What Makes a Great Ultrarunning Coach with Kristen Dieffenbach PhD | Koopcast Episode 72

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is about a subject that is near and dear to my heart it is all about coach education and development as i've become a more and more seasoned coach i have found myself absolutely loving this concept of mentoring and developing young coaches it's something that i could never have foreseen 20 20 or so years ago as i began my coaching journey but as i've now become the coach that i am today it's due in large part to training other coaches and bringing them up through their own developmental pathways and so to discuss this all i brought on one of my longtime colleagues kristen dieffenbach PhD of the university of west virginia kristen is an expert in this area of coach education and development she has been a consultant to the united states olympic and paralympic committee the u.s anti-doping agency the united states tennis association usa cycling usa hockey usa triathlon and i could go on and on and on about the number of groups that she's consulted with all in the vein of how do we develop high quality coaches we had a really awesome wide-ranging discussion and for those

of you that are athletes out there don't worry we talk about how you can make the most out of your coach athlete relationship much in the vein of one of the previous podcasts that i had with dominic gunto our athlete services director you guys go and check that out in the archives this was a really fun one i had a lot of i had a really good time with it i hope you guys do too i'm gonna get right out of the way here's my conversation with kristen dieffenbach all right let's talk about coach education because this is really what i wanted to to bend your ear on um it's something that's like really close to me and it's also really close to you and i think as you know we have both evolved uh as you know coaches and just as people it's a natural trajectory to move from the mentee to the mentor to somebody who starts to get kind of really really psyched up about uh coach education and i know personally that's a it's a it's a kind of a big part of my life now where i spend a lot of time growing and developing screening training mentoring that whole basket of stuff stuff for new coaches um for for me it's been equal parts a uh a journey of seniority which i think is natural but also something that i have felt that has like made me a better coach in this whole learn one do one teach one philosophy that you know that it gets espoused in a lot of educational circles

i wanted to kind of hear from you though like you're more of an expert in this coach education area than than i am what what really bent your ear towards it and how did you get more involved with it and what kind of like perks you up about it and you said we only have 60 minutes yeah you go as long as you want to it's your show well no i i you know you and i have known each other for going on almost 20 years right so this is going back to the early days when we were first there and i think i was straight out of grad school or just ending grad school as as we were working together in early days of coaching and i think you know for me it goes back even further than that that recognition as i was finishing up my collegiate you know sports career and then getting into bike racing how much influence and how important the coach was in the system and how a good coach could really make a great difference and how a marginal coach could kind of go either way and how a bad coach could really have just a detrimental impact and you know my early background and training was in the exercise science sports psych realm so i was always coming at it from that interpersonal connection relationship perspective and very interested in how those interactions happened and came about and that sort of colored my career as it went along and you're absolutely right this is a profession that has very much followed trajectory of i played therefore i coach and that still is is the predominant model particularly in our volunteer sector of of coaches but even over into our high

performance you know you don't get the job in a collegiate sport environment unless you know somebody and you know somebody because you played for somebody and that's still very much the predominant model it doesn't mean it doesn't happen other ways but that's how most people get into it what we've seen in the last 10 or 15 years and then again you know i went from coaching and consulting from a sports psych side and then coaching athletes to stepping back into academia because i found a really interesting program at west virginia university that did undergraduate and master's degrees coaching education degrees and i was like who's doing that come to find out that the original physical education teacher education training was all surrounded and based in after school programming and coaching type activities john wooden classically trained physical education teacher right and a lot of our early coaches were and i got more and more intrigued by how did we get so divergent that physical educators or teachers and get this really great training but somehow despite the importance and value of sport whether it's for life skills and childhood engagement or high performance how do we get so far away from the essential sciences of teaching as well as the sport sciences especially as the sport sciences knowledge is is evolving and growing right and i'm not saying that all coaches need to have an academic degree by any means just saying that the field has evolved such that there is now

more of an expectation and more of a bit of a structure to thinking about how do we best support and educate coaches the vast majority of whom are adult learners not necessarily trained academically which is fine but still there's some structure to it and there's some there's a really neat model that the international council for coaching excellence has that talks about sort of the foundation of what we do right as coaches our professional knowledge so you know you're coaching ultra endurance athletes so it's very heavy in the sciences in that area um someone's soccer might be looking at at the and there's a lot of information about soccer and a lot of couple journals that are specific to it right but also the professional knowledge of how to teach and you work with adults and so your specialization is work primarily is working in that adult model whereas another coach i work with might be in the olympic devo system teenagers whole different animal or somebody else working in the youth sector you know um and then it's the interpersonal knowledge connecting with others and then the intrapersonal knowledge the side of who am i what do i believe in what are my values um how well do i self-reflect on my own actions as a leader and a teacher so it's not just what did the athlete do but how did i do it which starts to get into um classic teacher training and i got really intrigued and has led me into a whole global movement

that is um hugely influential into influential places like the new zealand sports system right now um the football association the fa in the uk um the canadian sports system starting to infiltrate into programs here like you know usa hockey usa swimming uh on a call yesterday with track and field hockey um figure skating swimming lacrosse climbing and about four other national governing bodies all around this conversation of how do we better support those who want to coach right to give them these skills so i get this question asked me asked of me all the time kristen and i don't have i don't profess to have a good answer to it so maybe you can help me out and i'll steal your answer at the end of the day but it's how do you become a coach because it's not a profession as you were just alluding to with the traditional academic pipeline right if i want to be a cpa i know the academic pipeline to go through if i want to be an engineer i know the academic pipeline i want to go to i want to go through if i want to be a geneticist i know the academic pipeline that i have to go through so on and on and on and on you come up with all these different examples if somebody says you know when they're 18 years old hey i want to be a soccer coach or something like that which is a profession right i mean coaching is is is a profession you and i live that there is no established academic pipeline for it so how how would you answer that and maybe i can like i said i could totally steal your answer

