Training Technology with Dirk Friel⎮KoopCast Episode 5

what's going on trail runners how are you today did you have a good weekend put in some good long runs maybe you did a hard workout in the middle of the week uh in any case that uh that hard run those long runs they're gonna go somewhere maybe you recorded them on your watch and they just get uploaded to you know the watches cloud maybe they go to strava or maybe if you're one of our athletes they go on to a platform called training peaks which is what we use to analyze all of our athletes data that is generated from the risk-based risk-based gps monitor or their heart rate monitor or even a power meter that's actually starting to come out in the running space and so what i did this week is i traveled up to boulder colorado to the home offices of training peaks and i met with their co-founder dirk freel who i've known for a very long time and uh during that time i've known him we've been everything from competitors in the marketplace to friends to colleagues to frenemies uh in the coaching endurance space as well and irrespective of all of those labels i've always had a great deal amount of respect uh for what dirk and his team has done there they really have been one of the the ogs of the remote based endurance coaching space and they

just develop incredible uh technologies with very with a very forward thinking process that really first and foremost focuses on putting the coach at the centerpiece of the relationship they just make cool shit for coaches and i like using their and i like using their products so what i wanted to do is to bring him on the KoopCast and really discuss what the state of coaching is what the state of is take a little bit of a trip down memory memory lane to how all of this stuff started and then talk about what we see for the future of coaching and what i always find illuminating whenever i talk to these people is especially people with the experience that that dirk has is they just have a keen focus on developing things that they can put in front of coaches that will then have an impact on their coaching practice and will simply make their athletes better i just love the fact that they're completely centered around making coaches better so they can make their uh so that they can make their athletes better um some of you might recognize the last name friel joe is the son sorry dirk is the son of joe friel of the cyclist training bible the triathletes training bible and a number of other different books that are quite ubiquitous and prevalent in the endurance coaching space and so much so that i patterned a lot of what i did with the book that i wrote around all the things that uh joe has

written and he's just had a tremendous influence on me personally as a coach as well as he has had an influence on a ton of other coaches and uh other athletes i'd be remiss not to mention that at times this conversation is going to feel like a it's going to feel like a little bit of an advertisement it's going to feel like a little bit of a plug for training peaks and i want to be clear that i'm a customer of training peaks i buy their products and i think that is worth every single dime that uh that i pay every month to uh for for their services for their services of using their platform with my coaching business and uh uh with uh with all of our athletes and i wouldn't spend that money every single month if i didn't think it was worth it so there are there is no financial entanglement within this conversation at all i'm a pure customer just like any other customer i just really like what they do and i really like the perspective that dirk brings to the table whenever we talk endurance sports so with that being said and without any further ado here we go here's my conversation with training peaks co-founder and chief evangelist that's his official title training peaks co-founder dirk friel did you guys track that here did you guys do any of the data for that here no but you know it's

people are starting to think well what is the 159 for my sport right you know now you're seeing stuff around iron man can we go you know sub seven or whatever it might be right you know um oh we can draft the whole way maybe we can do a unique event and you know so it's kind of spurring a whole new kind of wwf of endurance because rules don't matter right exactly so that's what sometimes pro sports is you know is wwf you know what i appreciate that perspective of other endurance sports because if you were just to look at like the running community's response to that i think what they lose is they lose a lot of that perspective of how other sports look at an attempt like this 159 go oh shit we can do something like that like we could do something really cool and triathlon and come up with all these crazy yeah you know and it it attracts people to the sport it has adds pizzazz sparkle to your maybe drury sport most people think of it as but it's like oh wow that's a spectacle let's see if they can break two hours you know and all the ins and outs of the science of it that we can learn from and maybe bring into the rest of the you know sport right um but you wwf and can be bad too you know nfl players get suspended for four games for whatever bad product they take right usually they're getting suspended for a minuscule amount of time for like really heavy stuff like beating up their girlfriend or wife and in cycling you can't even look at a needle and that's illegal to have a needle

or your socks are too high socks are too high that's another uh yeah topic um but it you know in college high school football they're like oh he's cramping oh he's got to go into the locker room and get an injection he'll be back you know and they're like go put a needle in his arm and help him out but can't do that in cycling you know that's illegal that's probably a at least a six-month ban there maybe more you know it's crazy so it is all over the map yeah and a lot of uh sports fans that like cross from endurance into the league sports and league sports and endurance sports they have that perspective and unfortunately in cycling triathlon and running a lot of the audience is really insular right and so their their view of competition in sports is completely related to marathon running or iron man triathlon or you know ultra running kind of in my case or whatever and i think a lot of times that some of that perspective gets lost yeah no it's great to see you know where was it austria what town vienna you know the crowds that came out like it was just so cool and it was it was a weather window so you didn't really know when and then but they were lined up to have live tv whenever they went you know and said go so that was a yeah really really yeah cool event so speaking of that relative event has that was that ever on your radar like kind of in the early days of training peaks like having these types of performances that everybody's made the analog

