been?

There are. They accept that. But with the pre-dance they wanted to see before and to have the trust and the confidence to do the same things. On my position, on my job, you can't arrive to the best athlete in the world to say, hey, we are coming with a new project, you need to be involved directly on that project. So now we went step by step with Guillaume and that's the start. The start progressively to become a real project in the team. And now the athletes are aware that Guillaume is coming at the races and they can ask him for every topic around the performance, how they come back.

More than a few months ago, yeah, I guess we have to remember that the first time that Jean-Yves Coupu from Salomon, who is one of the person who initiated this thing, along with Vincent on the other side, when the first time he contacted me was October or even November, so it's really, really, really recent. And I guess this is one of my problems is that I maybe get too excited too early, too soon and I was like, yes, super, I'm going to be, I won't have enough time for enough athletes because they are going to be so demanding, et cetera, et cetera, and that was not realistic. Everything takes time. This is not a short term project.

This is something we want.

This is a long term thing. So of course, as Vincent said, I guess they need to trust me, or trust us in general, because I think you're right. That is, this is the same for you as a new manager, and this is many new things at the same time. So of course, they cannot say, yeah, we're going to change everything we do. I mean, they are here and if they are here, it means that they are among the best athletes in the world. So of course, they are good and they know things, and of course, we are not going to change everything. This was not our goal, but so this is step by step, but I must admit, if I want to be fully honest, that it is a bit frustrating.

Well, hold on. I told you so a moment with this because when you initially approached me with this, my feedback to you was do half. If you laid the whole thing out for me and I very distinctly remember this I said, just if you got half of that, that would be pretty good 10 years down the line. If you got the whole thing, that's a great goal, but year one, shoot for half. So I'm glad that that's actually coming full circle.

The buy-in piece of it is actually really interesting because I have athletes on the team and no offense Geet. Very few of them know who you are. They now all know, but you to me, because I'm in the sport, you were one of the first people that put together a framework for ultramarathon training that I could draw from as a coach in 2010 when I was trying to figure all the stuff out. Those athletes don't have that perspective, and so building that trust like Geet's a baller in his sphere, I mean in every sense of the word. But building that trust is an instant. You have to show it and especially with a lead athlete that's trusting you with their performance. You said that from the onset. This is a performance model. That's a big hurdle and it doesn't happen overnight.

Yeah, no, that's true. I mean, of course, I wasn't an elite athlete, so it's just normal that when I was running at GMB they were not even born.

No, I'm just exaggerating a little bit, but that was 15 years ago.

So, yeah, it's normal if they are not, of course, from the science field, it's just normal. But the fact that I've been a runner, even though it's not an elite, I think it's still a plus Because, yeah, I can still know what they feel, I know what's suffering with the bib on is. I know what being stressed on the triumphant de la midtier at the start of the UTMB is. So I think this is quite important and you don't have to be, of course, an elite athlete to be either a coach or a scientist working with elite athletes. Otherwise, only a few people will be able to do that. So it's two different jobs. But, yeah, so it's normal and it takes time and I have to accept that and I guess I'm learning that it will take time and I'm ready to accept that.

So what have the athletes learned? And either one of you can answer this, because they've kind of gone through a round of this essentially, and it's obviously an ongoing project, but you have enough data to work with, you have enough time frame to work with, to where they're coming back and saying having questions or hey, I want more of this, or hey, I heard so and so did this. I want to, kind of like, do that too. Just, can you give me a general sense of the athlete feedback?

I think the most difficult thing is to yeah the trust on the athletes and the athletes want to give this data. This is not easy to ask the athlete to open his door and open on his life.

Yeah, it's invasive.

Yeah.

So this is why this project will take time, because it's just a question to me on the relationship between Guillaume me and the athletes, or the coach as well, and this is not easy for an athlete who were in the team since like 10 years to open the door in six months. So to me this is very difficult things to do, yeah.

