Jay T. Kearney PhD on Leadership, Mentorship and Performance | Koopcast Episode 46

trail and ultra runners what is going on welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your host coach Jason Koop i hope everybody is well today this episode of the podcast is a personal one for me on the podcast today i have someone who has had a tremendous impact on me both personally and professionally and that is jt kearney jt has spent his entire life working in the areas of physiology athlete performance and leadership and i got to know jt after he had spent 24 years as a physiologist at the u.s olympic training center in colorado springs colorado where he directed the best athletes and the best coaches in the entire world to olympic success he was a personal mentor of mine and one of my direct supervisors when i was a young coach in my mid-20s and i'm proud to still call him a mentor as well as a friend during our time that we worked together jt taught me how to be a better leader he taught me how to find answers for myself how to listen and he called me out whenever i got it wrong which trust me i did plenty of times and that cycle never stops because even in this very podcast jt continues to bust my balls and put me through the ringer of humility and i'm grateful for every single second of it every coach and every athlete

deserves a mentor and a friend like jt his counsel to me has been incomparable and although it seems like a trip down memory lane at points during this podcast i hope that some of the nuggets of wisdom that we uncovered during this discussion you can take with you regardless of if you're an athlete a coach a husband a wife a leader in business or a leader of people jt i appreciate everything that you have selflessly given to me over the course of my career all right enough of the nostalgia let's get right into it here's my conversation with jt kearney i wanted to start out by telling you this story that has lived far beyond the time frame that you and i work together and will probably as long as i'm a coach and as long as i'm supervising and managing people i think that this story will continue to live because it's meant so much to me i have a little trepidation here that's fine you shouldn't because it's been a positive impact total total positive impact but i want to get your kind of impression uh on this on this interaction that we had several years ago and then use that to to launch this discussion um when i was a really young developing coach probably in my mid or maybe even late 20s and you and i had first started working

together um i was gearing up for this biomechanics presentation that i was going to deliver across the entire coaching department including you and i i it was one of those things that for whatever reason i just sunk everything into like i did a whole i did a lot of research behind it i spent you know hours and hours of meticulous preparation getting this whole thing ready and i did the presentation gave it to you know and i thought i knocked it out of the park and you know all this other stuff that you know cocky 25 year olds actually have and i wanted to get your feedback on it so i was like okay hey can we set some time aside and you can like tell me what you thought of this honestly and so we did like we had done countless times before we walked over to starbucks and you got your you know pumpkin scone and pumpkin spice latte or whatever and and you took me through the whole thing okay coop here's what you did good here's you know where you could rearrange some things and just this normal you know it was all kind of relatively like normal feedback both technical stuff and like delivery types of things but at the very end where are you going with this you'll see you'll see at the very end you made this one statement and this is the statement that kind of lives in in perpetuity you said listen if you ever ever confuse the terms exercise efficiency and running economy again i'm not going to let you back in the building i'm going to say go home don't pass go you cannot make that mistake because

you can fool the lay audience and people that that you write for an article but people like me and people like your peers they will see through that and look at you as incompetent because of it that has stuck with me jt for 20 years now almost 20 years and i tell that story to all of our incoming coaches in various flavors depending upon you know how i want to manipulate the situation but it's it's kind of it's it's kind of made an impact on me in two ways and this is and this is what i want to this is what i want to start talking about the first one is the obvious way it's like listen you got to know your shit like you that is unquestionable that you have to know what you're talking about because people will see through it there's too much information out there there's too many good people you absolutely have to know your stuff and yeah it's just a silly little vocabulary switch but it's meaningful in high performance types of context that was the first thing the second thing is and i didn't realize this until like five or seven years later is that that singular moment impacted me and also impacted others for years and so finally i the way that i took it i was like you know what if i were actually able to orchestrate some point of influence like jt had on me at that one particular moment in time that can have an impact on others that can have an impact on

others it can have an impact on it was a good leadership point and that's kind of what i want to start out with i don't know if you ever intended that interaction to be that way but it was well i'll start from the end and uh and go from there um i i am not a very subtle person in the way i i deal with people the way i exercise the way i compete physically it just that's subtlety is not me when i was racing at the the highest level in the canoe kayak the nickname the team gave me was mr mellow which was obviously okay what is as far away as we can get to what this guy is actually like it's like calling the fat guy tiny what it's like calling the fat guy tiny yeah yeah yeah i'm like calling the fat guy tiny exactly kind of a situation so i would not have set that up as in some way attempting to create you know some sort of a impact moment it's just it's something that i believed something that that i've all was always committed to in my communication with athletes and coaches

to try and be one as precise as i could but be as accurate especially when it came to implications for performance you know i i spent a lot of years and you know hundreds of presentations at the usoc working with with coaches who had resumes of producing multiple multiple olympic champions over years and years and years and years and so if i was talking to them about something that i believe from a sports science standpoint could have an impact on their performance economy versus efficiency i wanted to express that as as accurately as possible why do you think and this is probably me you know selfishly wanting to like lie down on the psychology couch a little bit what just as long as you're not sitting in the chair yeah you're the client that's all right just i'm not lying down if you're gonna be the no we wouldn't want that either but so you i i've respected you for a long time for the ability to be able to blend all of these different worlds from sports