analogy to like roger banister sub four minute mile and things like that but you guys are a performance and an athlete and a coach centric company yeah has that ever or has that ever really popped up on your radar these you know wwe types of you know spectacles so to speak huh no never really thought that far out you know it's more about helping coaches build their business and at every level you know certainly from the beginning we had the tour de france stars the the olympians and all that so you're seeing records at that level and then we we brought best bike split in you know and that was five years ago where we acquired best bike split and that's a lot of what they were doing was you know prediction modeling they still do and but it started at the elite levels and they were predicting tour de france finish times you know and who would place on the podium and in tomorrow's time trial and they would publish that before the race would actually happen to prove like hey we can actually do this now we bring that down so we i guess what i'm trying to say is we learn at the pinnacle of the sport and then we try and democratize it and bring it down we don't do one-off software for teams um or national governing bodies everybody knows if they contribute into you know our software development which we you know listen to the customer base and and you know try and build for them um that's going to benefit everybody else on on the uh on the platform so yeah trying to democratize those great ideas and

bring them out to everybody that we can all learn no matter at what age you know or level of the sport there's something to learn that and it's trickle down effect like f1 right down to your local toyota yeah exactly but you and i we've seen the whole transition right i was thinking about this on the car ride up here like we've been in the same industry in the same business for almost 20 years together yeah and that relationship is like just like any other relationship evolve where at one point we were like direct competitors right we were building software i was help i can't say i was building software because i'm definitely not a software person but i would help our software engineers design you know what was initially our first few coaching tools right now where coaches would kind of work with athletes and then eventually we became a customer of training peaks like we were looking at that trajectory saying this is just a better you know tool and you know tech kind of kind of technology to use and like now like we're just colleagues where we're kind of just doing the same thing just in different spaces it's been it's just i guess what i'm saying is just been really cool to see that transition i had that same story play out internally you know i was a full-time coach with my father family business was coaching um and early on i'm like dad why are we using the fax machine you know and i have 30 emails a day with 50 different you know attachments to them of dot hrm dot csv dot srm you know therefore i have to open up five different software platforms plus i have to print out the

facts and i have to three-hole punch it and so you know i was like well now am i i have to solve for technology you know that was like where i went to i was like i love being coached but i really got to figure out this data collection problem that we have because it's not only horrible for me as the coach but it's kind of bad for the client too you know can we have one kind of place to house it all um to make better quality service out to the athletes and so you know when i realized that i i really kind of jumped at that opportunity and saw the opportunity to to build more of the technology solution because there's nothing out there at the time right right um so i just consciously you know early on and uh 99 is when we kicked off so 20 years ago um it was september 99 that i came to my father with the idea uh joe friel and then you know obviously he's not a software developer he's a coach and hey that's a great idea go try and figure that out for us uh you know the only place i had to turn was luckily the best amount of my wedding gear fisher was a web developer i had a day job and i he was living up near vale at the time i went up and had a beer with him and it's called there's a pub up there called the george and gears first real name is george so it's a it's a special place in our hearts the george pub in vale um that's where i pitched him on the idea and he was like yeah let's try and do this you know and at the beginning it was to solve our needs within

our coaching business of at the time it was called ultra fit associates um and got that kind of off the ground in early 2000 for our own use with about 30 clients but then we saw no other coach had such a platform so we started to reach out to other coaches to see if they wanted to you know use the same platform and luckily they they saw value in it and started became our first customers were coaches and so it's kind of like taken off from there and you know my my primary point there is is that you know could you be a coaching company and a technology company at the same time and that was the early beginnings of sass and we've never taken an ad dollar it's always been you know we say no every week to advertising and for 20 years we've said no and it's more about pay for service so it's been a fun yeah really fun ride but hopefully we enable the the coaching businesses the experts you know in the field to become more efficient well in the day yeah and i have that same experience right because we were running along the same path for maybe a decade or so and i remember when you guys were the only player in the whole marketplace right i mean you guys did it first you had first mover position that's a pretty prototypical uh small business story right where you have an idea and it's the only you know kind of thing that exists you know in the marketplace but now there are other players that are starting to emerge and then you have the ones that are you know endemic to the uh

uh to the devices themselves whether it's garmin connect or suunto or whatever and there are also other companies that are similar to you guys that are that they're just trying to carve their way out in a kind of in the same marketplace whether it's across all endurance sports or whether it's across the strength and conditioning field or whether it's across you know one one of the endurance sports like running or things like that now that you know training peaks is 20 years old how's that value proposition change from the beginning where you guys are the only one doing it so there's your value proposition right there to now where it's like you guys have to look at the space and go okay how do we differentiate ourselves amongst everybody well our actual value prop has not changed at all for 20 years it's about helping coaches build their business you know at the end of the day helping people learn a new skill through deliberate practice is really our mission um within the business um so that value prop is not changed at all throughout the course of the 20 years you know we have to stay on on top of you know the coach has to rely on our software and their business relies on our software so building that trust is number one and knowing that we're going to be compatible with the next device that comes on the market you know working with those partners you know sinking does whift or whatever it is you know the the market's played out where it's an open ecosystem and we've definitely been that open player from the very beginning um so yeah that's you know what we try and stay on top of every single day your your

end users yeah you have an interesting end user because you have end users that are coaches right that use your platform across their coaching business but you also have end users that are the athletes themselves they're either guiding their own training process or they just want to use it as a training log or whatever do you communicate you know what the advantages and training peaks differently to those two groups um at the end of the day we communicate get expert instruction and if you're a coach you are the expert therefore we're working on your behalf to try and sell your you know your service into the self-coached athlete crowd um so you know they i guess they kind of just overlap in the same value prop expert instruction and when we communicate to athletes that are not coached we we try and communicate the value of getting that expert advice now that might be in a passive manner you know an active manner of expert instruction is i have my coach one-on-one i can call him anytime i want paying a hundreds of dollars a month and getting great premium service that's a real active you know um proactive relationship but then you have a passive expert instruction um value prop that we have where you can simply buy a training plan um you can even get you know an article for free on our blog to help you