And that's ongoing, right. The trust, that trust building relationship. I can talk about it as a coach, right, it's not like all of a sudden you turn the light switch on and you go from no trust to trust. It's a constant process and one of the hard parts is when you have multiple service providers that are like at touch points with the athletes. They all have to go through that trust building process and it ultimately falls on your shoulders, right? Because if you have I mean if either of you guys have a bad experience with a bad service provider or sports psychologist or nutritionist or whatever, you're holding the bag of you recommended it to them and so that's. I guess it's just slower, because when an athlete chooses, hey, I'm gonna work with this coach, there's instant buy-in. Or hey, I'm gonna work with a sports psychologist, there's an instant buy-in. When they're getting the recommendation kind of external, there's a little bit of some barriers that need to get broken down.

Yeah, that's true. Say, as you said, it's not going to be like off on a switch. So this confidence with building a confidence with the athletes, I was actually wondering a couple of months ago, so a few months after the launch of this program okay, am I doing something wrong? Why are they not as interested as I was hoping? And then I realized that yeah, everything takes time, et cetera. But then I also think that there are different reasons and for different athletes could be actually different reasons. Like, some athletes are just not like super interested because all they want is have fun, run in the mountain, be in the nature. They love running, and that's it. They don't need basically anything else. So they don't want anything else. They are not interested because they don't want anything else on their plate. They think that they have enough, plus the media aspect et cetera.

so it's a big job, it's a nice job, but it's still quite demanding for the athletes. So they may see this program as yeah, this is another thing that they ask us to do, and I've been trying to be very, very careful in not presenting things that way. It's not like you have when I first took to the athlete. It's not like you have to do that. If you do that, please trust me. If you do that, you're going to be a better athlete. Is that? This is what we are offering, and let me know if you're interested by at least one thing or maybe two things to start with. So I've been very careful and I think another reason why the athletes are some of the athletes, maybe I'm wrong but are not interested, for instance, to share that data, training data is that they may see me as like almost a dream breaker. You know what I mean Like they are afraid that I will tell them.

You're not good enough. It's not that you are not good enough, is that?

you train too much, so do less, and they love running so much and, at least for some athletes, I'm convinced this is the reason why they don't want me to take a look at their data. Because but this is actually I think one of the key point of the program is to try to prevent injury and one of the good way to prevent injuries to start by looking back and tell athletes see, you're injured. Of course, it's easy to say when the athlete is injured it's more difficult to prevent injuries, but still see what you've done and yeah, probably that was almost obvious that you are going to be injured at some point. Because you need more cross-training, you need more rest, you need a better nutrition, et cetera, et cetera. So some of the athletes maybe like may see me as like a pen in the butt, like saying no, I just want to run, so I don't need that.

I mean, I've had the same experience as a coach whenever I have offered like ad hoc counsel to athletes. Just hey, I don't want anything for it, just let me, if you want help. I'll take a look at it and I get the sense that that same barrier is still there. I'm going to put up a wall or something like that, or tell them to do something that they would normally want to do for fun or whatever. I'm going to say that that's not on the table or whatever, and that's not ever the case, but for whatever reason, it's in somebody's head.

And sorry, just to keep talking about this point and at the end of the day, I'm not going to tell them you have to do that First. Of course we didn't say that, but I guess this is so obvious that it's not the conversation between an athlete and myself, except if they don't have a coach, but of course all the athletes who have a coach. This is a conversation between the coach, myself and the athletes and sometimes Vincent, so it's really a teamwork and of course it's very important. So no need to say that the coach is involved and at the end of the day, this is the coach decision, or, I guess, the athletes' coach decision, and I'm only here to say, yeah, okay, let's.

I guess I believe that we are always smarter when there are more people involved. So if there is another person like me involved, just to give like an external view, I think it and it doesn't mean that the coach and the athlete they have to follow my recommendation, but at least they have this external view and sometimes I'm convinced that this is going to be useful. But now I have to start and show that this is actually helpful and I hope that the things that we have initiated will pay off. I guess it started to pay off already, but of course we need more, and then the other athletes will be. Oh yeah, they were doing that. It seems to work. Let's try.

Here. So here's the deal. I want to peel apart that issue just a little bit more with the other service providers Because I'm in that ecosystem, right, I coach a few of the athletes on the Solomon team, so I see the things that they go through and I help them select what's going to be valuable for them within the suite of services that they're going to that are kind of offered. And then I can also come in on the interpretation side because I have a physiological testing background and I can opine on that as best I can and bring you in when we're talking about the neuromuscular things and stuff like that.