science and coaching and mentorship and leadership why do you think that that one that one piece now having me you know told you how much of an impact that it had on me why do you think that that had an impact on me and like what's the relatable piece to other people that are trying to have a mentorship or a leadership impact on people you know mentorship is a very is a very difficult term and i honestly coop i honestly do not believe that you can aspire to be a mentor because if you're aspiring to be something that you're not that you do not genuinely possess those characteristics that can be that can have a positive impact on the way other people make decisions and you're trying to in some way you know inflate your own significance your own presence or whatever then you're never going to be a good mentor i think the i've i've had the incredible fortune to have had a series of mentors through my early professional life that established models for me and i i would be almost certain that none of them

would have ever said you know i'm trying to be a mentor to this guy you know and you you it has to be genuine go ahead yeah but in in a lot of cases it's because there's a lot of uh there's a lot of athletes and there's also a lot of coaches that'll listen to this podcast a lot of coaches end up in that situation in this kind of like mentorship role with their athletes or even with their peers as a byproduct of their vocation and so while that while they might not desire to do it or they might have the knack to do it or they might not have like the own internal you know personality or skill set or tools or whatever to do it they're still in in that position to to a certain extent and they still have to play a little bit of that role within their professional and personal lives and i've always kind of wondered and this is getting to your point like what what facilitates people that are extremely effective at doing that which i always thought that you were with myself and with our coaching group versus ones that just for whatever reason they can't like kind of grasp it coob i i would i would say it's one to the the quality of communication that you have with someone um and your ability to convey to them a a message whether that

happens to be a knowledge-based message or um i'll say more of a lifestyle-based message a how do we go about doing things that that quality of communication is incredibly important and i think the way an individual demonstrates that leadership to a person is when they're if i'm sitting down and talking to you at starbucks about how your presentation on biomechanics was other than drinking my latte i'm trying to be just with you i've thought through what you did in the presentation i almost certainly have taken some notes on it and i'm genuinely looking at it from a standpoint of all right if jason is going to go out and do this again next week how can he use what i'm telling him to perform at a higher level and it's the same way coaches should understand this paradigm incredibly well when they sit down and write out a month's training program their objective is to be able to alter the overall performance capacity of an individual from where it was on september one to where it's going to be at the end of the month i mean that's the design that's what they have in their mind

you know a story aside one of the most prolific uh coaches that i had in one sport that had and i say had sort of as a client um we got to the point where he would write down his objectives for the blocks of training usually he used three weeks sometimes they'd be a little bit longer a little bit shorter he'd write down the objectives then he'd give me all of the workouts intensity duration stress the whole thing and then i'd go through and basically do a content analysis on those training programs are you actually stimulating at an appropriate frequency and intensity and training load to cause the adaptive responses that you've identified up above and it was a wonderful interaction because it provided a feedback loop um that allowed him to sometimes and there were times when i'd have to say you're gonna kill him you know you can't do this much all loaded on one variable but there were other times

when in you know a month of training 50 workouts he'd have six workouts that were focused on his number one objective right come on we've got to do better than that that style of schedule review is one of the things that we commonly use in our coaching group to like audit each other so the stereotypical thing that we'll do to help provide counsel from coach to coach to coach or if a coach has an athlete that they need some that they need some advice on is we'll put their training up on a screen we'll all get in a room we'll put their training up on a screen and the coach will kind of go over this is what i want to do with this athlete physiologically i want to work on these things and here's what i'm actually doing and almost always when the coach can't figure it out those two things are in conflict they're in mismatch when everything's going great you're doing exactly what you said you were going to do yep i you know i i agree with that but going back to the leadership situation um i just coop i i i think leadership is is such a difficult difficult term to really define and and and and how how you get into that situation i'm not really sure but i think the most important

thing is the integrity the ethical characteristics the truth that if i say i'm going to do something i do it if i i don't go around and telling you one thing and go down the hall and tell somebody else something else um and because that's and i think those are always important be and it's almost like you can't use incorrect terms when you're presenting to highly professional people because they're going to figure it out well guess what they're going to also figure out all of the ancillary traits that you have and if those are ragged you know amf well and i i've so since then there's here's another corollary to that story jt whenever i read a lay article which i don't do a lot but i still do whenever i read a lay article and those two words are flip-flop i'm automatically god this person doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about automatically okay automatic even though they might have just made a simple mistake or an editor changed it or whatever which happens i automatically go to the point where you just made where if that if i'm just seeing this much of what's gone awry there's probably a thousand more things kind of like behind the curtain that we're not seeing yeah um you you mentioned this

really interesting uh point that that leadership is this really tough thing to actually define and and put a pin on yet we know it when we see it and you've always used this you absolutely you've used this story with the beijing olympics which you were a part of as kind of like a demonstration point of what good leadership is and what the result of it could actually be do you want to recap that a little bit because i think that's just like a fascinating not many people understand what goes on behind the scenes to pull an olympic games off from the perspective of getting the athletes there and getting them prepared so why don't you go through that i i absolutely would love to and as you know i've uh i've recommended uh that you get one of the principles in my conversation about leadership in in beijing um on one of your podcasts and he's an incredibly modest guy you're going to have a terrible time getting any eye eyes out of him but i'll do the eyes for him and then he can do the whatever okay perfect but um doug ingram who was director of uh sport at the usoc got the assignment okay we know that the chinese are going to attempt to make it as difficult as possible for the american team to be successful and we worked through and at his level that was worked through very extensively of