out right um but you know try and get that expert instruction see we can prove the value of that because your journey to the event is 99.9 percent you know of the experience is actually preparing for the event so if we're all focused on that one day and making it as it's the best possible experience possible um it starts you know months out and just trying to hack away at it on your own you know you can be successful to a certain level but really having that expert instruction and that that independent kind of a mind share you know helping you out along the way um you'll have a better experience on race day i've always found that that coaches and this seems a little bit self-fulfilling but but it's it's i say it in all honesty i always found that that coaches who aren't leveraging the best types of technology and in this case would be training peaks are really selling their own expertise short and that's what what i've always tried to communicate within our coaching staff because we look at it every year right we look at all the things out there how can we deliver coaching how can we do this and how can we do that and personally i spend an inordinate amount of time educating and developing coaches and when i look at that landscape i'd go you know what all that expertise not all of it but a lot of that expertise would be wasted if you're using inferior tools and in training peaks just being one of them right i mean you can look at tools of

kind of the whole run of show but all the a lot of that expertise would be wasted if you're using inferior tools to leverage this great expertise yeah i immediately go to something my father always says you know he had an experience in high school where he finally got his eyes checked and he needed glasses and he put his glasses on he's like why didn't anybody tell me the world looked like this you know he he also will relate getting his first power meter it was like going from a 2d world to a 3d world oh i see the depth behind my heart rate you know i can see why that occurs so no one tool is per se the holy grail but you don't know what you don't know until you see it and then you start to connect the dots and oh i see how that relates to that and i can get this result um if you stay blinded then you are just more or less guessing if you will you know there is certainly the art of coaching which will never go away we definitely believe in the human coach in our lifetime computers will not replace the coach in terms of having the best preparation possible but computers can aid the coach and make at the end of the day i want to try and make the coach better faster smarter in the moment and we

haven't accomplished that yet we've gone a long ways but there is a lot more to be done to empower both coach and athlete um but to make them you know better faster in the moment is how i kind of think of it you know the computer can do a lot of calculations for you compare you know this workout to the data set of other people and return to you the best possible way forward for the coach to accept deny or edit yeah well you remember when the power meter came along a lot of that sentiment that the coaches had was just that the power meter can't replace the coach it's just another tool that ate it and there there was maybe i don't know how you would characterize it but i would characterize it as a significant amount of resistance to athletes using you know using that tool not not trivial meaning just like you know five percent of the coaching population athlete population and things like that i mean it was enough to where we had to convince people that this is some this is a this is a this is a tool this is a way to track your training that is valuable and that ultimately you'll perform better with the insights that we gain from this tool now we take it for granted because it's ubiquitous yeah but there was a time where it wasn't i'll take that to another surprising level for you we had to convince the power meter manufacturers of that value prop of their own product we were the very first place where you could analyze heart rate power within the web interface i mean yeah you know garmin didn't do it pull it into a soon you know

we were the first place where you could actually get on any computer in the world and analyze your workout um when we showed that to a power meter manufacturer uh it was like yeah but nobody looks at their data after they ride literally it's like what they said it's like oh my gosh now you know we had to try you know now from top down we had to literally one by one try and convince even coaches it's worth number one yeah just getting the tool whether it be a power meter or heart rate file whatever saving the file that was another hard thing to do is just save it to your desktop and then at the time there was no bluetooth syncing etc you'd have to navigate find that file upload it to today's workout and for two reasons one hopefully for your coach to look at it and two for you to archive it and make sense of it later on i think within within training peaks too we we think more holistically you know it's it's yeah today's important but oftentimes your most important workout is the rest day with just like you know pedestrian numbers right or a day off but that is like the most important thing you should do this week or today or whatever it's more valuable than the hard day so how does that relate holistically to my goal is five months from now am i on track because this all plays out in a storyline that's

unique to each person there's no cookie cutter right you can buy a training plan but training plans are meant for the middle of the bell curve you might be on either side right um so yeah from the beginning you know and you know i often say that power meters really started in the pro level like tour de france let's say um but at that level at that time in the early 2000s it was a status symbol like yeah i've got an srm on my bike it's worth five thousand dollars no i don't use it but really you know i've made it i'm pro i have an srm and it was a status symbol not really a tool being used um so yeah that took a took a while to play out well and yeah you're in also it took a while for the cost of those to come down to where a consumer average joe or average jane consumer can look at and go okay that's you know i pay a grand for a set of wheels i'm gonna pay a grand for a power meter yeah i mean the same thing can play out you know in running um in just collecting the data it's not just start stop and time you know it's vertical meters and you know and you know terrain is different but collecting all that data you know has a lot of value over time i say you know going into your second year of data collection the data becomes infinitely more important you know year one is like okay i'm collecting this i don't really know i have a i have data but what do i compare it to once you have your peaks your valleys when you got sick when you felt your best that's when the value can really

