Why Coach Education Matters with Rick Prince CEO UESCA | Koopcast Episode 90

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 with a little bit more of a rasp in his voice coach Jason Koop i just got back from a run this morning and the air quality index was on the borderline of what i would normally go run at about 100 or 120 here in colorado springs colorado and the consequence for that is my voice is just really hoarse and it comes through during this intro and also during the podcast itself but the show must go on on the podcast today i have none other than rick prince who is the ceo and the founder of usco which stands for the united endurance sports coaching academy rick and i got to know each other as we developed a coaching certification for ultra marathon coaches something that i never in my wildest dreams ever would thought would actually be a thing a certification specifically for ultra marathon coaches but usco also offers coaching certifications for triathlon coaches and running coaches and will soon be offering one for cycling coaches as well rick and i have a business to business relationship he approached me about creating the certificate this coaching certification i wrote most of the content for it so in an effort of full disclosure any of the sales emanating from that sort of that coaching certification i do receive a royalty from but i wanted

to bring rick on the podcast today to help shed some light on how athletes can navigate finding the right coach i've had a few podcasts on this particular subject and this podcast is right in that same vein so if you're an athlete that is looking for a coach listen up you'll get some pointers on how to find the right coach for you in addition to that we go over why coaching education is so important for the landscape the landscape of coaches and also for the end users which are the athletes is something that i'm very passionate about as we know coaching is an unregulated industry you're going to hang a shingle up on the side of your house and you can call yourself a coach and because of that there are very good coaches out there that do a great job with their athletes but there are also some really bad coaches out there and those bad coaches have create bad experiences for their athletes and also it's also bad for the industry as a whole which we talk about in the podcast as well i've always appreciated rick's entrepreneurial spirit there's always things coming down the line from him and what he's dreaming up of and how to make coaches and athletes better and that definitely shines throughout the course of this podcast i hope everybody out there appreciates it that's what i wanted to say when without any further ado we're going to get right into it here's my conversation with rick prince from ueska i figured out the perfect way to introduce this rick hold on one second i gotta grab something from my

bookshelf you'll get a kick out of this hold on one second okay this is going to be a failure of audio so for the people that are that are listening to the podcast version and not watching the youtube version i have this usa track and field national coaching education program binder how old do you think this is rick take a guess oh uh 20 years old yeah you're pretty close you're pretty i think it's actually older than that because i i took this when i was 18 years old wow and i still have the notes from inside i love it yeah i love it it's all track and field stuff though it's like how to set up relay how to do this how to do that and the other and um the reason i wanted to kind of set it up like this is is i've been coaching for a really long time and when i first got into coaching and i and i wanted to like explore it professionally there were very few avenues out there to actually do it there were very there were very few educational opportunities and those educational opportunities were limited to this usa track and field certification that's probably 23 or 24 years old um any other certifications with the national governing bodies like usa triathlon or usa cycling and maybe a small handful of conferences like you just couldn't figure out like how to be kind of how to how to be a coach essentially and so i became a almost like a collector of sorts of all of these different certifications i mean you

name it i went to it cscs nsca acsm usa track and field usa cycling usa triathlon at one point or another i had i had them all i might have had them all concurrently actually at one point in my career yeah exactly exactly and at a certain point they kind of like the novelty of them kind of wore off because a combination of the my personal trajectory and coaching and then also the just the way that they were set up i guess is more is is is a better way to put it and that's with all due respect to the ngbs and the in these in these other organizations that are out there they do a fine job but it doesn't it does kind of become limiting and and i would say particularly so on the national governing body side because they're trying to serve a lot of masters right they're trying to serve the athletes they're trying to serve the coaches they're part of the olympic movement and when they're trying to also educate coaches it's just it just becomes really kind of really jumbled and so when you and i started working together professionally that was the background right of this of this huge like this long background of me kind of falling in love with collecting all these certifications and then falling out of love with the collecting all these certifications and the reason i bring that that that up is that says a lot about my involvement with uska because i'm i'm the first one to admit not only for

myself but also for the coaches that i have the privilege of working with we're pretty choosy on like who we how we actually go about educating them whether it's through a national governing body or whether it's through this certification that certification whatever could because we realize it's so kind of it's so limiting and so that's my background with with certifications and i know you kind of came into it very similarly when when we've had talks about it like tell us how uska initially started like what prompted you to say you know what this is what this is what i'm gonna do for a living this is how i'm gonna this is this is my next move in my professional career yeah that's a great question so uh you know my primary background is was was in the fitness industry i was a personal trainer then i kind of worked my way up into fitness management um i was working in new york city pretty much my entire professional career and you know gyms at least in new york are largely you know as far as the trainers they're mostly bodybuilders you know they're like you know big jack guys where i was the one usually the lone skinny guy endurance you know did bike racing and running and all that kind of stuff so as a result i always got the you know all the questions and all the people that came into the gym that wanted to do a 5k triathlon you know a century on their bike i was always the point person and you know the questions i would get and the amount of questions i would get was just staggering um and i realized that you know there really wasn't um to your point you know a lot of great resources out there um and you know and also