what was needed to be to prepare from that overall pie doug got athletic preparation what do we do with the athletes on the ground for their training recovery sports medicine all of that end of the continuum and how do i ensure that that's as effective as possible so i think the genius that doug had with that is that at his level within the organization he got the assurance all right you have a team of i can't remember but i'll say 20 people it might have been a little bit more than that 25 people and he said okay but i want to hand pick those 25 people for their for my based on my knowledge of their ability to be team players and contribute to the overall mission so once he had his team and he would and there were people that were really disappointed they were sure they were in line to go to the beijing games because they had checked various boxers and hadn't been to the last games or whatever and he just didn't take them but once he had his team then he was absolutely straightforward in his communication

our goal is to provide the olympic coaches and the olympic athletes with the highest quality of the olympic coaches and the olympic coaches and the olympic coaches and the olympic coaches and the olympic coaches and that included starting off with leasing half of a major university campus and all of its athletic facilities accelerating the construction of a swimming pool that was a hole in the ground when we first started looking at it to doing all sorts of stuff you know on the ground with with the staff and doug had the overall situation but then he also he put individuals and responsible for the various teams that took care of the functions within that and every day we started off with an overall session he talked about what whatever was flowing down from him and this started even before we got to beijing and we batted back and forth what do we need how do we need to do it and then when we got on the ground all hell broke loose i mean stuff like the chinese had specifically dumped broken glass into the sand in the long jump triple jump

pits and so let me let's back up a little bit because i want to accurately portray the enormity of the task at hand oh you were trying to recreate training venues for every single olympic sport except for one if i remember correctly it's three i think three okay three so every single olympic sport that you can think of for the summer beijing olympics you were trying to recreate training venues at some random university that you had leased that that when you get there is gonna know like god knows what yeah and so so it so there's certain port there's certain parts of this where you're taking equipment and you're shipping it on boats over to china you don't know if they're gonna get there or not you get there and there's intentional sabotage the chinese have done to this venue that they know that the americans are taking over like like how big of a project was it was it when you actually get there you paint this one thing it's like oh well they put glass in the pits i mean it's like it goes beyond that though oh it just um women's soccer um u.s is fairly good at women's soccer yeah um in case the country and the chinese hadn't noticed that by the way so on the practice field they had a set of american football goals exactly on the end line exactly on the end line um so it would be incredibly dangerous if any of the

the women happened to run past the end of the field and think of how many times people are going hell-bent for election and run way out of bounds you know just stuff you know like like that we took i believe it's correct we took nine sea containers um absolutely full of athletic equipment we took you know 10 cents of olympic weights we took weight platforms we took racks we took bicycle ergometers we took all you need for a fencing venue all the platform multiple that we took all the stuff that we needed for table tennis we took multiple sets of hurdles we took um all the pole vault we took safety cages for the disc and the hammer throw we you know on and on and on well one example the chinese heard that the u.s was going to have a practice game in water polo the women against i'll say the netherlands i you can't count you know you know some other team you know i think it was the netherlands so the night before they went to that pool which was not in our venues that we controlled and took out all the waterfall goals and equipment

this whole thing like every time i talk to you about it it gets more and more hilarious but the thing that sticks in my mind is is it's a small staff that did all of this i mean you look at you look at any other reasonable like construction project or whatever i mean they'll have hundreds and hundreds of people trying to assemble what you guys assembled with 25 people in the matter of just just several days or a couple weeks right yeah we were there about two weeks before the athletes got there so you know in that particular case we had extra water polo equipment and an hour later had it in the in the facility all set to go and we all we always had these uh minders the chinese staff that were supposed to help us and some of the women one of whom you know nicknamed them as just in general mr pima and the chinese don't know the acronym or pain in my ass and so this was perfect and so we addressed them as mr pima and you know there was mr pima from the basketball venue and mr pima from this and that and so on and they were all perfectly happy to be part of the pima uh group oh my god that's so hilarious okay and we just we just got around every everything like you know some of the

crazy crazy things you know i'm not sure you've ever seen me try to play basketball but you know i'm not a basketball guy we had specifically paid for a gym that had a court that could be just used for men and women's basketball and then the main gymnasium that we were going to use for volleyball and several several other things we get in there and the guys that know basketball start looking around in horror the backboards are basically the flush mounted blackboards on the walls you know so you know and the american basketball team either men's or women they're really good and sometimes some of those guys after they make a shot they run underneath the baskets by six or eight feet if you would okay so that's it and then strategically the lighting was set up so that if you were say 15 feet from the basket and you look at it you're looking at the bank of mercury vapor lights that go all the way around the building right smack in your eyes then their their coup d'etat was this is a suspended wood floor like it was supposed to be they take a basketball and they go around and the ball is going boom boom boom boom and would just almost not come back up the floor had dead spots all over it and this is what

our olympic basketball teams were supposed to be practicing on before the beijing olympics and speaking of leadership coach k came in they took him upstairs showed him the gym talked about all the things that we knew were a problem talked to about the red they spots and said you can use this but we believe you'll be a lot happier with this situation and told him how we'd have to mix the schedule of the four major teams that needed the gym he looked around and he says you're right we'll make it work yeah you know and that's what i want to get to the heart of the matter because this it's the we'll make it work piece so to like broadly paint this picture even if the chinese weren't messing with you what you were asked to do is an insurmountable task you're recreating all these different venues with 25 people over the course of a couple of weeks in a foreign country but then you add the layer of you're actually getting government like actual literal government interference in in real ways just class long jump pit the facilities are in it are inadequate you have spies kind of embedded into the teams and things like that but yet but yet like if you were to draw that on paper i'd be like oh these guys are screwed like they're like the metal count's going to be