be the story you should dig into and see why um it may not always play out that way but it's a nugget a big nugget of information that you can learn from and try and either replicate or stay away from going forward i definitely have those in my in my history well we try to emphasize that with our coaches because a lot of times when they when they first start with a new athlete or they first start coaching they don't understand why they need to take so much time being meticulous with gathering the information not only everything that comes from the device but also the post-activity comments and all that stuff because the because the value that the athlete receives from collecting all that information isn't really realized until 12 or 18 months down the road or sometimes the second the second season and it's hard to or it's easy to lose sight of that in the here and now when you're programming things yeah and it's not all about the numbers game right you know that how did i feel that subjective is just as important um i had an athlete that i coached and then um he started coaching himself and then he apologized for me you know to me apologized to me for not providing enough of those post-activity comments it was i got a lot more data than i did like how you felt and you know he then saw the value in that when he became a coach um so there's yeah there's so much to that soft side of of things as well and how you feel and the recovery i mean oftentimes your gut feeling is

the number one no matter what the data says you know it's like i shouldn't push it today i should only do two efforts not four every time i come up here i always always give uh frank or one of your engineers something that i want to get changed which i'm sure you guys hear we're going to talk about i'm sure you guys hear ad nauseum the one that i have for you guys today is completely related to that yeah i want the ability to see the post-activity comments first in the email that i get as opposed to the hero metrics right because right now i get the hero metrics time power you know average pace blah blah blah right and the post-activity comments are below that i wish i could flip that so the first thing i see is i felt great today blah blah blah blah blah blah and then i can look at all the numbers because that's okay but that's really more of a reflection to your point into your athlete's story right that's i prioritize that a whole lot higher right and that's that's not i don't know maybe i've been doing that for the five or seven years i mean there's a good part of my career where the hero was the hero metrics right that you pulled out from it and now i i'd say i take a more balanced approach yeah the hero tends you know you have very few outliers you know and you can't read into that one day's right data yeah the the trend over time so yeah how did you feel today so you you guys since coaches since coaches are main part of your user base right yeah and you guys i would say have

a a really sophisticated user base as well and also a very broad user base in terms of experience who they're working with how they work with athletes and i have not envied at all whoever is here in this organization that has to take all of that feedback and congeal it into what ultimately you know shows up in the product can you just do a quick run through of what that looks like like how you guys take that information from the end user and produce whatever new feature that you guys are going to produce down the line yeah it's making bets you know because you can't solve it for everybody so also you have to take into account what the user is asking for as well as what they may not know is in their good interest you know people didn't know when we release certain things in the past like oh oh i didn't know i needed that you know oftentimes you know so can we do more of those or of like aha oh wow i never would have thought about that that really helped me out so it's that balance of what are they asking for to solve those direct needs um balance with where do we want to take the business and solve for bigger issues that are 10 years out you know and so and then balancing that with the resources of where we where we apply you know the internal resources um so yeah we're definitely you know have done a lot in like r&d research around you know trying to make how can the computer do

more of the legwork for the coach is really we're doing a lot of focus right now because a computer can replace a bunch of what the coach currently does accounting for the coach's own methodologies so that's the type of stuff that we're really not being asked for but we know we got to invest a whole lot into because when we can solve that need for the coach they're going to be like ah thank you so much i saved 30 of my time now i can spend that actually talking to my athletes in person now the computer is doing more of the work that i used to do you know myself manually um but then there's a hey can you change this and that on the web interface you know feedback that we we take in from you know customer support just social media kind of bringing into the product managers and kind of groom through you know with product management but you're being more proactive than reactive in your approach it seems i think you yeah you have to be if you want to survive and be a long-term viable business you have to always be thinking way out on the horizon i mean the product in my head is 20 years out you know unfortunately that's the that's the uh part that's frustrating is you can't develop that quickly you know overnight um but we're definitely you know been putting a lot of effort you know into that um new stuff that's out there on the horizon that we see empowering coaches and athletes so what do you say to the coaches out there and we both know them because we're in this we're in the same

space right we have a good finger on the pulse of the entire coaching industry what do you say to the coaching professionals out there that are still using what you and your dad used 20 years ago faxes and spreadsheets and word documents and things like that like what is your reaction to that in this day and age well i know there's still olympic teams in the united states that are doing that and we've had conversations just recently with you know some of those olympic teams and you know in that realm it's really hard for them to develop the talent you know if we can get you know all the teenagers today have an iphone in their pocket they're hitting start stop to strava or whatever it might be right they're collecting the data but if you are relying on spreadsheets and you're a national team coach that is going to interact with that athlete you know five years from now are you are you going to be able to take advantage of that history that that athlete actually has been developing but if you're stuck in your spreadsheet how do you mind that let alone if an athlete does develop they're going to migrate from one coach to the next how transferable are those spreadsheets you know whereas if you have a database to ping and dive into it helps develop that athlete and it doesn't have to be a young athlete you could be 55 years old starting to run you're going to develop and you you might start with a training plan and collect the data but then if you go to a coach that is now on spreadsheets that

can't access that data was it was all for not right right so trying to make it you know the value is in in that data mining it you can have your own methodologies um and systems you know that can lie on top of that that data um so yeah that's you know i just kind of see it as being able to leverage you know the data and then it's such an open ecosystem now you know can you write a workout in a spreadsheet and have it sync to zwift yeah and have it run you through your workout on your treadmill well you can with certain tools but maybe not your spreadsheet but still it happens and i'm just as surprised as you are when you see it at the olympic level where those athletes you know they're competing for medals like they deserve the best of the best i mean go ahead yeah and we go we go the opposite direction too you know lots of coaches will rely on us to be that interface right to the athlete but then they can export the data and cross-reference it or slice and dice it however they want in you know wko on you know our desktop product or that you can pretty much do anything you want with the spreadsheet is in wko so and it syncs seamlessly you know whenever you open it up so that that's really you know again if certainly training piece does not have every single report in the world so our solution for that was a desktop product wko um but then you can export from there one by one and do your excel spreadsheets as well we we even have you know for we don't offer it to