similar to the coaching industry the fitness industry is completely unregular you know there's no it's very certification driven but unlike you know lawyer doctor electrician you know there's no license uh or you know a thing that everyone has to take so uh you know the broad spectrum as far as what you get from from personal trainers when they're talking to either you know just regular fitness clientele or endurance athletes is all over the place so that was sort of the catalyst my thought was well wait you know if all these people are coming to me with these questions um you know there's there's got to be something out there for this and i think i could serve that niche and i did look into the ngbs um i was a usa cycling coach and and it was fine but again i kind of felt like i could do better and i wanted to uh to raise the standard of the education out there of coaches and so on and so forth so that was really it you know again because like personal training you know you have amazing trainers and you have some not so amazing trainers um and so again i just kind of want to raise the benchmark for for coaching as a whole based off my experience as a coach as well as in the fitness industry what do you think it's gonna take to consolidate it all because i have the same i mean i kind of have the same gripe that you do in the coaching world right that you just mentioned that there's no anybody can hang a shingle right anybody can go out and hang a shingle and say i'm a coach and the what that does is that creates a huge range of professionalism of education levels of

even service levels and things like that and not that everything has to be like totally cookie cutter but i do think that some level of not standardization but some but some level some bar to jump over some you know very low rudimentary type of bar to jump over is good for the entire industry because what happens is is people don't know how to navigate they say they want to coach and i see this all the time they say they want to coach they don't know how to navigate the whole process and what ends up happening as a byproduct of that is just chance right it's just by luck if they end up having a great coach and a great experience and that is good for the coaching industry which is what i'm in right they tell their friends hey i had this coach it was good for me blah blah but there's also a chance that they have somebody who's underqualified somebody who's not doing it for the right reasons somebody who doesn't have their business set up correctly somebody who's not who's undereducated and on and on and that athlete has a poor experience and spreads that word as well and usually with a 10x type of megaphone right because we know that about customer service is people are more likely to share a poor experience versus a versus a good one and that's bad for the coaching industry and that's what infuriates me when i see that and why when i hear athletes have that type of experience and so once again there are all these different types of types of players right that are that are trying to raise the bar and you ask is one of them ngbs are one of them there are other kind of private

entities even training peaks right which is predominantly a coaching platform they have an arm which is trying to educate uh educate coaches like what is it going to take or is it is it even possible to to to have that kind of like lower bar so that everybody has a better experience yeah that's a great question too and you know it is always fascinating because what we do as coaches as personal trainers you know you're you're affecting people's body you're messing with people's body you're talking to the lord of god if you tell them to go out and run 500 miles they're going to go out and run 500 miles or if you're going to do 9,800 repeats they're going to do it um you know i had a physical therapist friend of mine who said you know personal trainers were god's gift to physical therapists because so many of them ended up over there so the fact that you know other other medical profession or medical professionals tries to say you know that also mess with the body you don't have to be certified i find it profoundly shocking that there is not a license or something that personal trainers coaches have to get um it would probably put me out of business but honestly i'd be fine with that i feel like there needs to be some type of standardization you know again i hate to keep referring back to it but in the fitness world i believe there are a few certifications that have kind of come together almost like a conglomerate you know they're still separate entities but they kind of work together to say hey you know we're in this together we have the same voice we're in it for the same reason um there's a discussion of being accredited um you know ncca is one of the big ones um i we've been looking at that closely you know we haven't found one that really kind of suits what we're going for there's a lot of different uh bodies out there but i guess to answer your question i i