terrible blah blah blah like if you were just to paint that out but yet you're able to pull it off so what were the key pieces of leadership that you guys were able to use with the entire team that enabled you to actually pull this insurmountable task off i think it all goes back to my initial comment doug had the capability of putting in place in front of all of the people that he hand selected the vision of this is what we're going to do this is how we're going to support these clients and it's important to remember that everybody on that team has been intimately involved with seeing those same clients i mean they they understand and know what the client requirements are which is incredibly important i mean if you're trying to put it together you've got to know what you're trying to accomplish you can't just decide we're going to provide this and they're going to figure out how to use it that didn't happen at all and so some of the most important interfaces were the coaches or technical directors for sports that we could communicate with beforehand how what do you need how do you want it what are the so that we had that kind of information and then we're able to implement it

so i think that's the first level doug's ability to communicate it to the group the second level is he selected a group of us and assigned us various uh tasks within it and then each of us took our little team and followed the same model this is what we were going to do and and then people had i think doug's inspiration was that was such that everybody was 100 percent committed it didn't make any difference what we were doing like to get the glass out of the the jump pits Bruce Bruce Wes Barnett, who you know, and I went out shopping with one of our liaisons and bought screen and two by four, two different meshes of screen.

And we built a sloped screening platform where the good sand came out the bottom and the rocks and the glass went down to the end. And we had crews of three, four, five people, all the women, girls, whatever, they're right in there with shovels. And we strained that whole thing. And the fun thing was we bought a couple of wheelbarrows. And every time we finished filtering it out, we took it across the field and dumped it in the Chinese pit. I love it. I also. So I think it's inspiration. It's knowing what you're trying to accomplish.

Well, and I kind of I translate this down to coaches working with athletes and they have to be invested in what the athlete is doing. You guys as a team, the 25 into 20 some odd individuals that you had going over there. One of the salient points of of the of success that you had mentioned is that you had seen all of the clients or the athletes and their coaches and things like that for years in this lead up to Beijing. And there was an intimate connection between the staff and the athletes and what they were trying to accomplish. And that connection was part of this fuel that, you know, allows you to run through brick walls and take glass out of, you know, logjump pits. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I did just it was a very, very impressive group of people to, you know, to be part of.

And, you know, I'm a I'm a big one on this. There's I don't know of a conversation of anyone that was on that team that came back from Beijing and said, Coop, you wouldn't believe what I did. We were you know, I was able to do this. I don't know of a single person that ever said that because that just wasn't the way we were doing. Well, and what's really impressive about that is like that's not what a lot of you all were signing up for. I mean, you're talking about like high level sports physiologists, high level, you know, athletic trainers, high level people in all these sports that are. I'm going to this is going to sound a little bit derogatory, but I think it's going to make my point that are reduced to digging the sand out of a long jump pit as opposed to pricking people's fingers and finding out their lactate levels and hooking up the gas analyzers.

And things like that. I mean, it's so far removed from what you were doing when they were back here in the States. Oh, that's absolutely true. I mean, but there was no one that was saying, well, I'm an ankle taping specialist. You know, I don't dig sand or, you know, I don't figure out how to move, you know, goalposts that are in the way of for the women's soccer venue. Like I, that just did not happen. So for the, so for the athletes and the coaches that are kind of like out there and they have to be part of a group of a team, either it's a coach leading a team of people or a group of athletes that have, you know, some sort of leadership structure within their, uh, within their like athletic organizational chart.

What, what would you, what would you like impart on them in terms of the things that you like learned from that to where they can take into their own organization and just make it and make it functional a lot better and do those things that are like the duties is otherwise specified in order to pull the project off or whatever they're trying to do. I, I, I, I know it sounds trite. It sounds incredibly trite. But I think to be successful in that, in a situation as a coach, as a leader, you have to spend time sitting down, thinking about, really contemplating what you're trying to accomplish.

What is your goal? And then once, once you have identified that, then it's much either easier to decide, you know, what are the behaviors that are appropriate to assist you in being able to achieve that objective. And coaching athletes is an incredibly, incredibly difficult situation because many, many individuals who have aspirations for athletic performance that far exceed their genetic gifts to be successful at that.

You know, so let's say you're a high school coach and you're coaching milers. All right. Well, every couple of years, you're going to have some ninth graders show up one, two, three, who are capable of running a five minute mile when they show up. All right. All right. And if you do a really good job with coaching them, they might be able to run a 440 or a 430. But if for one second, you decide, okay, this five minute freshman miler, I'm going to have him running Jim Ryan times by the time he's a senior and be down in the 450s.

That, that's just a totally inappropriate approach to achieving athletic success. I mean, so much of athletics. You know, I would argue that 90% of the coaches that you listen, that listen to your podcast are individuals who are trying to assist athletes to achieve the best that they can achieve, not being able to achieve some performance that is sterling by internationally competitive standards. You know, let's, you know, let's take, you know, a hundred mile runners.