because i don't have a good one well this is actually what i say to the parents of students that come in all the time and to students themselves and i get asked this question a lot depends on your motivation and your market you know if you're in a because it's going to be very contextual it's going to be very specific coaching isn't coaching isn't coaching any more than to be an elementary school teacher a preschool teacher or a college professor you know it's very contextual and you're right there's no one pathway there's many and you want to consider that by your sport for example if you're a soccer player and you're interested in soccer the u.s soccer system has a very nice nicely established licensing system and they are far enough along in their system that if you don't have one of those licenses you're you're uefa a or uefa b it will be really hard to get into the system if you're a strength conditioning coach and you don't have your national strength conditioning association cscs and the requisite experience you needed to get it it will be very hard to get a position in those kinds of places you want to be a cycling coach make a website now that's you know that's that's the basic but the second part because the market isn't there and there's no requirement there's no mandate low barrier for entry that's what i always very low barrier for entry but the second part is your motivation if it's about and this is where i think that people have to do some some self-examination right if it's about oh i want to coach because you know capital c coach that gives me power and you know we can all think about the guy who started

around town because they were coach right or the high school if that's your motivation then i don't see people doing a whole lot more because i got this i know this yeah if your motivation is i'm really passionate about making other people better and helping people achieve their goals then there are so many ongoing education things to consider and doing a self-assessment of what do you know and what don't you know and often the novice coach doesn't know what they don't know yet so seeking and talking to mentors people like you um ben barney king in the cycling world was one of my huge ones early on right what don't i know what i have my athlete experiences and those are great but those are mine and there are many other bits of information do i have enough exercise physiology background do i understand motor learning and motor development do i understand nutrition i'm not going to be a motor behaviorist or a nutritionist but those things inform what we do and so if your motivation is really to help other people then it's plotting a lifelong journey of how do i keep growing in all of the key areas of you know that that triangle that i was talking about before of knowledge and thinking about all the things that you do i mean a coach is responsible and this is again from the icce's framework you know we set a vision and a mission or we help our athletes clarify it you know we culture create a training environment culture not just the training plan

but the bigger picture we set the relationship we have the power and a power dynamic it's a little strange when it's a one-on-one paid situation because there's a payment power but then there's also the expertise power and so there's a little bit different dynamic you know we're preparing people for the competition we're understanding our field not just how technology is changing but how the races are evolving and changing and what's going on preparing our athletes for tomorrow not just today and there's so many things i want to pull on a little bit of a thread that you mentioned earlier and this goes along with the same thing that there's no established pipeline a lot of what we see in what i'm kind of calling the commercial space so age group athletes that want to hire a coach for cycling race triathlon race ultramarathon race and things like that they're out kind of they're trying to navigate this landscape without a map almost that in the new people like you and i we have the map right we can size up coaches across we can size up coaches across the space and say okay using our coaching intelligence and and answer a lot of the questions that you just went through this person is curious about filling their exercise physiology gaps in knowledge this person's interested in figuring out how to communicate better and things like that but the end user has a hard time doing that and one of the common one of the common things that you both you and i because we've talked about this before via social media and in person one of the things that is really prevalent is the elite

athlete that is kind of parlaying their their physical prowess right they can go with races and things like that into a side income where it's coaching and let's face it i mean you can't really blame them because it's hard to make it as an elite athlete those especially in the endurance space those contracts are not very good they're piecing together sponsors from 10 different you know 10 different people and they're just trying to kind of pull kind of pull income in and some of those some of those elite athletes do a great job being a coach some of them do not do a great job at being a coach and i'm wondering if you had anything like in your toolbox to help the end user really ascertain how to figure out between those two yeah and i think it's such a great question of conversation because it's not just in our sport you know you even see this in the elite sports where they try to bring somebody in and it's disastrous and then you've got somebody like wayne gretzky who does very well um yeah i think when i'm talking to somebody and and giving advice about hiring a coach you know i do i do strongly recommend you do a little bit of homework what what are some of the industry standards even if they aren't requirements what are some of the possibles what are some of the things that somebody might have you know if they're going to work with you in person do they have a first aid training background they have some sort of credentials there because they should know some of those things you know if they don't have some sort of degree in exercise science or in some of those fields because again it doesn't preclude them from doing a great job but it's one of those markers that

they'd have at least some foundational knowledge asking them what kind of training do they do what kind of information because you know just because i have achieved physiological success doesn't mean that i was self-coached and even if i was self-coached doesn't mean i understand how to apply that information to somebody else in their unique situation their unique goals it doesn't mean that i have anything more than a hammer with which to hit the nail and so you really want to talk to them a little bit about how they work and and what kind of training or what kind of things that they do but to me the other thing that's really important is always having some you know having sort of either a trial period or some sort of intern you know at least early conversation and is the coach telling you more or listening to you more is this more of a learning conversation or are they just telling you all the things they're going to do right right you know because at the end of the day if they're not listening to you and going hmm how do i tailor this to you how do i you know i'm always very leery when a coach jumps in and the very first week that they're working with an athlete they have a really detailed strict training plan because they know everything right off the bat right here's what you need to do magically and yep i've got a new client and i'm working with her and you know it's she's been a little taken aback and i'm like yeah we're gonna take a couple weeks and i'm gonna be throwing some things out there and you get to choose i'm gonna watch sort of how you're

you know what your preferences are and what's going on and i can't you know especially since we're at a distance i can't make some big assessments and throw a huge plan at you i gotta learn a little bit more about your patterns and who you are and how and she's you know a little bit shocked because she's always been given plans at the end of the day so i think there's a relationship piece here that's also really important and for some people all they want is numbers and that's fine yeah find your fit but for other people it's it's a relationship and a given and take and that confidence and trust is what will make a coaching relationship work over time so the two things that i'm picking up on you from in terms of how kind of the end user the athlete can can filter through this stuff is one look for coaches that are filling in the gaps essentially it's okay to be a great athlete and to parlay that into great coaching but you've got to realize that there are gaps and you can't just uh what i would call paint by numbers right from what you have done or how you have been coached which is what you see a lot right you see a lead athlete who has a really good coach they try to coach and then all they do is they just repeat what their coach has kind of done done done for them and that's not you know that's not learning at all you're you're you're saying look for that look for how they're filling the gaps but also look for the coaches that are asking more questions versus providing the answers right off the bat yeah absolutely because at the end of the day