But I'd realize that that's not always the case and also there are people that kind of work in their own silos the sports psychologists and the nutritionists and things like that. They tend to not that they all do this, but they tend to just prescribe the nutrition. So I was wondering if you could describe a little bit on what the people and the practitioners that are working with the athletes, what they've learned from this process, because we talked about what the athletes have learned. They're getting their feet wet, but what are the people like me? I'll describe my experience later. But what are the people like me or my colleagues, essentially that are parallels to me that you've worked with. What's been their general sense?

Again, I was saying that every athlete is different. I guess this is the same for the coaches and, generally speaking, I think the no, to be honest, even from the athlete, the general feeling has been quite positive, so they were quite happy. Not ready to change everything, of course, and this is not what we are asking anyway, but generally speaking, and I think I can tell that, with maybe the exception of one or two athletes, I've been discussing and working with all the athletes in the team, so maybe sometimes it was just like a very small recommendation or exchange, but I don't, that's harder to do by the way, this is real small stuff is way harder because you want the bigger picture.

No, no, but I'm fine with that. I mean, when you work with the top athletes and they are just like they have a precise question and they want something very precise about a program on three weeks to get acclimatization and this is all they want over the whole year, I'm happy with that. I mean, if this is all they need, perfect. I think that we could do more. But if we start with that with all the athletes, I'm happy with that. And for the coach, it's the same story, except that I think they have been even more receptive, even more interested. But I would say that this is also the same answer. So the coach, it's also time consuming for them. This is extra data to take into account.

Most of the coaches, if not all the coaches that are working with our athletes, are quite knowledgeable in science, so they, of course, know what I'm talking about, but still they need time to, for instance, the athlete when they do the lab testing. Yeah, I'm sending the results, plus we have one hour, one hour and a half conversation, et cetera. So, yeah, this is time for the coach, and sometimes you have several athletes, so this is more workload for them. So, again, I'm not expecting they stop everything they were doing to go oh no, we have data. So let's changing our way and work only from data. This is so same answer. It will take time with the coaches too, I guess.

Yeah, and your point of it takes time and I'll add to that it takes time and expertise to weed through all of that and sift through the information to figure out what, from a practical standpoint, are you actually gonna take forward in day-to-day training or in a specific intervention or whatever, like lessons learned or whatever. That doesn't grow on trees, you know. I mean we like to, I try to. I try personally have tried to design coaching education programs for physiological testing. That's only, I know, that's only one component and you can't do it in a one or two hour session. You have to do it over years and actually do the test yourself and present the interpretation and see it over a whole variety of athletes, and then you know repetition, repetition, repetition, and then you can kind of like make sense out of it. It's not a one hour clinic that you all of a sudden have like mastery on.

And I guess what I'm trying to say is is from a coaching standpoint, I would say other practitioners standpoint the combination of time and expertise to integrate all of that, I would say, is the practitioner's limiting factor and in the high performance coaches that I know in the United States that I've been trying to coordinate with their biggest hurdle that they have to overcome is the coordination aspect, and it's both along those areas the time and expertise. So sports psychologists it's like another meeting that they have to have. Right, they're already booked with clients, so it's another meeting they have to have. But then they also have to have the skill to relay whatever they're working on with their athlete to the coach, to the nutritionist, to have realises on the high performance team and kind of make it relevant for them. And that's not an easy skill to develop.

Yeah, but I think this is also part of our job. This is a service to we call that service to athletes, but this is a service to athletes and coaches. So if there are I mean everyone has his or her own strengths and weaknesses and so of course, you can know everything. So if there are like, some coaches are super good in lab testing, so sometimes I just send the result and they know what I'm talking about and we actually discussed before the test. If there are, it's not like, okay, we are going to do this test. If you're not interested, go to see someone else. We are actually discussing with the coach.

I'm proposing something and if the coach disagrees or like okay, I would like to change the protocol. And actually it happened, for instance, with one of the athletes. I proposed to test at 15% slope and he was like no, I think this is too much for him. And I changed the slope to 12% because the coaches was saying this is better for my athlete and I was like fine, and I'm not. Like in science, we have to have the same protocol for everyone.