I mean, to run a hundred miles is a hell of an accomplishment, you know, but then, you know, you have some genetic freaks like Matt Carpenter that we both know the name of. Most of your coaches have to, that in this process of deciding where they're going, what their objective is and how they're working with an athlete, they have to recognize, okay, I'm going to try and help this young guy, Jason Koop, break the time standard of 24 hours for the Leadville 100. Not to try and do it in 16 hours, you know, and that will fulfill your objective.

You as an athlete's objective. Yeah. A hundred percent. There's always going to be different flavors and kind of like levels of athletes and the amount of the number of coaches that get to work with the top 1% or the top one half of 1% are very few and far, far between. And we probably mentioned like five of them since we started talking right now, five out of the 10 of them since we started talking right now. But so, so the vast majority are working with just normal people, but still at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Like still the coach has to have certain leadership qualities in order for the coaching that they're delivering to be efficacious. It's not just the training program. It's the whole thing that gets wrapped around coaching. So what are the specific things with a coach within the coach athlete relationship that are important?

Oh, I could not agree more on that. Well, we started off on feedback and we're going to come back to feedback right now. The quality of communication of feedback to an athlete. In other words, how they're doing, how that, how they're, that training performance relates to a potential competitive performance. You know, what's the relationship between training and ability competitively, the whole strategic aspects of it being motivational, but not being dissociatively motivational.

Oh, I know you can, I know you can do 16 hours. I like that term dissociatively motivational. Yeah. So, so you're just saying motivational no matter the situation. What's that? Are you, so are you saying, are you saying motivation, being motivational outside of the situation, like irrespective of what's going on? You're always like, yeah, you're awesome. You're going to always do. No, no, no. I think that that's a huge fault. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. That takes someone out of being an effective coach in the league. You know, if I start with you and, and you show up and you tell me, I really want to be an Olympic weightlifter. Okay. If I'm telling you right away, who, I think this is really possible.

You know, everything I can see about you is, is right there. Um, and then start trying to train you and motivate you to do that. That's just plain dishonesty. For, for, for anybody who actually can't, who's never seen me before, I will never resemble an Olympic weightlifter. Yeah. Never. So what you're saying is they got to be real. Like, that's what I'm trying to get back at is, is that one of the things that you were pointing out is. Coaches have to be real with their athletes. They can't always be this. You're amazing. You're awesome. Like, irrespective of the situation. It has to, it has to also be backed up with some honest and at times, you know, maybe difficult dialogue. Right.

The first part of what you were saying, that's dissociative motivation. It's, you're not associated with reality. Do you know the name Tara Knott? No. Do you, um, Tara Knott, um, was the first Olympic gold medalist in women's weightlifting. The first time I saw her in the gym, you know, and this is a woman who was five foot nothing and 108 pounds. I went over to one of the weightlifting coaches and I said, who's, who's this? And they said, this is a woman that didn't make the 96 Olympic soccer team has gone, had gone to Colorado college, took up weight training as part of the soccer thing and realized she was quite good.

Well, for the coach to immediately see how incredibly fast she was, how just lightning quick reflexes, you know, all of the, all of her traits to be motivational to try and say to her, you know, you're doing well. Really, really, really looking forward to seeing you in the gym tomorrow and tomorrow and this afternoon. And she made huge improvements over, you know, a period of a couple of years, but she was working with Dragomir Sherislaw, who, you know, incredibly knowledgeable, had been an Olympic lifter, was great on motivation.

And he could, he could give up all his coaching background and be a motivational speaker and was appropriately applied. And I'm sure there are other situations where that motivation shouldn't have been that way. So that goes back to, you got me off the idea of feedback. I think for a coach to be able to provide feedback that is objective as much as possible, that you have data that you have data that support what you're saying, and that you can allow the athlete to process those data in a way that they understand the relationship between a previous performance and a future performance or training performance and competitive performances.

Then I think that that quality can be really, can be really great. Here's the stumper for you, JT. There might be, I'm assuming it's going to be a stumper for you because it's a stumper for me. What grade class should you be as an Olympic lifter? No, no way. The skinny, uncoordinated class. Do you remember Meg Stone, who worked with us for a while? No. She was the one who actually taught me how to do Olympic lifts. Yeah. And I remember the, some of the first, like first sessions that we were doing were all with broomsticks. And which is, I think, I still think is harder to learn with a broomstick as opposed to something with a little bit of weight on it.

But anyway, that's my own, that's my own hang up based on my own inadequacies. So I remember after the first couple of weeks is her trying to teach us this with broomsticks that I just couldn't get it. I just, I just couldn't, I couldn't coordinate the movements together, you know, which is, should be no surprise to anybody who's tried to see me dance. And she finally looked at me and she hit me on my, on my rear end with the broomstick and typical Meg Stone style. You know, she's pretty abrasive and tells you like it is and says, at least you can be an example of what not to do. So if there's ever an Olympic weightlifting competition, consider me out because I can't even get it with the, with the broomstick. Um, okay, here's the stuff. Here's the stumper though, because, and I, I struggle with this a little bit, um, uh, in coaching.

And I know there are a lot of other coaches, including our own coaches that have a hard time, like piecing it together. You mentioned that part of this communication loop has to be based in objective data or objective information that you're getting from the athlete in some form or fashion. You're seeing them work out. You have a heart rate training file. You have a, you know, GPS file, power meter file, whatever you're using that as part of the communication loop to, to, to provide athlete feedback. Okay. You're doing good. You're doing great. You're not doing so good. And that comes to be car becomes part of the mix when that doesn't exist, which it does from time to time, either with an athlete throughout their entirety of their career, where there's not a lot of, you know, objective feedback to get, or during a period of time for whatever happens.