every coach but we definitely have national teams that are using api um they're exporting the data data you know daily cross-referencing it with medical records um even travel records you know i mean they have athletic management athlete management systems that we tie into um so we see those are other partners behind the scenes that people don't see um whereby data is flowing into an athlete management system and then national team doctors can access the data as well um in a secure you know process yeah like i was saying earlier i've always i'm really baffled at the national team level across the world right with all these ngbs that are still stuck in you know spreadsheets and word documents but you also see that permeated down at the consumer level as well right we're here in boulder there's probably how many coaches are within a 30 mile radius of us right now yeah you guys know that yeah it's a lot a lot so there's a lot there's a lot of a lot of people with private coaching business more than 100 200 yeah easily yeah just just within right 20 mile radius of where we're sitting right now and some of those coaches are not on any technology platform right absolutely and big name coaches yeah but yeah and i actually think that it's more befuddling in that situation when you're doing it as a living and you're leveraged to what you can charge and how many athletes you can work with essentially because the technology irrespective of whether it's yours or somebody else's

streamlines the entire process not only is good is better for the end user i think we can both agree on that right the the information that you can glean utilizing the technology is going to make your athletes better yeah but also from a business perspective i was there 15 years ago using spreadsheets and word documents i'd pull my hair out trying to trying to manage it all so i don't know if like you have any like reaction to it on the like the consumer side well it tends to be you know you're an open platform type of coach or it's you know if it's not built here that's not worthwhile you know that it you kind of in one camp or the other um so if it's not if you're in the camp of it's not built here then there's not much you can do unless they get a concrete example of they can really relate to and and you know take advantage of um you know it's not only in the you just described for profit but you know you have the collegiate yeah um we now have i mean you can see right over the hillside there niwatt high school and their state first time ever they've been state champions in men's and women's um high school cross country as of like two weeks ago the women are ranked sixth in the nation they're going to the nike nationals or whatever it is in five weeks but like all 80 plus kids are on training piece um and it's that's not a for-profit business but it's a coach that has a winning mentality and they think how how can i win not every athlete is managed to

the same degree as the top you know top five girls um but you know those top five athletes have mandated that you know the coach wants access your data and they want to the do the best job for you programming wise um even in the off season and so we're seeing you know schools kind of get on board too because it gives them an advantage how many high schools have that in play right and you know we have so you're starting to see that as well at the collegiate level you know university of utah nordic team on training peaks but it can really help them spot talent as well if an athlete pings the coach and is interested in going to the university of utah it's like the coach can respond and say hey why don't you start using training peaks and tracking your data so you know later on we might be able to like make sense of it you know it's not just race results in your times it's what went into it and do we see your capabilities to go beyond your current race times but you know what lies within your training and have you been training smart or not can we really find efficiencies in your training um that's where these platforms can really help you know all coaches do you know what the compliance over the high school is i don't but they've really adopted it i mean i had a it's really cool you know i had a girl that's not in the top 10 on the team but she absolutely just loves it she you know gets the programming and she can see what she's doing plan versus actual and it keeps her motivated and then they even have an off-season program that you know that's a different coach but you know they

leverage training peaks um so it's really holistic kind of view of how can we you know really make sense of it all and and make the best choices possible you know on the athlete's behalf i want to pivot a little bit and talk about the recent endurance coaching summit that you guys had here uh you and i had this conversation afterwards and i made a deliberate attempt just to tell you how how impressed i was with that yeah it was and my perspective on it is is i've been to these things ad nauseum for years you guys's coaching summit stuff over at the olympic training center usa cycling the ngbs usa track and field usa triathlon i've kind of done all the rounds as a participant and also as a as a presenter so i've got a good land i've got a good landscape of it all every single time i've ever been to any one of those i've been moderately to extremely disappointed across kind of two facets the first the first facet is the quality of the information and i i don't know that sounds a little bit of ours no no no no no no the other ones that i've been to the first one is the is the quality of the information that that's that's presented and even when i've gone to some of the things at the at the training center which you would think they've got the best and the brightest for whatever reason they just dumb the quality of the info down and then the second thing and this i'm not going to make a lot of friends with this comment and i'm okay with that is the quality of the attendees oh i've

i've always come away with those things just utterly disappointed in the knowledge base the professionalism kind of the whole run of show with the coaches and attendance this one that i just recently attended completely changed all of that across both of those aspects and i've got my opinions on why that actually is but i want to know from you guys's perspective like how you orchestrated that because it was really awesome i think number one we think application first yes science backed but we really want coaches to walk away with like oh that's something i can put in play tonight like right now i'm emailing my athlete so with every single one of our speakers like what can you provide to the audience that's applicable to to these coaches that's number one i think we're also agnostic so we don't play in the same sandbox if you will you know if you're whatever an ngb conference you're only learning from kind of what you already know you know you're regurgitating a lot of the same ideas whereby we're trying to we're trying to create an endurance coaching summit you know we we did have the high school cross-country running coaches there nordic coaches ski mountaineering but yeah the majority of it was triathlon and cycling but we are trying to get that to a broader base so we can learn because no matter what sport you coach you can learn something from a different sport um so that's another part of it i think it's the art science and business that somehow creates