I'm not going to publish those data. I mean this is not the goal, at least not at all. So if I have one athlete tested at 12 and the other at 15, I'm happy with that as long as the coach is happy, so, anyway. So the goal of this program is also to help the coaches to yeah, sometimes they are not, maybe not, they don't have enough knowledge in nutrition. Yeah, fine, let's bring a nutritionist to help the coach and the athletes. And if they don't need a nutritionist because the coach or the athlete himself is a feel like he has enough, fine, we are not going to call the nutritionist. So again, this is very end of your eyes for both. Yeah, not only for the athlete but even for the coaches, because you're, you have different experience, different knowledge, and it's, it's just normal, I guess.

So I've been. I'm not the end user, obviously, but I have used this to level up my game whenever I've been in this type of environment, because I might be one of the better people in the room from a coaching perspective, but I am not the best person in the room from a biomechanics perspective, from a nutrition perspective, from a mental skills perspective, all of those other things. I realize I'm the dummy in the room and I have kind of like bowed down in those situations and learned a whole lot professionally by just simply asking questions and listening, and then I can go back with that knowledge and serve. Since I'm the person talking to the athlete on a day to day, week to week basis, I can go back with that knowledge and then help the athlete further.

And I hope and I believe, like most coaches we are dealing with in the Salomon team are like you, so they take it as a chance. So that's why I think they were also happy to have this program set up. And of course, I was obviously, but again, no need to say, but it's better when we say it. I was not like okay, now I'm going to tell you what a good runner is, what a good ultra runner is because science is going to resolve all your problems.

No, not at all. It's like okay, the main thing is actually your skill, your expertise and, of course, the talent of the athletes. Now, if you need something, let me know. We can see if we can offer. Maybe not, We'll do our best. That was I mean. I guess you can confirm. That was definitely. My point is to say let us know how we can help. It's not we are telling you what you have to do, because I'm convinced that you know your job, but because you cannot be an expert in everything, let me know what you need and we'll try to find the right person, Not only the best expert, but definitely the right person who knows the discipline as well. So it's not the best scientist, Sometimes it's someone with a bit less knowledge. But more knowledge, more practical knowledge, more experience in the field to help you, and that's it's about that.

Well, and so I can tell you from my experience, half of the things that you can help the athlete with come from what you have designed. So the nutrition protocol, the testing protocol, the sports psychology services, whatever like it's as intended, right, they get the benefit from whatever concoction of things that the athlete is going to partake in. They derive that benefit from it. But the other half and this is really interesting that I have observed that the athlete actually gets out of it if and this is a, I think that this is a big if if the athlete is extremely observant and or they have somebody else as an observer and a coach kind of plays that role, they learn more from things that happen within the environment of providing all of these services that aren't a direct consequence of the service itself. And I'll kind of I'm going to try to anonymize this as much as possible to protect the innocent. But this just recently happened with a camp that you guys, with a camp that you guys put on, and I just happened to have a little bit of a window into what was going on during this camp, where there's a lot of Solomon athletes that were all kind of training for similar things all at the same time, and I was trying to solve a problem with an athlete of underperformance, I just, and I just couldn't figure it out. I couldn't figure out what was going on. Like, we dug into it, kind of like left, right and center.

Turns out it was a really simple things when this person was training really hard, they were underfueling, and they were underfueling because they didn't have enough time to make meals for themselves.

And so my solution to and that's not an intended service that you're like designing right, but it's a byproduct of the environment that they're in.

And so the way that I'm going to solve that is like I'm just going to send you meals, like when you're doing a big training camp and you're out on the trail for eight hours, I'm just going to give you a meal service and we're going to send you meals so you don't have to deal with it. That's a bigger ergogenic aid than I can design training for, like right there, like we just kind of like solve that problem. And so I think that when we're talking about what you're trying to design, yes, you get a whole lot of value from one degree of separation from the services, but you also get a lot of value out of creating this environment where athletes can kind of take advantage of the best experts that are all doing things on their behalf. And there's these, just these, like tangential things and circumstances that they end up in that end up benefiting them just as much as the very specific protocols that they get to go through.