don't i don't know if it's possible um but but it definitely is a problem and i will also say i think one of the things and i'm sure jason you see this as well is um also just educating the consumer on what to look for you know i think one of the biggest things is you know well okay jason you ran a four minute marathon therefore you must be a great coach or you've done western states you've done this many and uh you know so i think so much of what people look for in coaches is how good of an athlete they were or how many races you know how many big races they've done and they might be a great coach but they also might not you know i always kind of associate that to that great preferred you know to a professor you might have had in college who was just lights out brilliant you know he might be able to program a rocket to go to mars but he couldn't you know teach his way out of a paper bag so there's not necessarily a correlation so i think educating the consumer also on what to look for in a coach and how to ask the right questions i think is equally important and what what is that because that's the million dollar question that you know that i think that we can arm athletes with and i've had a few podcasts on this same thing and i'll link them up in the in the show notes for people that are interested but from your perspective rick because you you've got a unique perspective on this which i truly appreciate you see coaches from a variety of different backgrounds all come up through your education platform and then there's follow-on right you've got this really great facebook group where people are or i would say they're very interactive with each other you have people from uesca that kind of help mentor you know these coaches uh kind of along the journey

but if you had an athlete come to you and besides being uesca certified if you had an athlete come to you and say hey what do i look for like what do i look for in a coach we've already kind of said like what not to look for like being an elite athlete doesn't automatically qualify you as a good coach and that that's a great example that that gets used a lot but what should athletes actually be looking for i think there's a lot of things i think first and foremost i would look for them to to be up to date with the most recent you know research the most recent information and be really curious because i think you know yes we certify coaches but you know at the end of the day once you become certified it's kind of on you to stay up up to date on everything and things change i think that alone speaks volumes because if they if the coach isn't up to date or if they're you know they say oh well you know i was certified x y years ago and they just kind of hang their hat on their own race results and what they do personally versus you know what what the data says i think that's a big red flag i think it also just shows professionalism so i would say that's probably one of the biggest things and i think that's just uh it just shows how seriously they take it um as far as being a professional whether or not it's their side gig you know i always say look you know when you're at your day job you know you should be 100 of your day job but once you flip that switch and you're working with athletes you have to be 100 for that athlete and and stay up to date on everything um so i would say that's that's probably one of the biggest things is just you know being curious you know keeping up with with whatever is is keeping your ear to to the industry that you're

in whether it be cycling running triathlon so on and so forth here's the thing with that is when i ask coaches that the really good ones if they the really good ones explain a framework to me like if i ask them okay how do you how do you get you you yourself as a coach better if they can describe the framework and it doesn't have to be the same every tuesday i go and i look up these journals or every you know xyz i network with these professionals if there's some architecture or some framework to that i'm staying up on the latest research i'm developing myself as a professional it's there's almost like a chasm between the coaches that can describe that process of of continuing to get themselves better versus the coaches that like bumble through that that answer that don't really know say oh well you know i coach a lot or you know they just they just don't have a framework right so their answer is really is really fumbly i think that i personally like i've always found that as the telltale sign between the coaches that take it professionally that it's their it's not their side gig right it's their profession it's what they do for a living it's they treat it very seriously versus the ones that are like man i could probably make an extra 500 bucks a month doing this like just because i can bring in you know 10 clients or whatever it is that i've always found that that's the biggest difference is they can they can describe that framework to which you were just talking to yeah yeah and i would also add that you know that's on sort of the knowledge side from the

business side um being an effective communicator is so critical um you know my wife was worked as a writing coach when we lived in new york city and she got so many calls from people who said hey i've reached out to you know these people these people and i just don't hear back or you know i'll email them a question i never hear back and so you know also once you're in that coaching relationship you know you can also tell even if this person is you know lights out smart and stays up on the most recent research if they don't return phone calls or you're you know they take way too many clients and you're just you know instead of being you know Jason Koop you're you know client number 5,948 and they just don't really care again that's a problem so i think there's also that component as well yeah our athlete services manager dominic who i think you've you've met before he will he'll always say that we have anytime there's a problem it's a communication problem it's never an efficacy problem or a prescription problem or anything like that it's always a communication problem yeah so that that speaks to that that that really well so that's really poignant because that's a piece within all of the different usca certifications let's kind of like take a step back right and not to we're not going to plug you ask it too much or i'm not going to let you plug it too much even though we're both involved in it but you've set up each of the i would say the disciplines am i describing that correctly like each of the certification disciplines with kind of the same structure where they've got the same kind of things that each of the certifications touch why don't you like run the audience through what those

are and then why you chose to like lay it out like that because i think that's something really unique as opposed to the ngb certifications that are just more like it's almost like more tactical heavy like here's how you do these things right right um yeah so we kind of approached it like you would a four-year degree in college honestly you know um you know you have this as well obviously so you know before you can learn about you know anything applied uh you have to learn the fundamentals you know my first year in college i took anatomy and physiology one and anatomy physiology two biology chemistry physics all that kind of stuff and then from there you're getting the biomechanics of running and all that kind of stuff so that's kind of how we set it up with the the thought process was you can't apply something that you don't know so we wanted to teach what the body is how the body works and once you have that foundation of knowledge not to say you're you're going to go out there and be performing brain surgery but you have a pretty good idea of how how everything works as it pertains to being a coach then you can take that information and apply it and then you have a better understanding of what to do when you're working with athletes so you know skeletal system muscular system energy systems um you know how the body moves and mechanics of it whatever systems and from there then you get into the sports specific stuff how to do programming nutrition you know mental training comes into play but it all kind of falls back to your point on those first few foundation modules um on on what the body is and you know we don't have a tiered based system uh you know meaning we don't have a level one certification level two level three um i've always