a recipe that thrives um because you you can bounce ideas off the scientists and how can we apply that but really that doesn't hold water in my business you know i can't ask my athlete to do it 800 whatever test you know so when you have those three components at play art science and business of coaching you just really get to the meat and potatoes of what you know what can i take away from this and there's a lot of great ideas that get generated we want coaches to also learn from other coaches it's a really big part of our philosophy is meet learn teach that's kind of developed within our training peaks university whereby you might be a competitor with this other coach but we can share ideas and learn from each other which elevates our profession and our service level for all and it might bring in more athletes you know into seeing they're worthy of getting a coach so you know we want to start those conversations at ecs and continue them you know we have ideas how can we create more of a group that that lasts beyond just the event so we can keep those conversations going so yeah look for ideas to be developed around that i was just amazed to to speak to your last point the coaches are good yeah and i haven't said that in the endurance but all accepting you don't have to be some you know i have olympians in that's the only coach we accept no no exactly and i loved having conversations with like all of the coaches that were there so just for size and scope

like how many coaches were there well we cap it about 220 220 coaches coach all different types of athletes you mentioned the high school athletes that are just across the hill professional athletes cyclists runners triathletes trail runners all across the board yep i once again this is one of the first um professional conferences that i've attended where i got personally and professionally far more value out of discussing things with other coaches and i was really enlightened by what they had to say it's one of the first experiences that i've had with that what like why are the coaches that much better or is that just me having a warped perspective on it oh boy i i don't know i mean thank you i i don't know how um maybe it's the presenters that attract you know we have a broad array of presenters and authors um so maybe they attract the right crowd um also you know we alternate between the u.s and europe and um it's it's it's pretty cool we're we're in london next november um we've been in boulder you know from the beginning um so i can't really pinpoint the quality of the coaches and why um but it's cool yeah i mean once again i'm in the space yeah right and i could view that as oh man everybody's getting better i'm gonna get you know chunks of business taken out of whatever i'm doing i look at it as good because good coaching is good for coaching yeah maybe it's because these coaches also they've

already bought into the concept that you've talked about in the past with tools and these ecosystems and you know it's a growth mindset i think is where where you will find your best audience is if you have more folks that you know have this growth mindset that i can learn more i can not only learn more but teach others and that'll help me out um so it's more of a community feel that might attract you know that type of of coach um where we do want to share ideas and it's not just the presenters it's it's in between sessions and it's the we have round tables where you just strike up conversations around a particular topic where you might have a a leader at that round table but you can all learn from each other so we like that round table concept so you see opportunity around that yeah half the round tables that i did i would spend like two minutes on you know on point on presentation and the rest of it was just ad hoc stuff and it was way more valuable than whatever i had canned absolutely yeah so yeah it was cool yeah um i want to pivot to another topic since you're you know you're you're you guys are heavily embedded in technology and you mentioned earlier like part of what you try to do is make the coach more efficient and what's been creeping up more and more across all industries not just service industries is like this emergence of somewhere in between big machine learning and artificial intelligence and some of the practitioners in the space take that take that defensively right

the machines are going to replace me yep and other ones embrace it and i wanted to know what you're what you guys at training peaks what your perspective on that is is because you guys will probably be the first to start to like wade into those waters or toe those lines and i'm sure you have some some perspective of how it's developing yeah i alluded to this earlier all that ai machine learning should make the coach better faster in the moment make better decisions the computer can make a decision to be accepted denied or edited right by the coach so we always want to leave that final say up to the coach but we also want that whatever ends up looking like we want it to have the brain of that coach's own methodology there are hundreds of different types of methodologies if you will out there we won't all make the same decision of what to do tomorrow for the same athlete right so we want to incorporate that coach's methodology into the decision making process there is not a training peaks way of training so there is not a training peaks bot you know that we are creating we are creating an underlying engine that we can plug and play different personas different methodologies um so that's the direction we're taking the very first project that's actually live right now that we produce is an app in the app store called run with hal so it's not under the training peaks

brand we did it in coordination with hal higdon uh running coach and so that is our first kind of foray into this new world if you will but the end game is to get it into training peaks to enable to empower all of our coaches to become better faster more efficient it's not at all to replace the coach um it's you can also think of it as the next generation of training plans you know training plans today are static they don't adapt they suck i can tell you that i can't yeah they don't take into account that you're on vacation for three days next week and can't swim or whatever it might be so you know we want to up the game on turning plans which will eventually up the game on making the coach more efficient can you elaborate on the run with how program are you allowed to first yeah i mean it's it's in the marketplace it's already out yeah yeah okay so why don't you describe like what it like what it actually does like to like what is the end user gonna yeah go ahead and cough oh my ribs oh dirk stabbed himself with his cross country pole this weekend yeah he's been grimacing the entire time i have some uh sore banged up ribs um and then um yeah so it's uh i believe it's like nine dollars a month you can start for free with it plug in any distance race um you know up to marathon um plug in multiple races put in those race dates your current fitness level do you have a