We are talking about the athlete trusting us, but I think also we need to make sure that the experts, or even myself, we trust the athletes, and of course, this is what, at least what I do. But I want to make sure that our experts, they also trust the athletes, in the sense that we need to realize that they I mean, if they are here, it's not by chance, so they are smart, they know what they do. Sometimes they just don't have all the, all the expertise, and part of the program is also to try to educate them. I mean, don't take it the wrong way, it's not like they are dumb and we are going to educate them, but of course, it's impossible to know everything

. So I think this is part of our job also to try to provide information to the coaches, if we can and I hope we can in the future and to the athletes themselves, so that they can, they can be a better athlete. Yeah, the theory is it's not. It's not like being either practical or theoretical. I think we need both.

So this is this is part of the thing, so, yeah, so that's why I was saying we don't need the best experts, like the best scientists, but we need someone also who knows how to talk to the athletes and who trust the athletes. And, yeah, I hope that the person we have and, of course, it's an evaluative thing, so we have a network of experts, but we may change in the future if we are not happy, but I trust that the person we have started to work with are actually a good, both scientifically speaking, but in that sense as well.

So this kind of comes down to one of my operating philosophies with the lead athletes. It's first, do no harm, don't screw them up. Second, get out of the way when you need to, because they're going to they, like you said, they're there for a reason. And the third thing is is when you do intervene, do it in small increments unless there's a really good reason for it and that's exactly the talk that I did when I first talked to them.

It was like exactly what you said, because I've seen and I guess the reason I'm like that was first I fully agree with that. And also this is this came from my experience because I've seen not that often but still a couple of times scientists who were talking to coaches or athletes like with a very small knowledge about like tiny measurements, and from that they wanted to change everything and they wanted to explain to the best, for instance, cross country skier how to do a classic style.

And I mean, the guy was the best technician ever and because they have done two videos, they were going to tell him okay, now you need to change your technique. Because I tell you, as a scientist, this is not the right way to do. I was like come on, are you serious? So for sure, this is exactly what.

I want to avoid. I have seen that I can't tell you how many times ski Okay, but I want to end on on a note that it's going to put you in a little bit of an awkward position, which the preface this a little bit, but I think you're you're a big boy, you can handle it.

That's right?

Yeah, we'll try. We'll try. You can duck and you can duck and die. We'll get something out of this.

But whenever I have tried to conceptualize this, one of the stumbling blocks I personally have had and then also I know a number of different organizations have had is who, what entity, is the right provider to do it? So you have it. It's different than a national governing body situation. So somebody bakes the USA triathlon national team. You know they get adopted into the ecosystem there.

Right here you have a commercial entity, solomon, that paying the athletes and you mentioned one of the things about the on the trust side of things is well, the athletes don't know if they're using this as a screening process to either be a part of a certain part of the team, move up the teams ladders and things like that. And I mentioned that because I don't know what the right solution is. I don't know whether the right solution is to have a corporate entity, a sponsor entity, controlling these types of services, or it's better in the commercial space. I would be somebody in the commercial space to do it. I boot up something and I charge people for it, right, or I monetize it on whatever I want to monetize it for, or whether it's better left in something else that I can't think of.

And I wanted to just kind of get your experience on that now that you've worked with it for a while, because you do have this kind of like dual role of you're working for Solomon but you're also working for the athletes. Right, solomon's cut in the paychecks but at the end of the day, the athletes are the ones receiving the services, and whenever that dichotomy exists, it's a hard thing to kind of reconcile. So I just wanted to brainstorm it more than anything else, like what's the right solution?

I guess there is no like best solution. It really depends on the context, generally speaking. But since we're talking about the Solomon athletes, I assume it would be better if they had enough money to build their own network and they do their own thing, because I agree that sometimes they may be biased and they may be scared to share that because of the reason. That's another reason that I haven't mentioned, but I agree with you that it could be one of the issues with the athlete not trusting me or the program. But one thing we haven't said yet that is quite important is that I'm not going to share the data with anybody I mean even Vincent, except if and even with the coach. I mean at the first I have to, but of course I knew that it was not going to happen.