found that kind of odd because you never know what's going to come walking through your door as far as who wants to work with you so our thought process is just make a really robust comprehensive certification um that includes all this information while it might seem overwhelming um hopefully you know again doing it structured that way it enables people to learn what we feel is the proper way to learn and what i the thing that i've appreciated the most about that after after diving into the content is that foundational approach because it's especially in today's social media world it's really easy to get the prescription or the answer right it's really easy to copy paste name whoever's coaching philosophy i mean even i've written a book and i've seen people copy paste my you know philosophy into you if they're self-coached or i've even seen other coaches just kind of do it but it's really easy for coaches just to look at other coaches and copy paste what they're doing and have no idea what the underlying physiology what the underlying biomechanics or even like you start with the skeletal system right that's like unit two unit two can i remember that correctly yeah all right i remember that correctly yeah so or module two sorry um but that fundamentals first approach like lays the whole foundation and then everything kind of builds on top of that but another thing that you've like baked into the into this entire certification is like more of the business side of it right like explain to the listeners like why you chose to do that because that's a sticky thing

to get into right a lot of times as coaches we're worried about oh is this 10 minute interval right or do i want a 12 minute interval right we get really like nuanced on this like prescription piece but you took a step back and said okay we need like coaches need to be if somebody wants to be a coach you need to be educated on how to set their business up like why did you choose to do that specifically yeah well you know i got a lot of feedback i should say you know when i was developing i got a lot of feedback from from people knowing the audience always going to be serving that hopefully these people would take this and while some people do it for their own knowledge most people are going to be wanting to go out there and hang out there and shingle um you know it's kind of like you hear that all the time with lawyers and doctors you know they go to all the school and become a lawyer and a doctor and then they're out there and they're like oh my god i have no idea how to set up my business from the business side so so while it wasn't necessarily the the main focus clearly about certification um i did feel it was important uh to have that aspect of it because without that you know it's like well great i'm on with all this information i've absolutely no nothing to do with it now i have no idea what to do um and and while we certainly could have gone a lot deeper i mean you know you could probably have another certification just on how to start a business um it hopefully lays a groundwork for you know for these coaches to be able to understand you know some of the legal aspects of setting up a business some of the things to look out for how to market so on and so forth so again it wasn't a massive part of it but i did feel it was important to to just bring to light where do you think if you're like criticizing or like analyzing the current suite of stuff right now where do you think the gaps are um probably in the continuing education field i think is probably one of the biggest biggest

gaps you know what we what we were just sort of talking about you know you get certified um you've learned a lot of stuff but you know things change on a minute-to-minute basis and and then what do you do you know and unfortunately within our industry a lot of the sort of continuing education in my opinion is very much of a money grab you know it's okay we've got your initial money but how can we make more so get these specializations um which which oftentimes are just geared towards making more money um so again it kind of comes back to being a student of the sport it means to what you were talking about talking to the smartest people reading books really looking to see again what's new out there but so much of it the onus falls back on the coach it's not going to present itself out there to them um you know you can certainly take other courses nutrition that take other certifications sort of the formal approach but the informal approach i would say is just again being a student of the sport and really uh really doing due diligence on your own and you know going on the pubmed and some of these peer-reviewed journal sites and just you know googling stuff see what comes up but but not going on blogs unless it's a well-respected blog not you know just just you know googling stuff and just going with the first thing that pops up because unfortunately that's what we see and you see i'm sure all the time and trying to get the real source of the information i think that's that's one of the biggest gaps is once people get a certification or they've got a few clients i mean the dog like great i'm done i'm the world's best coach you know my my client pr'd for boston that's it i know what