How does one go about providing that objective feedback when the data might not exist or they don't keep track of their training files very good or anything like that? Well, a couple of things. One, I think you can always create the data. You don't need any technology whatsoever to create the data. You can use what I've always referred to as marker workouts. You can have selected workouts that a person comes back to and does on a regular basis. And you can have a range of those that assess various, I would say, elements of the physiological performance capability that is going to contribute to whatever the competitive distance that you want to have.

So that you can have some that assess power. You can have some that assess speed endurance. You can have some that assess the VO2 max kind of performance. And use those as marker workouts. Because then if somebody is in a situation that they're trying to improve a particular quality, and you can look at how they're doing on those marker workouts, and you're getting no change, then you can sit down and you can have, with the athlete, a conversation. Either we've reached a point, the Germans call it, where you've gotten as good as you're going to get and not get any better. No athlete will ever accept that.

Or we need to modify the training stimuli that you're using to try and elicit the adaptive response. And, you know, you said I could jump on a soapbox if I wanted to. And I just want to pick up on that one point. I think there are so many athletes and coaches who do not look at their training program, their training regimens, from a critical standpoint and say, Am I exposing my body to the milieu of stimuli that will cause an adaptation in what I'm trying to change?

You know, and, you know, one of the, you've probably heard me do this, you know, Kearney's 10 laws of the universe. And one of those is you can never learn to fly by running very fast. And the idea is that as you get to a higher and higher level of performance, you have to adapt different approaches to trying to get better. You know, what gets you from A to B and B to C may not, I would say, is not what's going to get you from C to D.

I have heard that. I can tell the audience right now. I can't tell you how many times. And it's part of the reason why, like, even things down to, like, how many athletes I coach, right, kind of emanates from that. Because I only have so much time to look at the information that's coming in and give it a hearty, qualitative assessment to, like, actually, like, figure out how. It all emanates from that kind of stuff. You actually have to look at what's going on to figure out how to get better. Yeah. And you're right. I don't think a lot of athletes take the time, athletes and coaches take the time to give that as thorough of a review and an analysis as they need to do in order to figure out what the next step is. You know, endurance athletes, I think, are prone to being very, very poor, very myopic, because for their whole early career, and that's when we, you know, we lay the groundwork for how we believe we approach a sport.

If you just do more, you get better. Yep. You know, when Norman Pillsbury and I decided we were going to be two-mile runners in track season, we ran all the way to the Pennsylvania state border two miles and back. Well, we did that for a couple of months, and we got better at it. Go figure. But what a lot of endurance athletes don't understand or underappreciate, I guess, and this is really particular with the ultramarathon audience that is going to be listening out there, is that you can only increase your volume so much. Like, eventually you reach a point to where you're going to get injured, you don't have the time, there's some limiting factor there, and that's where the analysis really comes through, because once you are unable or the volume increase doesn't result in a positive adaptation for whatever other reason, once that one-trick pony is up, where do you go from there?

Yeah. That's coaching. That's what I've spent the last 20 years of my life trying to figure out. I still don't think I've got good answers for it. Yeah. Well, there's a model that I, with, well, and it may be appropriate for some of the people that you're working at, that if you take a look at any particular workout, and then you say, all right, from this workout, what are the adaptive stimuli? And we'll put those to the right. What are the, I'll use destructive stimuli, and we'll put those to the left. And then how do those scales of justice balance out?

And when you get to a certain point, you know, let's say you're a sub-27-minute 10K runner. Well, a really good quality workout would be go out and run, you know, repeat miles on, with two minutes rest at 15 seconds below race pace and do, you know, six or eight of them in a workout. And it'd be a great workout. But if you sit down and look at, you know, what are the destructive characteristics of that from all the orthopedic problems, from all the muscle stress, from, you know, everything involved, that's a huge load.

Is it actually going to be counterbalanced with your body adapting to it? Oh, yeah. You can have a hard workout and not have it be very beneficial. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I can design for any one of your ultra-endurance athletes a workout that does not last one hour that they will not be able to walk away from the next day. We're going to do, I'll just, I'll do it for you right here. Okay. That's what I wanted to get out of this. Because I got one too. We can go over your example. Okay. We're going, we're going to do a set of 60. All right.

60. That's a lot. I can't count that. I can't count to 60, JT. So you've already lost me. In other words, we're going to do it every minute. Yeah. Okay. Got it. All right. On the minute, we're going to do this. We're going to do 50 full squats and 100-yard sprint as fast as possible. When we get to the other end of the football field, we're going to do 50 squats and 100-yard sprint. In one hour, you're talking the next day, you're going to have to go scrape this person out of bed. But that's a bizarre example, right? Well, I'm working on speed and power. No, it's true. Okay. Fair enough. I mean, I'm sure there's some endurance athletes that would prescribe to something like that.

But the one that I use, it might not be as deleterious as that one is because I agree if I did that, I'd be in pretty bad shape. But it's more related to you need to do the things that you actually say that you're going to do. And a lot of trail and ultra running training has been kind of extrapolated, and I would say erroneously extrapolated, from the traditional Olympic sports. So 5K, 10K marathon, things like that. They look at those as a blueprint and say, okay, we just need to make them more, right? We just need to add more volume to our point earlier. And the workout that I bring out to our coaches is like, listen, you can do a really simple workout, 10 by one minute hard, one minute easy.