But the athletes own his or her data, okay. Then of course, if they don't want to share with the coach, okay. So what's the point of collecting data? So usually that works. But then if they want and actually Vincent is not asking for data, but I told them you can be sure that I'm not going to give anything to Solomon, except if you agree. Sorry that I do that.

So yeah, this is an important point to say, because the trust is also at this level you're right and that's a good way to create a separation of church and state, so to speak. Right. The fact that you're not the separation is the data, essentially where the data goes. The data only goes to the athlete. It doesn't go to the company.

So this is personal data and it means what it means. This is personal, this is from the athletes and the athletes own those data, so there is no reason to share that with Solomon.

I've always appreciated that approach. That's the when.

This is going way back, but I can stand on the soapbox a little bit, for when we used to build our, we built our own coaching software for a long period of time before we adopted training pieces of software, and I was one of the people that was responsible for interfacing with the software engineers. I did not build software, I interfaced with the software engineers to like tell them what we wanted essentially. And I very distinctly remember having this one conversation with them. They said, well, what happens when an athlete quits? And I was like, wait, what do you mean? They said, well, where does the data go?

The athlete owns the data. They take it with them, like they're like, okay, well, that's gonna cost an extra, whatever they were like building because they had to build a redundancy system. That's kind of like what they were getting into. But to me it wasn't ever a question right Of where the data goes. Once the coach-athlete relationship is terminated, the athlete holds onto the entirety of their data, the prescription, the analysis, all of the communication that's within the tool between the coach and the athlete. That's the service that we have provided, that the athlete has kind of like paid us for. So I've leaned on that experience. Whenever I've been into these situations where an entity is paying for a service that the athlete is receiving, I always make sure that even the check's getting cut over here by somebody else not getting cut by the athlete, that the athlete owns that service in its entirety and no company in reality is like getting breached back to the person who's paying for it.

Yeah, no, of course, when the athlete do the tests in my lab, they pay for the test, but it doesn't mean that they own the data, because they pay for the test, Of course, and if they are at some point asking me okay, so we are hesitating to keep this person on the team. Okay, can you tell me what?

the view to Max is Because maybe this athlete doesn't have such a bigger engine. Of course I will not tell them. To me it's quite obvious. Maybe it's not so. You're right to mention this point, but it's true, and actually Salomon will. Not only they are not going to ask that, but they are afraid that those data can be. How do you say that can be?

released in the field.

So I sign actually confidentiality agreements saying that I will never release those data after I'm done with this task.

So that's good practice. Like total kudos to you for doing that practice. Now I remember you and I talking about that with some of the athlete data that we were going over. Here's the thing that you will still have to contend with, irrespective of all of the legal lockdowns that you put on. The stuff is the psychology, because some people and I have had this. I've had this with athletes that are on teams that have the one that comes to my mind the most is sport psychology services. So a team will pay for sport psychology services and the athletes not the ones that I work with but some of them are hesitant to do that because they're afraid that they're gonna reveal something in that sport psychology session that that psychologist will then kind of like, take back to who's cutting them the check, which is the team, and then that therefore reflects poorly on them or kind of whatever. That's a very real consideration, even though it shouldn't happen and it doesn't happen in your outfit, but the thought that it might happen is absolutely relevant.

Yeah, and that's probably among the different reasons why we are, why the athletes are not, like, more inclined to participate at the very beginning and then each time. This is back to the trust that we are talking about, and I mean, if they are scared, I guess there is a reason and it happened in the past, so they are right to be scared because it can happen. Of course we'll do our best that it doesn't happen, but of course, theoretically speaking, it can happen.

Yeah, okay, I got one last question for you. We've danced around a little bit. Where do you wanna take it Like five years from now? Solomon's still cutting checks for this thing. The athletes love it. What do you ultimately see the program kind of becoming? Because I know you've got a five-year vision for it. I wanna see how much you can divulge to the public.

Well, first, one thing we didn't say because you didn't ask, but I still want to say it is that this program, of course, is now for the elite athletes, for the international team and actually, from like very recently, since we're very recently, we also have world runners in. Solomon, so they are also joining this program, but still elite athletes.