you know i think this was any relationship where someone's trying to help you achieve your goals if they do more telling than asking how do they how do they connect to what you're trying to do and what your goals are and and you know we also all know that whether you're high performance or you're you know this is your your hobby we only have so many resources and if a good coach doesn't really understand what your resources are what's in your bank account so to speak they're not going to be able to coach you effectively and so my recovery needs are different than yours my crazy lifestyle of family and work stuff is different than yours and so again if that formula for training isn't really carefully tailored it becomes harder and harder you know to achieve you might get better but to really achieve becomes the question and so they that uniqueness and a coach who doesn't understand that or doesn't have the skills to ask the right questions or to do something with the answers yeah starts to become a bit of a concern yeah i get on you mentioned some one area that i get on our coaches all the time with and that's hint and that's hinging too much or taking too much credit for the improvement if you get a new athlete in somebody who has relatively little experience yeah you're they're going to improve absolutely are they going to improve as much as if you did everything perfect

probably not but it's really hard to ascertain kind of one from the other and it's hard to knock it because they're going to improve it's harder and harder and harder the more years that you go by and i've always felt that the really good coaches shine after about four or five years of consistent training because that's when that this like asymptotic relationship between performance and improvement starts to or time and improvement starts to level off and if you don't know what you're doing then then there you see all the stagnation or even you start to see a downward trend because there's no bandwidth there's no more bandwidth for improvement um this leads me to another area you touched on it kind of earlier like good coaches can make all the difference in the world right good coaches are good for athletes obviously but good coaches are good for the entirety of coaching like the whole ecosystem around coaching the opposite is also true bad coaches are obviously bad for athletes and we can point out high profile examples of that but we can also point out and kristin those of you who are not watching the youtube version kristin just shuddered because she doesn't want to get into into all this but there i mean let's face it there have been a number of high profile examples especially at the olympic levels of coaches who are you know abusing their power abusing their authority and we don't need to we don't need to rehash that but my point with that is is that bad coaches are obviously bad for the athletes but it's also bad for the ecosystem of coaching all of the coaches around them all of

their coaching peers all of the all of the coaches that kind of rely on each other and i'm wondering if i can kind of get your get your thoughts on this aspect because it is still what i would call an emerging emerging industry and we're going to be able we as coaches we're going to be we're going to be the masters of our own destiny essentially and if we do a good job we're going to thrive and athletes are going to thrive but if we don't do a good job i think the opposite can also be true yeah well and again so yeah this is so oh you get me started on this one this is getting into you know the ethics and the moral decision making and all that and yes i absolutely shuddered because more often than not when i talk about being in coaching i don't usually get somebody telling me oh i had an amazing coach i usually get to hear the story from somebody about how horrible their coach was back in the day and what the awful thing they did whether it's on the criminal spectrum or just the complete jerk spectrum and i'll watch my language so that you know you don't have to watch your language on this podcast chris to trust me okay that's good because i have i have to be very careful when i'm in the classroom and i'm not always as careful as i need to be i'll put an expletive uh marking on this one like i do the rest of them but but i think you're absolutely right right that we have so this is where we start getting into the professionalism of sport coaching and the difference between somebody who is a hobby coach even if they've made a business out of it you know a hobby coach is somebody who is doing it because yeah they really like it and it's fun they might even be driving their full income

from it but the approach is yeah i know this i'm doing this just follow along whereas the professional coach whether they are a volunteer or a fully paid you know coach is somebody who is treating this as a professional and as a professional one of the hallmarks is we have a responsibility to those we serve our clients our athletes right for their health their well-being and the achievement of their goals but we also have a responsibility back to the profession itself and coaches are really in many cases you know we're the linchpin in that long-term athlete development model if we're working with the youngest kids whether we're a volunteer or paid we have a huge say in whether or not they enjoy the experience they develop good skills and they want to continue we know that most kids when they quit they quit for a lot of reasons at 13 or 14 there's a huge drop off some of it is because um you know they're 13 or 14 and all of a sudden they're getting close to driving and dating and they drop off we know that they drop off but you know for for a variety of reasons but the big ones that cluster that we know about bad experience with coaches and parents high expectations coaches being at the top of that and systems that start to shut them out because they aren't talented enough and we know that you know you don't perform as a kid unless you're talented kind of silliness that's in our system but throughout the whole thing the coach has a huge potential to impact the experience of sport and whether or not somebody stays in it or stays out how they feel about themselves

you know the achievement of their goals and that sort of that linchpin piece that coach as a ambassador to the sport is huge and you know it's funny we in our culture we tend to look at the coach that's amazing as sort of this one-off bigfoot kind of thing right they're they're iconic and they're cool and the general consensus is that you know the coaches the yelly screamy all about driving the athlete and not a professional right and so we have and it's a little different in the niches so you come into our world and it's a small enough world you go into other sports and and the stereotype might change a little but we really do have a very big responsibility to that and part of that is being well educated and then upholding the ethics of the profession and that's a fun one because what are the ethics of the profession certainly the usopc has a standard of code the national federation of high schools has a code nsca the strength conditioning association has a code but at the end of the day it's your personal code and examining that and you know i've done some stuff for usada where we're really trying to help people think about moral decision making and are the choices you're making in alignment with what you really believe and it's one of the fun things when i'm working with my students they'll all tell me what they believe when i start asking how they know if they're living by that they can't tell me they