a 5k time a 10k time etc how many hours do you have available when do you want to do your long run you know the basics um that will basically create a custom training plan for you and that's static that's in the free mode here you go it's better than a training plan because it actually took into account more inputs if you pay then it'll become adaptive did you do today's workout yes or no if you did not it's going to change future workouts um it will start to account for your actual um performance of those workouts right so we can start to layer in more and more intelligence into it right now it's very elementary you know binary did you do the workout or not that's a whole lot better than a current training plan right um but it's a place where we can experiment and get feedback um outside of the training peaks brand um but it's all driven through apis it can be served up into any app or website right so somehow i'm imagining an elaborate flow chart somebody's whiteboard with all these it's optimization engine i'm sure it's more sophisticated than that but that's essentially what best bike split is you know and it's it's mathematical modeling coming up with the optimal you know um a workout to do given all these restraints and your goal um and again it it can get more and more sophisticated you just simply add more and more inputs into it you know so

that's gonna eventually end up within training peaks and empowering all of our coaches to be become better faster smarter that's cool so yeah we believe in the human coach in our lifetime the best experience will always be to work with an experienced good coach um that can balance the art and science we realize the machine's not going to take into account that stress level that it doesn't see right or all the other million other factors that come into play that you have to account for as a coach um but we can make the coach still even even better um and crunch a lot of numbers on their behalf so so we both had this experience where we've worked with coaches and we've worked with athletes through you know several transitions right one was the transition where all you all you had was an in-person coach right i coached where i coached the youth track and field team where that's what it was an in-person coach and then we used snail mail and then we used fax machines and then devices started to be able to become downloaded and you could transfer those files to your coach and your coach could read it might it might have taken seven steps or whatever then all those files could be harnessed and remote-based endurance coaching became a thing and now we're kind of staring in the face of where the technology can start to forecast predict and aid the coach in what they're doing day to day what's next what's 20 years from now yeah forecasting i mean we want the coach to spend less time on the

computer we'd like to athlete to spend less time on the computer it should just be kind of coming to you and help help guide you um but the coach is overseeing that so i don't know what it 100 it looks like but big data definitely plays a part of this you know we we should be able to leverage our data set to make the coach smarter because right now the coach has a data set of more or less one right right um but we have other athletes that have done that event look like that athlete what are lessons learned from that athlete um or not that one athlete but let's say you know 5 000 athletes that might look like that that have done that event over the last 20 years right collecting all that and empowering um the coach with that that insight um is definitely going to happen in the next 20 years so that's exciting stuff to think about it's not replacing the coach making the coach better um making the athlete faster at the end of the day right so somehow it's going to morph and take into account that but i'm not sure what it'll look like yeah yeah it's a hard i know it's a hard question to answer but like i said we've seen these we'd seen we've definitely seen several key inflection points that i just mentioned earlier yeah and i think we're almost at the cusp of an of another one that's able to either harness big data or be able to and i always hate using the word ai because i don't think it's applicable in this

situation you always forecast in these inflection points you always have the resistance you end up having the early adopters right and that's going to happen again you're going to have the resistance of like right oh this is a machine's going to take over my value prop you know and then early adopters that will help guide that you know um and what that looks like so that'll be interesting um yeah to see how it all all develops but i mean rest assured we're here to work with the coach and not replace them um because we truly believe that that's the best way to go is with a coach you know and not just leave it up to x's and o's for sure and that's you know it's always been true so that you know oftentimes people in the past thought training peaks was only for remote coaching but then when you had training peaks within an environment even at the olympic training center coaches realized oh i do manage the workouts every single day with these athletes but they're putting stuff in their training logs that they won't say in front of their teammates you know and they're getting more insights and then and they can see that in the holistic view so even if you are with your athlete every single day and think you know it all well what did they do december 12th you know three years ago yeah can you remember that well how did that might have relevance to this december 12th of this year right um so it can do

it can play um it's it kind of gives you some insights and it's it's that art art of coaching which is always going to be a part of the equation as well you know our trail running camps we do a demo that's one of the pieces of programming pieces of programming that we do where it's in all honesty it's a hook to get people into remote based endurance coaching with us so we have athletes that come to our camps that are both coached by us and then athletes that are not coached by us and we try to convert them into coaching because we feel the same way right that's the best path to success and we've learned over the course of years that if we do this really simple demo it's extremely illuminating and that demo revolves around two pieces it's the first one is is we take the run for the day and one of our coaches just breaks the file down this is what i do with every single file with every single athlete every single day these are the things that i look at and the second part of that demo is here's how that file fits into the context of what the athlete has done previously and is going to do towards the future and the whole thing takes maybe 20 minutes yeah right which is right that's that's a really long time to actually go through that but from a demo perspective it takes about 20 minutes and you almost see like the light bulbs go off for the athletes that track their training they don't track their training at all or track it in a spreadsheet or just use strava or just use garmin connect or something like that they look at and they go oh wow i never thought about that yeah you know obviously most of our customer base comes from

you know a garmin connect or a strava or some other either out of the box with your device or or the the social media type you know offerings out there but the reason you come to training peaks is when you have committed you've you know kind of committed to this this goal that's that's out there on the horizon it's kind of scary it's date sensitive um and you ask yourself well what is the best thing to do tomorrow you know that's where you tend to then graduate to training peaks either as a self-coached athlete that's now experimenting and trying to make sense of their data and seeing where it's taking them forecasted into the future or you know they now find a training plan or a coach but it's when they make that commitment and they ask themselves what should i do tomorrow to make the most of that event that's where you you know step up the training peaks if you will well the data that you get is so good now i actually build my training programs not as far into the future as i did when the data wasn't as good so when the data wasn't as good i could build three four six weeks out right you know i wasn't getting like the like the intimacy of the feedback right the intricacies of the feedback to like modify what was going to go on tomorrow the next day and the day after that but now the insights are so illuminating because the the way that you can capture the data is so easy and then what you can do with it is you can drill down to such a finite level that i it's very rare that i build more