We have four world runners now but down the pipe it will also be used to help all the athletes, all basically the consumers using a Solomon product. So there are initiatives that I cannot release now because this is still confidential. It will start very soon, so hopefully we'll be able to talk about it in the next podcast, but the plan is really to use the experience that we are developing with this program with elite athletes and to bring that to the lower level athletes, I mean to all the athletes working with Solomon. So you'll see, I hope that you will be interested by this part. Now your question was, I guess, still related to the elite athletes. There are different things that we want to implement. Well, first, as we discussed the many things that we were trying to implement at the beginning, as you said yourself, it was probably too ambitious. So hopefully in five years we will be able to do two.

Yeah, we are at least there, and then I'll come back and.

I'll say I told you so.

Yeah, so my ambition is that.

I already mentioned that but in addition of improving performance, I also want to reduce the number of injuries, and this is related, as you say, because you need to keep training if you want to improve your performance. So if you're injured, of course you don't train so, and we have quite a few athletes that have been injured this year, like very serious injuries. So maybe if the program had been launched two years ago, maybe we will be at the same point, but I hope not. I hope this program will also be helpful for that.

We want to.

I really want to reduce the. This is not an easy task, we know that, but preventing injuries is very, very, very important, and another thing that we want to do in the future is also to work in talent detection. So we want to try to use, and this is Good luck.

Yes.

We want to use big data to try to detect the best athletes. So this is another piece that we want to add in, but, as you said, it won't be before, probably three, four, five years.

Good luck so different things.

I already talk about the education, so I want the athletes to be healthier, not only more performance.

So there are a few things that if they're interested, of course, because sometimes they just know it but, they just don't want to do it, and we cannot force anybody to do anything, but we need to convince them that this is good for them, good for the performance, good for the health, and this is not going to be too demanding. This is going to be okay. Sometimes it's just a few things that you need to change and the impact can be good.

I just want to point out that the expansion plan is just as ambitious as the original plan. Because the expansion plan I'm going to summarize this for you better. Take notes here, guy You're trying to expand in breadth right. So now you're currently focused on elite athletes and you're going to broaden that out to sub-elite athletes, essentially. So you're going broad, you're going to go deep in terms of you want to be able to impact the current group of athletes that you have in a more robust way with the buy-in and take more advantage of the services that are available to them, and you're also expanding scope. So different types of services, so you're expanding in three different areas, kind of all at the same time. That's why it's ambitious. I love it. I love it. Y'all are gonna kill it.

I think it's awesome. Plus, there will be also some initiatives in terms of, like, pure science. But again, this is something that I cannot reveal today. I'm so sure that you will be interested by that, and specificity, and specificity.

That's the way you're also expanding, and specificity, but of course, this is a teamwork.

There are quite a few people working on this program. It's not only Vincent and myself. There are quite a few people. So we cited a few people already, but it's impossible to cite everyone. There are scientists at Salomon and different people, the experts. So yeah, it's ambitious, I agree, and it's probably too ambitious, I know that. But I guess we need direction. At least We'll see you are talking about five years, so five years is not tomorrow, so we'll see in five years where we are.

This is the next frontier I've been mentioned. We're in Germany right now, like literally was where mentioned earlier, at the OCC finished a couple of hours ago and one of the things that I keep mentioning to our coaches that are here and this shall I with us is whoever cracks the code on this high performance model is they're gonna have a spotlight on them for the next few years, because it's such a hard model to figure out. You can't do it alone. It's high expertise, it's high buy, everything that we're just talking about throughout the course of this podcast. These are all hard things to do, but if you do it right, it can make a big impact because nobody else is doing it and you look at the other high performance models that are out there.

There's a reason why all the team sports are doing it. There's a reason why all the league sports are doing it. They've got a lot of infrastructure to throw money around at it. That's another subject for another day, but it can be in the right hands, and the right hands would be the high performance coordinator. Who's this would be you and the right hands an extremely effective tool for a group of athletes. Because we just saw OCC finished and I'm gonna look up the stats at the end of this and I'll put it in the outro because I can't come up with it on the top of my head. I think the top 10 people were separated by like 15 minutes. The top 10 men For that duration of race.