don't know they've never thought about it right just i believe in that well yes i know you believe in it but how do we know your actions are matching your beliefs and that's huge right and so that comes back to that piece of professionalism that you were talking about the responsibility to the profession that requires that interpersonal set of skills that i mentioned at the beginning the ability of quality self-reflection self-awareness and taking time as a professional coach to do that in addition to the analytics around the athlete and how they're performing yeah and that's again i don't think a lot of coaches that initially get into coaching in kind of in in the domain that i work in understand that aspect of having a responsibility to the profession itself they're they're looking to earn a side hustle right and that's the term that kind of gets thrown thrown around a lot and sometimes those coaches grow into understanding that they have a larger responsibility compared to putting a few bucks in their pocket and then other ones are constantly doing the side hustle they're current they're constantly going from athlete to athlete figuring out how can they make 200 bucks over here and 100 over there and 50 over here and things like that and it i mean if i'm being if i'm if i'm being honest kristin i can't i can't be it's my podcast i don't know why i wouldn't be we'll censor out anything yeah exactly it irritates the living crap out of me when i see the latter group because they don't understand the responsibility back to the

profession and doesn't understand that that affects everybody the whole like like i've been saying the whole ecosystem underneath it as well as the athletes like if you're treating the athletes as a side hustle commodity commodity that's not the right that that doesn't do them any service right well that's the motivation piece we were talking about right are you a coach because you want to say you're a coach are you a coach because you're truly trying to help people and i'm right there on the bandwagon with you i get on my soapbox several times a week with my students about this site this and when i go out and do coaching ed for the different ngbs and in that space it's actually how there's a growing area of development in this field around coach education and coach development the united states center for coaching excellence which is the the nonprofit group i'm currently president of is seeking to help improve that with the accreditation of coaching education programs and the clarity that there are people who are coach developers to try to help the profession of coaching it's a it's an occupational socialization thing that doesn't even i mean let's be honest here there are people who become doctors and there's a huge accrediting body there who become doctors because it's all about their ego and not about their patient there are people who become teachers i don't understand why because the pay is so bad but there's people who become teachers you know your wife and my husband because they truly believe in helping children and then there's people who become teachers because i don't have to do much just gonna go in the classroom and i got summers off right so there is a huge piece of motivation there

and then it starts to be about okay what do we as coaches do to self-police ourselves what do we do to elevate you know our work and the work around those you know among us you know the conversations that we have with other coaches talking about best practices looking for ways to create opportunities to safeguard athletes and put out information about a good coach will do this a good coach does that if your coach does this and even um this is going back into that you know big hairy and ugly side of things but it's a continuum of bad behaviors that's how the u.s center for safe sports it's other the canadian red cross system in athlete protection came about there's a group called siga the sports integrity global alliance that's creating some resources and practices around athlete protection to a certain degree it's even how the athlete development model came about if you know the long-term athlete development model um you know the idea that if this is truly about the athlete then there is a curriculum for development that is holistic and then the coach training and the coach preparation needs to be around that and then there needs to be a way to hold them accountable slow slow moving train of professionalism but one that this is how strength conditioning if we go back to them you're you've been in this long enough you remember it 20 years ago you know getting to the late 90s and that was just starting out yeah it was a total they were like um you know seven or eight different certifications you could get to be oops hold on i'm losing my headphones they slid off the

back of my head um but you've got you know seven or eight different accreditations at the time you could get to be a strength conditioning professional um and now 20 years later not only if you want to be cscs strength conditioning certified by the leading group probably in the world not only do you have to have an undergraduate degree but in a few years that will change to an undergraduate degree specific to exercise physiology exercise science from an accredited program and it's very very difficult not impossible but difficult to get a job in that field without that it's standard but it's slow that's 20 20 plus years of movement in one place yeah you know uh i'm i'm really fortunate cscs is right around the corner for me uh here in colorado springs and i've done a number of different workshops with them over the years i've patterned a lot i've patterned a lot of our coach development around their framework obviously the content is totally different strength and conditioning versus endurance but in terms of how they set it up we're going to take a person from a to b to c to d in terms of making sure that they are a developed coach and they can work with athletes i've looked at that very very and put a lot of scrutiny into how do i adapt that into a different you know a different sport venue essentially and i mean i felt that it's been very successful but you're but you're right you can't do that overnight it's not like you just turn the switch on and all of a sudden all those things are different those wheels grind like extremely slowly and it's i think it's kind of unfortunate

that i'm gonna i'm gonna kind of knock the ngbs a little bit but once again i don't mind it's my podcast that the end i don't think the ngbs have traditionally done the best job at doing that usa cycling usa triathlon and usa track and field because i've had all of those certifications at one point or another and they're okay it's a box ticker a lot of people use it for like liability insurance and things like that you get out of it which you put into it but i i just it's it's in my opinion it's a it's like a missing opportunity to at least have some type of framework or some robust type of framework for the freelance coaches that are out there that that want to up their game but and i will i'll jump in there a little bit just because you know i've been working with the ngbs you know starting with usc cycling back in you know 20 years but i work with many of them now and it's some of it is is informal through we actually have um routine meetings with ngb coach developers because that is the conversation in the ngbs as well that we're in a leadership position and yet how do we do this how do we do this with a group that is volunteer and a group that's very resistant to change which i find to be the funniest thing right sport is all about innovation and change but you walk in and say we're gonna we need to require more of the coaches or we need to do this and people go no you can't do that it's like you know so we battle that all the time but the other thing to remember not just about the ngbs but there are there are several hundred organizations in the united states that vet or certify coaches in