And so that would be analogous to a world-class athlete doing 10 quarters or 10 by 500 meters or something like that, a really common type of setup for a traditional endurance athlete. That workout's going to be hard. They're going to feel fatigued afterwards. They're, you know, it's going to impart some sort of stress on their system. But if you're looking for a cardiovascular adaptation, something that stresses the cardiovascular system maximally, if that's like your goal and your training paradigm, whatever, that's probably not the best workout. And you can peel the, you can peel the workout apart and see why. It's not long enough. The rest is probably too long. The amount of exposure that you have relative to like how, like percentage of VO2 max that you're actually working at is not enough. So if you were doing that workout for like a speed perspective, great.

That'd be awesome. But if you're doing it for, to like maximize your cardiovascular. I'm not going to let you get away with that. Oh, go ahead. No, you got to call me out. It's been a long time since you've done that. So go ahead. If you're trying to develop speed, what do you have to, what is the relative ratio that you need of work to rest ratio? For an endurance athlete? What? For an endurance athlete? Any athlete. Right. So probably trying to develop speed. Yep. So probably one part. I'm glad you called me out on this. Now that I'm thinking about it. Probably one part speed to three to five parts rest. You can't see that, but JT is giving me a thumbs up. Yeah. Was that your thumb or your middle finger? I only saw the bottom.

That was my thumb. I had big fingers. So thanks for calling me out on that. So you're, you're 10 by one on one off. Wouldn't even be a speed workout. What would it be? That's a, that's sort of a power endurance workout. Yeah. So I, I, so anyway, I use that example because. Because it's an easy one to peel apart in terms of like the cardiovascular benefit, which is usually the easiest thing to start to target when we're actually like working with new coaches. It's like, okay, how much of their, you know, what's their real two max going to get to on each one of these intervals? Is that enough exposure at that level for that amount of time to produce a certain adaptation? That was not a minute. Not a minute. Yeah, exactly.

That's my point is not a minute. Yeah. The coaches that are, that are listening to this are the 10 coaches that we have, the tenant, uh, ultra marathon coaches that will be listening to this. They're laughing their asses off because you had to correct me on something. So perfect. I love it. I love it. Oh, you know, typically if you ask me, okay, a VO2 max, uh, protocol would be something like five or six times five minutes on two minutes at jog 50% with the requirement that the overall work done in each of the five minute intervals is equivalent. So that if you're on a treadmill and you're doing, you know, 12 miles an hour, every one of them is right at 12 miles an hour.

The first one is easy because you have this extra metabolic compartment that you just use a little bit of, but you've got to do the same stress because the stress or excuse me, the same intensity is what elicits the VO2 max. Even though it's easier, your body is still getting to VO2 max. I feel like everybody's going to take that workout and do it tomorrow. That would be hard. That would be like an elite level workout. Maybe we do four repeats for a normal person like me. I don't know if I can handle five. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You, well, you can, you can move it down, uh, to, you know, yeah, three or four minute pieces. But the thing is, it needs to be the same, uh, intensity.

Like, um, Nordic combined, um, use, uh, an interval workout like this and they did it up a Canyon out of steamboat. And the coach went up with a Volkswagen van and each athlete had their rock along the side of the road. So they all started together and, you know, they use different, uh, intervals, you know, but let's say three minutes or four minutes or five minutes, but they had to get to their walk every interval. That that's a similar way that I'll do it with trail runners is just have them go uphill, but they have to gradually work their way up it. Cause they can't get back down in time. They don't have the Volkswagen van there.

They're not sophisticated. Well, it's better if you have the Volkswagen van because then you get the rest. Yeah. Okay. Let's, let's, let's, we've divulged into, we've got down the rabbit hole of like training architecture, which I could do for a long time, but I want to get back to kind of this. You have to be able to analyze what is going on with the athlete and, and kind of peel apart. Are they adapting? Are they not adapting? Are they more fresh? Are they more fatigued? Communication is a big part of that. Yep. Data is a big part of that. How do those two interplay with each other? Or how do you think coaches should interplay those two with each other, especially in a high performance context where we have these athletes that are, extremely stubborn and have huge high pain tolerances.

What's the balance of communication and looking at data? I would say it has to do with the difference between a technician and an artist. The analogy is fairly similar. All of us can attend classes and can learn how to paint. You know, for some of us, our paintings would end up looking really good on the back of a barn. For some people, they are capable of being incredibly creative, skilled, gifted in that. So that I think of a coach, you can have a coach that's very well technically prepared, but doesn't have the capability to have the insights into the athlete and into how the athlete is responding.

And more appropriately, what are the alternative approaches that they can provide for that athlete, whether that happens to be better facilitated recovery, better nutritional support, outside work on sports psychology, better social interactions, you know, the whole myriad of factors that go into that. And some coaches completely have that capability and are wonderful in communicating it. Other coaches either don't take the time, don't have the skill, maybe haven't been exposed to a mentor that could help them understand how to do that.