That is astounding, that it's coming down to yeah, I would say this is normal and the fact that there were more room between athletes in the past is not that was not normal.

It means that we are not.

we are now starting to talk about elite performance, and I'm sure we are not it yet. I'm sure the performance will still improve quite a lot, particularly in your trust in the future. And well, for different reason, one being that when the Eastern Africans will start to play and that will be one of the reason, but it's not only about that, it's a yeah. So hopefully what we are trying to do with Salomon will be part of the solution. Of course, it's only a small piece, but I think and I hope it's an important piece.

Y'all are gonna crush it. Man, I can't wait and I can't wait to continue to be a part of it, as long as you guys will have me, in my very limited role, put in the corner to where I don't screw things up.

It's not an immediate role. I think the coaches are in the center of the game, so I appreciate that.

I appreciate that. Is there any place that people can learn more about this? Is there anything like a public facing, anything that the listeners at home could kind of like grasp onto?

Not really. I mean, I'm not particularly interested in communicating. I'm not doing that to communicate about the program et cetera.

Now this is. I mean there is nothing secret.

And yeah, and you didn't ask, of course, what I have done or we have done with such and such athletes, because of course the answer would have been no, sorry, I cannot tell you. So now, we are not trying to communicate. This is not the goal. The goal is really to try to enhance performance and make the athletes happy. And yeah, no, sorry.

Well now, I'm honored that you'd come on the podcast and divulge what you could divulge. That means a lot, so we'll leave it at that. The audience will have to think up of whatever is going on in their own heads. They'll have to use their imagination. But I appreciate what you're trying to do. It's something that, like I said, I've tried to crack the code on and do whatever I can with my limited resources and when I have somebody alongside, shoulder to shoulder, kind of like fighting the same fight, it means a lot and I think it's gonna show up.

Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you again for the invitation. Absolutely.

All right, folks, there you have it. There you go. Much thanks to Vincent and Guy for coming on the podcast and really helping me personally brainstorm about how I might actually bring one of these high performance coaching models to light. It is something that I've been working on over the course of the past 12 months. I still don't know how it's gonna shake out. I still don't know what format I'm gonna do and all these other kind of things. So, if anything, this served as a good brainstorming lesson for me, and I appreciate what they're trying to do with the Solomon athletes because, as I mentioned during the intro of this podcast, the elite athlete fields are getting so sophisticated and so good that models like these are becoming more and more common. We see some athletes trying to take on some aspects of this model and I think that they are well-served to bring in a whole host of practitioners in order to catalyze their performance to the highest level possible.

On another note, the USCA Ultra Running Coach Conference registration deadline is coming up very quickly. On September 20th, that is your last day to register for this absolutely amazing conference in Colorado Springs, colorado. Three days of nothing but geeking out about ultra running training and ultra running performance highlighted by myself, my colleagues Nick Tiller, stephanie Howe I'm gonna leave a link to all of the presenters in the show notes and during this conference we really try to comprehensively cover every single aspect of ultra marathon performance that you could possibly think of, from training design to environmental considerations, heat altitude, injury prevention, strength training and even building up your business. Building up your ultra marathon coaching business is all covered in this three day conference in Colorado Springs, colorado, september 29th through October 2nd. A link to register will be in the show notes. I hope to see you guys all there. I think it's actually gonna sell out pretty quickly within the next week or so.

So get your hands on this conference. It is only live. It is not gonna be recorded. There is no virtual presentation of it, and a big reason for that is one of the key attributes and key benefits that you get from coming to this conference is simply the in-person networking that you get. I have been a presenter at the Training Peaks Coaching Conference over the course of the past several years and I've always gotten much more out of just simply talking to my fellow coaches in-person, one-on-one, as compared to the presenters, which are actually always quite fantastic, that are there. The networking piece of it is always quite valuable, so I hope to see you all there. I'm always open for any questions about this conference. You guys can hit me up on Instagram or through my website, should you be inquiring about some of the particulars of this conference. That is it for today, folks. I appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you and, as always, we will see you out on the trails.