different developments everything from positive youth development type programs like up to us and um you know positive coaching alliance types perspectives all the way up through the ngbs the united states doesn't have a sport ministry we do not have a governing organization that oversees everything right there are 300 plus different coach associations in the united states 300 really 300 yeah my research lab has put together a database and you know we identified we started off and we had identified over 400 different associations everything from acsm to the ngbs to little league you know those types of groups and now we've grown that database to uh quite a bit larger and and in some cases like u.s soccer there's quite an affiliation of all those smaller pieces but then in other places while little league and cal ripton league and pony league and baseball and softball all may talk to usa baseball usa baseball doesn't have oversight over them and so we're in a you you said wild west that's not a joke it still is strength and conditioning just had such a small niche and i've talked to you know michael about this a bit he's the michael messick's current ceo because they had such a small niche it was easier for them yeah within our sport governing bodies coaching education has traditionally not been an educational piece it's been a marketing piece it's been a coaches are just something we need to serve now in youth sport markets like hockey and swimming where they have a closed tight venue in which you

can't coach unless you can't set foot on the premises unless you have a license they have a mechanism and they have a way and if you ever get a chance you know usa hockey's got tremendous materials even age group differentiated materials because it's not about this it's not just about the skill at the age group it's about how do you teach a u6 different than a u10 and i'm coaching u10 right now and i haven't coached children in a long time and it's a constant learning reminder how different it is to coach somebody who is developmentally here versus coaching somebody who's cognitively and physically here um i do a lot of repeating and a lot of oh i can't believe that right um but so you're hitting on something really important it's wild west and i'm not absolving the ngbs of stepping to a challenge but if coaching education is education then the people that are hired and that are running the show should probably be educators yeah and should understand adult learning theory and and that's actually what the ngbs are now currently engaging and there's that that's been the movement the last 10 years uh again slow moving probably i get frustrated because it is slow moving oh drives me insane oh yeah i mean which is ironic right because we're an ultra endurance people and we know that the the game is long we know that stuff will happen and you still might have an amazing outcome but i find it funny that i like an ultra endurance and i have no patience i don't see how the two come

together at all but yeah that's such a ironic statement kristen isn't it though i mean just i mean i'm again self-awareness is another big piece of my life right it's like wow that's really screwed up which is probably a good thing that i'm sports psych in the first place then because if i'd be even more screwed up if i didn't have all that awareness you bring up a really interesting point of um i think a really good skill coaches can learn is to coach something outside of their domain expertise oh yeah because the skill of coaching should be translatable in a lot of different sporting venues if if you really know what you're doing and here's the here's the example i always bring up my coaches are gonna they're laughing their asses off right now because they know exactly where i'm gonna go with this so during our our hiring and screening process one of the things that we do is we give them a case study and we give them a case study in their domain expertise so we're hiring for a triathlon coach we'll give them an ironman athlete or something like that and then we'll give them a case study outside of their domain expertise and we'll kind of compare and contrast how they handle those two what we find is the really good coaches can figure it out if they're a triathlon coach and we ask them to figure out figure it out for an ultra runner the coaches that are solely relying on this like paint by numbers aspect that i mentioned earlier i'll lead with the question of how long is the event what's the duration of the event you're doing the ludville trail 100 how long

is it going to take this athlete nowhere close like don't don't even understand the basic fundamentals of it's going to take this athlete 26 hours or they're doing the mountain bike race 11 hours or something like that that and and so we use that in a continuing education standpoint to drive home the fact that you can't rely on only the things that you know you have to translate the framework outside of what you know into sport disciplines that you might not be as comfortable with and that only makes you better at the at the end of the day yeah i think that that's just really huge and i think you know my first i think back to my very first experience when i was coaching i came right out of college distance runner that's what i was doing at the time i was bike racing but i was still such a novice and they threw me in as the triple jump coach at a high school level and first of all i wasn't qualified to coach i was straight out of college right all i had done was accomplished my own running things and and they threw me in to coach that and it was like triple jump now keep in mind i had been banned from field events as an athlete because i'm not that's not my thing so now you want to put me with the people that are going to run skip hop and jump and throw themselves oh my goodness right and it was a crash course in how do i study a sport so i can teach it and now like you mentioned i'm coaching youth hockey because my son is um in nine and he likes wearing the armor and so we're a hockey family and um you know i've done a lot with usa hockey

for over the years and i'm really super excited that he likes this but you're hitting on the the essential here the differentiation between what to coach and how to coach right and what to coach is is having again that content the fitness design the the mechanics of the sport understanding that knowing what the athlete has to do and you're right you have to be able to go out of your niche and if i'm coaching baseball i should also be able to translate it to softball you know if it's a striking game i should be able to translate it to other striking games there's some great physical activity foundation in the those basic tenets of invasion games striking games because those are the core elements right and you should know the core elements of your and then you could translate i probably should not you know coach somebody in ultra endurance swimming because it's not my niche but i could have a good discussion with another coach and i could probably evolve into it right there's a drowning aspect there that i wouldn't do but how to coach right the teaching process the principles of assessing someone assessing where they are so you coach the athlete where they are not where you're comfortable coaching or not where you want them to be um being able to give good feedback and instruction being able to do all those things though how to coach that's universal at that and that's probably 90 of what we do yeah right and it's big and it's something that people overlook and like you said novice coaches and to be fair novice teachers who have been trained often come in focused on the x's and o's and the semantics yeah because they're anxious yeah yep and then over time they learn the

others i'm going to turn this around to to the athlete side of things because once again there's going to be coaches that listen to this podcast but there's going to be far more athletes i want to make it relatable to to that audience as well for all too often athletes or folk athletes who are in the market for for a coach are looking for the coach that has done whatever they are trying to do i'm training for the leadville trail 100 my coach has to have run the leadville trail 100 and there is no other more cliche sport that is victim to this than the sport of iron man triathlon and i pick on iron man athletes all of the time on this podcast and i love them to death because i coached a lot of iron man athletes back in the day but they they have this thing where if they're training for iron man in arizona they better have a coach that has won iron man arizona they who cares if they won iron man lake placid or iron man kona or any of the other races out there they have to have done the specific triathlon that they that that that they are focusing on and our ultra endurance crowd kind of gets kind of gets wrapped up um in that as well so much so that our athlete services uh director dominic who's on a previous version of this podcast and i'll i'll leave a link to that in the show notes um he has a hard time he plays matchmaker between the incoming athletes and our pool of coaches he often has a hard time