i'm doing and unfortunately that's just not the case well it because of in covet actually highlighted this a lot it becomes a very insulated profession right where you can just hang a shingle and you can just have your athletes and you can have a maybe your small circle is just you right or maybe it's you and your spouse that like you know bounce ideas off of each other or something like that like that professional network if you don't if you don't deliberately take the time to develop a professional network to get mentorship to answer questions for the answers that you have it becomes one of those things where okay how am i going to solve this problem okay i'm going to google it and it's going to be the first thing on the on the results or i'm going to find a podcast or something like that and you don't know where those people are coming from so that professional development i've always found is like that that to me is where the biggest gap is right it's it's the continuing education is like one piece of the professional development piece right and the professional development piece has mentorship continuing education and on and on and on and on um we we kind of we touched on this a little bit earlier right and sometimes i i get i get a little bit insulated because i am a coach and i've been a coach for so long but why does this matter to athletes right like why ultimately does high quality coaching high quality coaches it's really easily self-serving to me to say yeah it matters because i'm in the industry and i want the industry to be professional and robust and people have a good experience because that's forward feeding and

i like good competition right i like having other good coaches in there because i can go out and i can network with them and they provide a good experience to athletes but just like good coaching is good for coaching bad coaching is bad for coaching as a business as a profession and things like that but like why like why does it matter to the athlete side of it because you could take the approach of just because if you're getting information from somebody that knows just a little bit more than you you're still going to be a little bit better right but why does hat why does having like a robust and well-educated coach at the end of the day why does that ultimately matter yeah it matters i think and you're right i mean if someone who's a little bit more than you then you're more like more than likely going to see results up to a certain point you're going to be you know be able to be coached and see results up until the threshold of what that person knows um in my opinion the goal is uh you know not that you expect every athlete that you have to be going to the olympics or you know qualify for western states or anything like that but you need to be that coach that has that level of knowledge that can do that you know and while i understand that some people want to work focus on beginners some people more on elite so on and so forth that doesn't mean that you shouldn't come well equipped with you know with this broad base of knowledge so i feel like it does a disservice to your point to the coaching industry but also is to the athletes that you serve if you don't you know really have a broad base of knowledge to be able to keep growing with that athlete you know um and i would say that

from a professional level scope of practice if you only know x amount then you need to be able to say look i here's what i know um i can take you up to this point but after that you know you got to go probably somewhere else or work or somewhere else i doubt that very often happens um you know but but that would be the professional thing to do and that's why it's important to have all this uh you know information and keep pushing the boundaries as far as what you know you know individually as a coach so you've got these four right four different certifications running cycling triathlon ultra running yeah cycling is in development now cycling is in development i'm kind of teasing this is going to come out before it's like fully launched but you can expect it soon right i'm putting you on the hook for this right now i knew it's in development i can't remember when it was going to be released but you get this for it started with running right and then triathlon or is that my track went to running went to ultra running and almost cycling okay so thanks for correcting me on the on the on the order there um why is ultra running different than running so ultra running you know i bought your book um and i started reading it and i'm like oh my god because i'll be 100 honest with you i've never done an ultra running race you just jack up the numbers a little bit and there you go um and i i was reading your book and i'm like oh my god this is this is insane um and and i realized that there were just so many things that are completely completely different

about ultra running and i only that only you know i only you know sort of got that uh you know understood that more after talking to you but but yeah i realized that it's it's not just a long marathon clearly there's a there's a heck of a lot more to it but so i there's a good plug for the book i appreciate that i didn't ask you to do that um and i agree with you that ultra running is a different sport but it'd be really easy just to bolt it on to running you know like it'd be super easy just because you already have the running one built right and you could have just said okay here's the you know ultra here's how you adapt it to the ultra running module or whatever but instead like there are certain pieces of the running that are like common to the ultra running piece but then there are certain pieces that are not and let's back up a little bit we might need to pull up the website let's run through all the modules for the ultra running side of it and which ones have like common elements and which ones are kind of completely new in the in the ultra running side and where i'm going with this is it's not just copy paste stuff right i mean they really are like i i as a coach i've coached cyclists triathletes runners ultra runners you kind of name it i would take all of these individually and yeah i would breeze through three or four of the units on each one but they're kind of like standalone they're not just bolt-on things so let's start with the ultra running piece and just like run through the modules and then just go this one's common with running this one's not just to see like what the unique elements of it are okay okay yeah i don't well