And that's one of the areas where our internal mentorship structure, I think, I think did a really good job at because to kind of set the landscape a little bit up for the listeners, we had a open, we had like an open air office essentially where everybody could hear everybody else's business. And it wasn't that big of a stretch. If I said something stupid to my athletes, like, oh, I'm going to give you this speed workout. That's 10 by one minute on one minute off. JT could spin his chair around and say, Coop, stop being an idiot. You know, that's not why this is not why and things like that. Did Dean actually say that to you? Dean's like, well, I'm going to get Dean on the podcast just to go just completely humiliate me. I had, I had Lindsay Dean's wife on the podcast just recently.

And so I'm trying to go at him to come in like very specifically just to completely humble and humiliate me at the same time with all the stuff that he has called me on over the course of the years, which has been a lot. And he still does. But the point with that is, is when you have some, when you have somebody that is good where you are not, and they can constantly oversee you and hear what you're doing and see what you're doing and spin their chair around and go, okay, this is like, you need to think about it like this. Cause not everybody's great at everything. As you mentioned, some coaches are good at this. Some coaches are good at that. Our structure, our, our structure was able to round out those weaknesses in almost a natural way because we had all these strengths and weaknesses collectively and we kind of peeled off of it.

Sometimes it, you know, became more competitive than it need to, but that's a, that's another story. But it is that one of my questions for you is, is that's the way that I kind of grew up coaching with really good mentors. And it was, I can, I can never, I can never communicate how impactful that was to me. You were a big part of that. That's why I'm having you on the podcast. And I've told, and I've told you that many times, how impactful it has been on me. Is it necessary though, for coaches to have that? Like I had that experience where it was a big impact on me. Do you think that it had, like, is that universal or is that just something that some people are better able to figure out? Certainly my, my thesis would be, there are some people that are way better at figuring it out.

Okay. Okay. That, that have the ability to, to have the bigger picture, see what's happening and then have, have their own, their own ego. That's enough intact so that they can take different approaches towards trying to get to the same outcome. Even if those are changing their own basic philosophy, I think, yes, that there are people that have that capability, but let's use you as a coach. That when you, when you and Liz got married, she accepted a position at, you know, some high school out in the plains of Colorado.

And you became the high school track coach out there. And, you know, the next, the next most knowledgeable guy about distance running was the janitor that painted the lines on the track for you. So think of the loss there would have been in your opportunity to develop as a coach, because then you became, become much more myopic in what the inputs become much more limited. You know, many coaches lack the ability to understand that the key may be in, in understanding someone else's approach to trying to accomplish the same thing.

Yeah. And to my point, I didn't know that that existed until I had to confront it. And it was in front of my face with all of my other peers. So I was like forced, like not forced into the situation, but I had to deal with it. Right. Versus going and seeking it out, which I think a lot of people, which you can do, you can always go seek out, you know, mentors and peers and things like that. Yeah. You know, I, as you know, I'm a woodworker and I ended up, you know, completely rebuilding this house and cabinets and trim and so on. And there are so many people that will come in and we'll look at it and be really, really impressed, to be honest.

And then they'll say, you know, how long are you doing? And I said, well, this is not what I've done perfectionally at all. And then just be really honest. He said, you know what? If you want to know how to do something, you can spend three times 15 minutes on YouTube and you can be, you can be pretty well prepared to give it a go. Um, and we don't have YouTube for coaching. Oh, I love that so much, JT. We don't have YouTube for coaching. I'm going to use that. You mind if I steal that from you? It's yours. Perfect. All right, JT, we're going to let you go. I can't tell you, I can't tell you enough how appreciative I've been of your time, of your counsel, of your knowledge, of your expertise, of your mentorship, everything that you have like wholeheartedly given to me over the years and continue to do so, even though we're on opposite sides of the country and have to connect through, uh, connect through video.

You know, I, I really hope that, um, that the people listening out there and especially coaches can find people like JT Kearney in their lives, because not only have you made an impact on me, you've made an impact on everybody else that I've been able to make an impact on both coaches and athletes. And they should all be appreciative of that as well. Well, greatly, greatly appreciated. That's wonderful. Well, now what you have to do is you have to cash that in and show up on the doorstep and, you know, do a few lobsters, a little kayak battling, go out on the power boat, you know, come up in the winter and we'll go cross country skiing. I'm going to take you up on that. I can never, I can never turn an opportunity down to, you know, do whatever adventures that we have, whether it's snowboarding or snowshoeing or talking about physiology.

Yeah. We have lots of toys. Awesome, man. Well, we'll see, I'll see you in person at some point after this freaking pandemic is over. Two middle fingers. I'm going to show that on the video just so people can, I can prove that you're not actually clicking me on. Hey, thank you, Coop. Yeah. Thank you, JT. I appreciate it. Oh, man. I really like it whenever I get a chance to sit down with JT. As I mentioned on the onset of the podcast, I've been incredibly appreciative of all the time that he has spent with me over the years. And that one interaction that we had where he was correcting me on something. If everybody at home can envision that happening five days a week, sometimes multiple times during the day.

And oftentimes with a lot more intensity and competitiveness associated with it, that's probably not appropriate for this podcast. That was my life for several years. And I'm really grateful for that experience, if you can't tell, because it just made me a better person. And it's something that I try to pay forward in my coaching today. So thank you for coming on the podcast today, JT. Thank you to all the listeners out there. I hope you guys had a lot of fun with this. If you have any feedback for me, please hit me up on social media. I love hearing all that. Appreciate the heck out of everybody listening today. And as always, we will see you out on the trails.