creating that match if the coach hasn't done whatever specific race that the athlete is is is training for even though the coach is perfectly well qualified to have them do whatever and so i i don't profess to know how to solve this riddle how to communicate to the athletes that a coach can take those coaching skills and do the research and even though they haven't done the leadville trail 100 they can coach an athlete for the leadville trail 100 i don't know why i'm poke uh poking fun at leadville right now but anyway it's just on the top of my mind uh it's a hard race um it gets a lot of triathletes maybe that's why it's subconsciously seeping through my brain here so how can how can athletes look at this kristen like how can athletes that are legitimately nervous about preparing for event and one of the reason or one of the ways they're like satiating that nervousness is to get a coach how can they kind of like make the leap and say you know what this coach is ready to coach me for this event even though they don't have any personal experience in it yeah no i think that's a and you know part of that is brilliant marketing on the part of the iron man system it it really did come out and brand itself right iron man right it's got the brand it's got the tattoo it's got everything and i i i share you and you know your feelings of picking on the community the same way we did when triathlon first just emerged on the scene and it's like had a greek field day with that um you

know the little it's almost like sibling rivalry is the way i look at it between these groups right we're we love each other to death but oh come on we got to pick on each other uh because we're all nuts it's all a little crazy and every time you think you've met somebody who's done something crazy and big you're like oh wait a minute you mean there's a a double iron man there's a deck iron there's a what so so it just goes nuts but i think when when athletes get really anxious that that's an expert you know that need for somebody who's done just what i've done is really an expression of that anxiety that you're talking about that that they're anxious about it and the sense is that this is just so unique and so different going back to the branding right and how that's been done that the only way to do this is to have somebody who's going to lead me through that has that knows all the secrets right you're going to hire the guide who knows which stones to step on and which which path to take right that's going to be safe and i think if you can start to change how you look at it a little bit and almost take what we talk about a lot um when we talk to athletes who get really anxious about going to a certain event like i'm going to go to the olympics or i'm going to go to nationals the game's still the same right and we have this conversation a lot the olympic swimming pool is the same size the water is is still water depending on where we go and it's you know those of you who are old enough on the podcast and my experience is that a lot of ultra runners are and ultra people are on that spectrum you know that you guys remember hoosiers that iconic scene yeah where they go

in right and they measure and the baskets doesn't get any higher and i think if the athletes can slow down and think about what are the elements of the race every single race has unique elements there's you know different hill profiles and all those types of things but the core elements of the race are more similar than different i'm going to have to navigate x y and z i'm going to have to pace i'm going to have to consider my transitions i'm going to have to do this i'm going to have to do that and a good coach can take that core foundation that we were talking about a little while ago and we'll be able to help you translate that and filter that through who you are not how they navigated it because i'm a hill runner i prefer to go up than to go flatter down any day and so my strategy is going to be incredibly different than somebody else you know jfk 50 starts off rolling brilliant then you gotta go flat it's awful right and that just about killed me whereas other people would have done it really differently and that one trick pony of a coach who's just going to know this now that doesn't mean that the coach has done it is going to do it that way but the mindset from the athlete perspective that you think that if you find the right coach they will be able to do that and they will be able to help you personalize those things to you because again the water is still wet exactly right and you know the strategy is going to be the things are the same so i think it's an anxiety thing and examining that anxiety is probably where the athlete needs to sort of sit down and think

about what do i need from a coach somebody who's going to support me somebody's going to listen to me somebody who's going to be reactive to my resource shifts whether it be time money energy etc what are those things that are going to make the most difference and somebody who has walked the entire thing is probably down here when you start prioritizing yeah that's exactly right that make a priority list that i've done that the coach has done that race is way should be way lower on that but the thing is it's it's easy to elevate it uh so yeah anxiety yeah so personal story um to to illustrate this really well um i have i have a colleague who's who kristen i think you'll probably remember his name's nick white fantastic coach great guy fantastic coach lives out in tucson and he coached craig alexander to not one but two two iron man world championships which is the pinnacle of that sport obviously and i would say one of the pinnacles of all of the endurance sports you look at the olympic games boston marathon tour de france iron man triathlon is right up there with all those so we have this coach the picture that i'm trying to pay we have this coach who really knows this stuff he's coached this this this triathlete who is a good athlete in his own right there's a lot of good athletes out there but to get that athlete to not one but two iron man world championships is a really big thing that elite ultra runner come in that i thought was perfect for nick for a lot all those reasons that you just mentioned right nick was

the data guy this elite ultra runner was data person blah blah the fact that nick had only done a very small handful of ultra marathons made it a non-starter the whole conversation was a non-starter and i thought that it was so tragic because here i had this this fantastic coach that i knew could coach anything in fact when he coached craig to not one but two iron man world championships he had never done an iron man before right never and craig just took it you know craig being the professional that he is and i don't know if you've run across craig before he is a professional he's a professional within his sport um he he obviously made made the right call there but the fact that i couldn't make that uh kind of kind of make that leap or i couldn't make those connections for this incoming athlete that despite this seemingly lack of sport uh uh specificity it just frustrated the bejesus out of me and i just know that they're so prevalent yeah at a layer well no yeah at a layer because as you're talking it just it's making me laugh right because i'm a female coach oh right oh i love it and if we look at you know where i'm going with this right i do i do oh man let's take a look at it because i think it's i think it's an argument actually if athletes really think about this can a female coach coach men's basketball or football