i don't have it up in front of me right now what i can tell you right now you know especially after having lots of conversation and working with you you know certainly those foundation modules are very much the same you know how the body works but you know the nutritional element training the gut you know what's different for running 100 miles 200 miles versus you know 5k 10k marathon the programming i think is one of the biggest differences quite frankly um you know at least as far as how how we teach it from the running versus ultra running um i think that has a profound difference the this the sports psychology what it's like to be out there for for as many hours you're again you just don't have that with anything else and you have to be able to train for that um included with that sort of the mental toughness of just how to get through these these ultra run you know you can kind of you can suffer like a dog through a marathon you know even if it really sucks but that's not necessarily the case with with ultra running you have to be much more strategic obviously so i would say those were sort of the biggest ones for me that i was really can i it was funny because i came into this almost as a student as well you know i was learning from you as i was developing this as we were co-developing this and and those were the ones i was just most blown away with again even though i by that point i had an understanding that okay this isn't just training for a long long marathon or training for a marathon i was just blown away by the differences well and i i split it into into thirds like one third was the same and then two thirds was different so the skeletal system is a skeletal system the muscular system is a muscular system energy systems

or energy systems the benchmarks there's like slightly nuances and things like that but then everything after that which that's about a third of the content right there the other two thirds are all kind of entirely different which is once again i i think i think that that illustrates that if you know the fundamentals you can parlay those into different and different sports you need to do some homework on this is kind of my coaching background i came into coaching as a runner but i initially started working with cyclists and triathletes but because i had strong fundamentals i knew how i knew anatomy and physiology i knew physiology well i knew biomechanics very well i knew energy systems very well and things like that i could parlay that into coaching a cyclist coaching a triathlon and then learn the nuances of triathlon cycling not that it was easy but i started with the fundamentals and i kind of and i was able to take that to take that approach but i've always viewed as one third two thirds in terms of how you've organized things one third is common and then the other two thirds is completely unique to that to that uh to that sport discipline yeah and i would say another thing that was shocking to me as well is the resistance training you know our standpoint is that you know for running resistance training is very important you know heavy resistance training explosive training to increase spring systems you know get that pop when you're running um and that's 100 correct but that's absolutely not 100 correct in regard to ultra running you know as far as so so that you know and again it's sort of that not that it would hinder you per se but it's that sort of

balance you're already putting in this much time from an energy standpoint is that extra resistance training really a benefit or is it a potential liability so so yeah i would agree with you i think so many things that you know within the quote-unquote normal distances of running you know the road racing um that 100 are the right way to go more than likely probably is not the case with ultra running and i think it's a profound difference it's a different proposition did you get a lot of pushback on that by the way you know i haven't talked about this i got a decent amount um i think you know to be 100 transparent i think having your name attached to it like i'm sure if i just said it oh my god that's total bs like oh wait that's okay that's i'll buy that but no we did get some pushback we got a little people like this this is you know and i'm like well you know and i'd say you know my response is well look it is a different value proposition what we're talking about here um you know you people coaches can certainly do whatever they feel like um but we're like look this is this is essentially what what the science is what you know we wanted to go to the best people you know i never wanted to be the smartest person in the room i was always trying to find the you know these smartest people which when it came to all 20 which is why i went to you and i'm like look this is this is what coop says this is what the science says here it is you know do with it as you please but um but yeah we did get a little pushback it was kind of funny it's it's always the most content that and the diet side it's always the most contentious piece i've told the story a couple of times i'll tell you again on this podcast because you'll appreciate it so in in the first edition of the book i made a really egregious error i had this whole strength training piece laid out

it was probably 7 000 words or 10 000 words or something like that nor a whole chapter's length and my publisher came back and they said listen you've got to reduce the length of the book because the price is going to be this and you know there's this many pages and blah blah blah blah blah and you've got to cut some thing you've got to cut some things and so i reduced that chapter to like a 500 word sidebar or something like that it still had the same conclusions you know it was just i just kind of i really i really trivialized it but going from from you know what was eight or nine thousand words down to 500 words you obviously lose kind of the entire background of it and i got hammered for that i just i got absolutely creamed and you know everybody went up in arms and i just kind of i just kind of rolled my eyes so the next edition of the book i have a hole like it's even bigger than i originally intended it to be but uh yeah it but same but it's the same answer right i mean it kind of comes down to the same conclusion that it's a different strength training in particular is a different value proposition ultra running as compared to road running and track running but if you just explain it with more words maybe i don't know we'll see if people get just as pissed off yeah and i think a lot of people you know when they when they look at it uh you know is something good or bad or right or wrong it always comes from their just their own personal perspective not i've coached all these people and you know this is what it is you know so a lot of blowback i've gotten over the years of coaching as well um and even with these certifications as well you know rick you said this isn't right or whatever but i've done it and it works for me you know and that's great i'm