than like two weeks out and even then out of that 14 days i might modify three or four of them just as things go along again you might have three athletes training for the very same event that kind of are similar but they're going to be unique you know and totally it really comes down to how are you adapting to that unique individual yeah you know that's gonna produce the best results yeah and that's why it's yeah it's more the short-term kind of planning that you can adjust you know along the way well i've always thought that that's the the individualization component is the biggest thing that athletes that either aren't using a coach or aren't using a coach that harnesses the tools that are missing out on because as you know like coaching we blend best practices with the individual of the like the individual nature the individual tendencies of the athlete yeah and if you have a static training program you're getting best practices yeah and that's good but you're missing half of the equation and that's why i kind of flippantly say that they suck is because i know the second half of the equation isn't quite there because you're getting a 10k running program that that you can probably improve with right for a lot of athletes but it's missing one whole side of how you would actually coach somebody properly and that's the individual side yeah and the last couple years i had a coach and it's really that adoption piece that really helped me out the most because of the work-life balance the family oh yeah i can't train three days next week i'm in new

york city how do i adjust well static plan is not gonna you know help me out there but the coach can really give me insights on how to prepare for that vacation as well as how to maybe make up for it or not you know i mean i may not need to make up for it it may be a good thing and then the injuries along the way and there's this the insights and the experience level you know and i'm taking up a new sport you know in the last five years so it's it's great to be able to have those insights you're a badass at that new sport too national champion well it's nice in a niche sport where there's not there's fewer fewer athletes in that sport than ultra running so i love it you have a coach here i've had uh scott johnston at uphill athlete oh okay yeah very good so yeah you know it's been it was a great experience to kind of like yeah my goal is you know to become national champion and i did you know but it took a lot of effort and i'm like i'm sort of in the state now where i i want to kind of really enjoy it a little bit more right now it not have all that stress of every single day can i win national championship now it's like you know i'm trying to like sit back and enjoy it a little bit more um so you kind of as an athlete ebb and flow into commitment level i'm absolutely committed to doing basically the same race schedule but can i pull it back a little bit in terms of that the full throttle commitment to it

right um but i'm definitely going to go out there and enjoy the day i love it it's so authentic right i mean i may be 30 minutes slower but yeah nothing wrong with that all right well we're going to put a pin in it i got one last final question for you oh doozy yeah this is going to be a doozy so you could wave a magic wand and do anything that would ultimately help athletes out the most within your realm of expertise what would that be uh just to have them run into somebody they trust and can really be open with you know in their life that can give them a few insights that really reap big rewards so it's about if i were to wave a wand it's more about empowering people that to to find that person they can trust and be really truly open and authentic with and get the hard feedback from as well because it's that hard feedback that sometimes you really need that honest feedback and you couldn't quite see yourself that's going to really help you break through and become the athlete that you want to be i love that i love that it's not a technology piece and it's a human piece that's really cool yeah i think at the end of the day you know it's more about i've always thought of myself as trying to empower people to reach their potential you know my unique way that i can help out start was as a coach and now it's through technology but you know that technology should

be ubiquitous part of the whole process not the focus right it's just a one component cool thanks dirk yeah i really appreciate it thanks coop where can uh people find you guys well i mean training peaks instagram facebook etc i mean i'm i'm just dirk friel d-i-r-k-f-r-i-e-l at instagram um i don't do twitter a whole bunch but love instagram cool thanks a lot man thanks all right trail runners what'd you think you out there you're going to upload your data to all of the different places you can upload your data to it makes a big difference and um i've been coaching long enough to where i i've used as i mentioned in the podcast i've used spreadsheets i've used word documents i've used the endemic software within each one of the devices like moves count or what was formerly moves count and garmin connect and even when srm which is a bike power meter had their own endemic software i've used all those and finally we just kind of come back to the de facto the best one to use is is training peaks but i still realize that there are coaches and athletes out there that use all you know all different types of um uh of of methods to harness and to find detail within athletes training and that's fine i just think the best one out there is training piece i think it's a great i think it's a great service so i would encourage all of you guys to

check it out i hope you guys enjoyed the conversation that i had with dirk i hope that you think about your training in a little bit of a different way and i hope that you think about how you harness your training in a little bit of a different way because i can tell you from experience it does make an an enormous difference if you can look at in the past what you've done over over years and we talked we we tried to illuminate this in the podcast you get a lot of value for trying to track those trends over years and seeing what your strengths strengths and weaknesses are and seeing what types of workouts that you actually adapt to so i hope you think about that a little bit differently and i hope you enjoyed this episode big thanks to dirk for being on the podcast i like pausing saying dirk big thanks to dirk for being for being on the podcast and uh uh and helping going over some of these aspects if you have anything to mention to me you think it's a great episode you think it's a poor episode you want to hit me up on social media i am on twitter and on instagram at Jason Koop that's coop spelled with the k i'd love to hear from you guys love to hear for i'd love to hear your feedback and as always we will see you on the trails you