because they've never played it and i think that for a long time that was the you know um i actually had a this is going to be really random but i had a i had a one-sided argument with tommy lasorda several years back before he passed just recently but several years ago it was right after one of the nfl coaches had been one of the teams had named a female coach and by one-sided arguing i sat there very politely listening to him have an absolute rant well that was exactly right you know he he was somewhere between we were at a dinner and he was somewhere between my grandfather kind of image because he kept asking for more corn it was so strange and you know this reverence for the field of i know who you are i know what you've accomplished and the fact that he was like 80 something right and he's railing and my colleagues are sitting on the other side tables laughing their heads off because i teach women's and study and gender and sports stuff and you know not exactly quiet about that kind of thing and i'm being as quiet as a mouse because i'm trying to be respectful and the whole time i'm like oh but i think it's a similar argument right that we have these really strict boxes and ideals and that examination of you know i've coached several male athletes to national titles and you know to olympic teams and and i've coached female athletes and i've coached people who are in their 70s and i'm not 70 yet and i've coached people but we get into those boxes and it actually goes back to an earlier piece that you brought up of you know why are

we not farther along as a profession of coaching and that um the reason that strength conditioning has been able to do it is because it's a nice tidy box of speed agility and power and when you start talking about sports there is this idea that football is so different than basketball and basketball is so different than soccer at the end of the day they're not right i'd say 90 the same and 10 different right even though it's in different you know it's a venn diagram right there's way more overlap than there is difference but we culturally so so you know the it's frustrating but the athletes hesitancy is just a reflection of how we culturally have dealt with sports they are so different right you can't possibly like football if you like soccer and you can't possibly like soccer if you like football right and and i don't mean to you know i'm not trying to genderize this i just think it's that bigger conversation of our sports tend to put blinders on we're different we're unique it's an identity identity and in that identity there is a reluctance because if it broadens out too much right it's not that unique and not to pick on us the ultra community and not to pick on the iron man you can pick on us it's cool i know i will no i'm going there you know i'm just preferencing i'm trying to soften it a little but you know we know that it's a bucket list sport we know that there is in a bit of an elitist mentality and a boardroom mentality and so there's also a little bit of that it's not just insecurity it's a i'm an iron man and i'm coached by an iron man right and if i say my coach does this

do i lose some of my street cred and not that anybody has thought that through probably but that's again that's the culture it perpetuates itself so how do we as professionals break it do you find that um getting women into the profession of coaching is difficult oh yeah um you know it's funny i i'm talking to usa rowing about this in a few in a few weeks on a podcast they're doing yes and no i have always been really astounded by the number of what you know women that i have met it's still smaller percentage but in the ultra endurance and cycling community you know the renee is the kathy uh zwatsky is the you know the folks over the years um that i've met and known we're still smaller percentage but we're here whereas if i go over into our traditional sports they're far fewer between i think at the upper levels what we've been seeing is more and more women who have been able to get inroads into the sport and then found their way over into coaching and you know i'll be you know really honest i was a good athlete not amazing i got my PhD for the sole reason of knowing i needed something else yeah to break in right we have a huge problem still at all of the developmental and youth ranks with a very very gendered differentiation and it's uh so much so that most of the sport organizations had have or have or have currently or have in the recent past

had initiatives to try to yeah empower more women yeah i i mean i recognize that maybe 10 or 15 years ago that we started to see this big discrepancy in the number of male coaches versus female coaches that we had and talking about the wheels grinding very slowly i started to grind those wheels in in in my professional capacity kind of kind of the best i could and and now and i'm very proud to say this and i don't care if people will say i'm beating my own you know drum about this or not because it was a lot of podcast it's my podcast there's a lot of freaking work um which you can you can you can probably vouch for how hard it was we have a 50 50 split within our ultra division men and women uh for on the coaching side of it and that didn't come about because of just me letting the boat go wherever it wanted to if we if that were to happen it would be 90 10 um i had to go out and for years intentionally recruit hire train female coaches because i thought that it was not only good for our business but also that it was good for kind of good for the sport as a whole and i will say that every single every single woman that i've ever hired absolutely deserved the position above the entire entirety of the rest of the pool i just had to go to greater lengths to find those people is that's consistent with the literature on on yeah because we've seen that in many other professions women are less culturally have been cultured and again we're getting into you know some of those nuances of those things but it's been shown in many professions that women are much more reluctant to

apply for positions even if they're overqualified they they tend to wait until they're way overqualified to feel like they're allowed or permitted to enter whereas men tend to jump right in way before they're qualified right and that's it's a gross stereotype but say that about sport too yeah it's well it's a stereotype but it again it's seen in the literature and it's something that they've actually studied and looked at in business and other areas and so you know odd random remember listening to a great um podcast about how he works by stephen colbert who's somebody i really think is a consummate professional because i'm really interested in how professionals be professionals and he was talking about being a professional in the world of of comedy and it's a lot of work there too right and he was talking about how they were trying to seek a more diverse voice in their writing staff and when they put out calls they'd only get men when they specifically targeted and sought out women they found amazing resumes and people absolutely deserve to be there but if they didn't invite them in they had been kept out for so long and so i find it interesting at ultra world you know the the differentiation at the elite level between men and women is not as great as say in some of our other sports right there's a little bit more blending as you go up in the ranks and there have been you know races that have been won by female or male depending on the year because again we have the dynamics of the sport are a little bit different and yet most of the people who are in it

grew up in a very traditional culture of sport reminded and seeing only men coaching and so we're still fighting that a little bit and you know for those of you who don't remember that we are the women who were in their 50s and 60s are the first generation to really benefit from the title nine shift and you know if we really want to be historic historical about it you know case weitzer's in her what i want to say mid 70s yeah i think so yeah she ran the boston marathon as a as a well she had a number she was official but if you've ever seen the video the race director did not agree with that no i mean they try to tackle her off the course yeah but i guess what you're getting at it is is it hasn't been that long from a timeline perspective and going back to the theme that we keep circling around to these wheels grind very slowly um okay so let's let's circle back again to the athlete perspective of things and i kind of want i kind of want to leave leave it on this because we could go down a gazillion different rabbit holes well before you do that there's just one thing i want to say about what you just said because i think it's important so i guess as we're talking about this i want to make sure people you know are left with that message from that perspective that i absolutely believe we are making amazing progress and there's tons of wonderful things going on so for all the problems and awards there is still and even just this podcast in this conversation it's a growing chorus of conversation that if you're paying attention and watching you'll see more of and i think we are we are in a really good trajectory for the evolution of the