glad for you you should keep doing that but what we're saying is as a whole you know there might not be a lot of substance to it but if it works for you personally keep doing it but you can't extrapolate that to it works for everybody and that's the other problem i think with coaching as a whole um which we kind of hit on before is i think a lot of um you know i don't want to use the word unprofessional but maybe unknowledgeable coaches just take their own personal coaching experience you know i did this xyz to be able to run a five minute mile therefore that will work for everybody and that's one of the main things our certifications also focus on is look everybody's body responds differently to the same training stimuli so i think that's another important thing for just coaches to remember it's not just what works for you it's it's you know understanding how the body works and then you know figuring out on an individual basis yeah so it that kind of there's another flavor of that and that not only this works for me so i'm going to do it for this person but it's just as egregious when somebody says this is what i've done and it's usually the elite athlete this is what i've done for xyz elite athlete so it's also going to work for you same thing like the exact same thing i see that in articles a lot like here's so and so's you know now that molly seidel's a household name i'm sure that you know her workouts are going to get posterized everywhere and everybody's going to do whatever version of it it's and it's just as egregious right it's just because it's worked for her doesn't mean that it's going to work for everybody else out there yeah um okay so so let's take a trip down memory lane you approached me about writing this ultra running

certification and my first initial reaction was one of skepticism i thought that i didn't think that there was a market for it to be honest with you like i know the market really well you know i'm a professional i was a professional endurance coach and then i was a professional running coach and i would call myself now a professional ultra marathon coach i never would have thought that that that transition would actually have happened because the market and ultra running is just so small so you approached me like hey you know i want to do a specific ultra marathon coaching certification which is the the quintessential definition of a niche of a niche right ultra running is a niche and then the coaching within ultra running is a niche of that niche to which i said to you i was like you're going to sell like 10 of these dude like i'm all like whatever we could do the content or whatever but like i i had zero i had zero expectations needless to say not to toot our own horns or whatever but it's been successful like way more successful than i would have ever thought you said the same thing uh same thing to me uh privately what what is driving that like i don't know and i'm not going to sit here and say yeah it's my name or whatever but i never would have guessed that there would be this many people that are interested in ultra marathon coaching specifically that's what that's what is kind of getting me it is very very specific that is ultra running what do you think is driving that is it coaches that want the knowledge is it athletes that want the knowledge is it is it people from other sports that are having their athletes do ultra running that they need some education in it like

what does that mix actually look like yeah that's a that's a good question i think it's a little bit i think it's all the above i think to answer your question um you know we i would say maybe 10 percent of the people that purchase it uh their ultra running certification are doing it just for themselves you know they have no desire to to coach other people they just want to learn how to how to run better themselves they're athletes they're athletes yeah yeah yeah exactly they just want to be able to perform better okay um so i would say maybe another 10 percent or probably you know look i'm mostly a running coach i'm mostly a cycling coach but for whatever reason i have these two or three people that come to me and want me to coach them for this you know 50 mile or 100 miles and i don't know what the hell i'm doing so i i need to figure out what i'm doing i appreciate those coaches the most because it'd be easy for them to just like okay we're just going to increase your volume by 25 percent whatever whatever reasonable percentage but it's i i think it's a good sign right going back to our professionalism the industry for them to raise their hand and say you know what i don't know what i'm doing i'll help you out i don't know what i'm doing but i'm going to figure it out i think that's cool yeah they definitely understand sort of scope of knowledge i think that that that that percentage but i would say the rest are pretty hardcore ultra runners you know and i guess hardcore mean you know they've done some they plan to do a lot more that's that's their thing and i think you know all of us want to feel you know special i don't know i don't know what the right word is but you know i i would see that in cycling a lot you know where you know it's not just you know i'm a i'm a rider i'm a cyclist you know i'm i wear a spin i shave my legs i do all these things so i think

you know a lot of ultra runners you know they just don't feel that incorrectly so that you know the running certification really applied to them they felt like look again it's better than nothing and i learned a lot and and i'm sure it's great but that's not my demographic i want to train ultra runners and i think quite frankly they probably had a better understanding than i did as far as maybe even than you did as far as like um you know how much of a need there was for this certification i think that they said you know look this is enough different and quite enough different that i feel that you know this is something that needs to be out there and i want to take it and i would say the real catalyst for we got all these in our in our coaches group that you just spoke of the facebook coaches group i mean i got bombarded with notes all the time hey rick when are you gonna do ultra running when are you gonna do ultra running i'm an ultra running i'm an ultra running you know so it was clear to me at least within our segment within our little u.s world that there was a certainly a need for it and i i took the gamble that okay if this if this is representative of the population as a whole i think there's something to it we see that play out in the ultra marathon world a lot you know that in the in the next few weeks when this podcast come out comes out it might be two weeks from when this podcast comes out the leadville trail 100 is going to happen and i always use that as a little bit of a barometer for growth because it attracts a lot of new people into the sport because it doesn't have an entry requirement it has gotten a lot of media attention from different angles right over the years and you see people and it has a big field and so you see people in that race that you