professionalism of coaching to support those of us who take this job very seriously in support of our athletes oh i chris i mean you and i started doing this around the same time i couldn't explain what my job was to my mother i mean it was like the least profession of professions like ever like she's like what you you're you're in colorado and your athletes are over here like oh my dad kept saying you're gonna get a real job when yeah exactly you're just still playing in sport exactly so that's a monumental that's a monumental leap right huge and i don't so let's go to the athlete perspective yeah let's go back to the athlete perspective because and i kind of want to leave it on i want to leave it on this note because i think it's the most uh it's the most tangible and actionable piece for the athletes there's you can get what you want to get out of a coach athlete relationship we went through all of these different scenarios of you know how uh how coaching has become more professional how coaches can treat their profession more professionally how good coaching is good for coaching and also good for for athletes and bad coaching is bad for athletes and bad for the whole uh for the whole ecosystem of coaching but the athletes can can do a lot of things to make the most out of their coach athlete relationship whether they're currently in one or whether they're looking for some sort of some sort of coaching guidance and i know you work on both you work on there's like four sides of the equation there i know you work on all of those different sides of the equation what would you tell

the athletes that are trying to like maximize the benefit they get out of looking for a coach and then getting coaching yeah no i think that's huge and i you know i think that the place to start there for the athletes is to really think about who you are is that not just what you want to accomplish but who you are as an athlete what kinds of relationship things really work best for you and what are you looking to get from that so that you have some clarity as to what kind of feedback works best with you where where uh where do you need the most support where what kind of relationship do you need and then being a very clear communicator about that with your coach and yes the coach is the professional and yes the coach should be driving and making sure those things are happening but this is we're talking about adult to adult professional relationships here you have that same responsibility to be very clear and concise in your communication and polite and all those things you know and professional of this is what i'm looking for this is what i need more of this is this is how i best work because you're developing a relationship not just getting your taxes back right you're not just getting a formula throwing the shoe box over and getting right you're not just well and that's important because coaching should be done with you not to you i love that right and

athletes should be just as active and engaged if my athletes can't give me quality feedback and they just click the box that they did the workouts i've got nothing to go on yeah i can look at your power file but that that really only tells me a piece of it and if i'm only coaching you on numbers something somewhere down the road is gonna go wrong and i'm not gonna know why yeah and so taking that responsibility finding taking the responsibility from the beginning to choose somebody who fits you well it's okay no matter what the coaches credentials not everybody clicks i've had amazing athletes that i'm too soft i'm too personal even though i do data and that's okay and then i've had people who you know want more of the soft and i'm like yeah i'm not your counselor that's not for me either you know or want more of a friend relationship and i'm like oh i'm not comfortable with that right and so having that you know having that clarity for yourself and then being really clear on your your investment you you're paying for this invest yourself in it right and and give give it what it deserves you know bank account left without any deposits can't grow so what are you depositing into that bank account not just your numbers in in your training peaks or whatever platform you're using so that would be where i'd really put a lot of onus on the coach on the athlete it's expected of your coach hold them to a high

standard clearly communicate but don't be passive kristen that's a brilliant way to end it don't just be a passenger in things right take ownership of it um as always kristen i've appreciated your counsel over the years and this is no exception uh we'll have to do this again we could do i wanted to thank you by the way oh my gosh those of you not watching the youtube version she's got a version of my the first version of my book uh holding up but you know what but i have to complain it's not signed i did not personalize it so next time i come to the springs i tell you what when the new version comes out which is uh i hate to hold myself to a date right now because it's such an arduous process when the new version comes out in in may i'll just leave it there when it comes out in may i will send you a personalized copy with gotta be personalized otherwise my students don't know that i know all these things oh that's not true you're not that famous but you're always welcome back on the podcast kristen awesome anytime i feel remiss that it's taken me this long to to get you on because you're interested in the subject that i'm keenly interested in we go on this stuff all day let me throw out an odd topic yeah that might be do it so um i don't know you know selena jaeger yes i do and she's been doing some very interesting conversations around feisty menopause yeah and there's some really interesting conversations around ageism and aging and whether it be on the menopause or the manopause continuum and the psychosocial aspects of being an aging athlete in a culture that tells us we're supposed to sit down and take pills

and justifying all the time to everybody why we're still moving yeah wow so if you ever want to talk about that that's one of my favorite new topics it's right in our it's right in the sweet spot of the audience too like as you mentioned ultramarathon audience it's a little bit of an older audience you know it's our stereotypical uh coaching audience as well so i think i think it's a good one i had uh i don't know if you're aware of this i had stacy on the stacy on the podcast recently she's awesome and she's right at the heart of that same conversation she's more on the physiology side yep yeah yeah very thrilled with what she's doing okay game on we'll uh cool we'll cue that one up kristen thanks a lot uh do you have where can people find you and find a little bit more about your work so yes i'm at west virginia university so if you just look me up at wvu um i'm under the faculty for the college of physical activity and sports studies that's probably the easiest way to find me um you can also look at www.uscoachexcellence.org which is the national non-profit of which i'm currently the president that is striving to pull coach educators and coach developers together better coaching systems to support the coaches who really want to get better to make better athlete experiences so those are probably the two easiest places awesome i'll have links for those in the show notes you guys go check kristen out she's got a lot of great work out there thanks again thanks that was fun talking to you it's good catching up yeah it was awesome all right folks and there you have it there you go much thanks to kristen for coming on the show today i'm definitely going to have her back i could talk to her all day about this coaching stuff

i hope the athletes that are listening out there today really did take note on some of these concepts of how you can choose the right coach and how you can make your coach athlete relationship work the best for you links to all the references are in the show notes you guys go ahead and check that out appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you listeners and as always we will see you out on the trails so you you you