don't normally see at other ultras which i lovingly describe as the same group of idiots that just goes to different locations leadville is a little bit different they have like you know they've got the core group of idiots that's that's at leadville but then they have all these other people that are trying to like get into the village you know so to speak the idiot village um but the you're so my point with that is is your anecdote of your current coaching group and just for everybody's kind of clarification those are the people that have taken one of the us certifications saying when are you going to do ultra running i think is a reflection of the client base that they're looking or that they're working with saying i'm going to do something like leadville because it popped up on the radar or i'm going to do my local 50k or something like that they're going to like parlay their endurance experience in running and triathlon and cycling or in running and triathlon i guess would be more appropriate and try to get into this ultra marathon more and the coaches reacting to that saying okay i need to figure out what's going on yeah yeah yeah for sure and i think you know is and maybe you could answer this question better than i but i think everyone is always looking for a new challenge um and what i found is instead of going down in distance and saying going up in speed like okay i'm at you know running a half marathon but i want to try to nail this 5k uh pr everything goes up in distance you know okay 10k half marathon marathon well what now i've already peaked out i've already done five marathons well ultra marathon is is what i got to do then you know and you see that with we see that with triathlon too you know going up to the from the sprint distance all the way up to uh

to the ironman distance so um i think it's sort of a natural evolution of things as far as maybe how people's brains work and and you know you and i spoke of this certainly with covid um when you know the big mass start races weren't happening um you know the ultra the ultras were the first one to come back online because it makes the most sense because you're naturally socially distanced it's easier to you know do that do that kind of thing and and i think it's just easier training wise too you know you're out there in the woods or just south there training you know it's not quite the same as you know showing up your local track or something and doing speed work so so i think there's a lot of things that sort of maybe uh led to that you know that big push with ultra running i'm sure there's a million more reasons but those are the ones that are probably the most um pertinent in my mind it's so interesting yeah i i seeing the whole industry kind of play out after covid has been really interesting because you're right the ultra marathon world has kind of come back a lot more quickly than the marathon world and even the cycling in the in the triathlon world but i think a lot that also forced people as you said back into like into that sport right where we're seeing a lot of like new people come like just come and come into ultra running which is almost exactly as i as i predicted so we've just gone through this like really pivotal i think this covid moment that we're just kind of i keep saying we're seeing the tail of it but i know there's another shoe to drop right like everybody's like bracing right now for something else like material to happen and the world implodes again but let's assume that just doesn't happen what like what's next right i mean you're you're an

entrepreneur i really appreciate like what you've done you've kind of created something out of nothing and you know this space really well what's next and i want you to like position it almost from the athlete's point of view because it's that's that's mainly the listeners right there's a lot of coaches that listen to this but it's going to be predominantly athletes what's going to be next for the athletes to try to navigate with this whole like coach athlete relationship and just trying to like find a coach and stuff like that what's on what's on the horizon what do you want to create that currently isn't out there right now um you know again it's another great question i think because that whole coach um relationship is sometimes hard to even get one of the things that we're going to be doing is creating sort of a coach match program if you will you know where we'll have we already have a database of coaches um but to help facilitate a little bit better um where you know what we want to be a sort of that hub or sort of the conduit for people that are looking for coaches you know they know that all of our coaches have gone through at least our certifications um so they know at least they have that base foundation of knowledge and then from there they can go through and find out about coaches you know about their training philosophy or coaching philosophy you know what sports specifically do they focus in what disciplines is it 5k marathon ultra running um and uh and to just keep building that database start help or start marketing that database so it serves you know that that athlete as best as possible to kind of decrease the barrier you know decrease the hurdles to finding a good coach because at the end of the day that's what we're all about you know we want to create the best

coaches possible but that's only makes sense if people can can then link up with those coaches please make that happen yeah i'm begging you because i've seen people try to like crack that nut i had a colleague of mine that that went on his own little side business and tried to crack it that nut and it was really hard for him and he decided it was too hard training peaks has tried to crack that nut which i think that you you know you're aware of they've had you know various coach matching services and it that's a hard thing for them and they have a big database of coaches but if we go back to my one of my original points good coaching is good for coaching if we can have more good coach athlete experiences that's good for the whole that's good for the athletes obviously it's also good for the the coaching industry getting the coach athlete match right is the linchpin in that proposition it is the linchpin in that proposition and if there is something or somebody figures out a way to be that conduit so that athletes don't have to guess which is what they're currently doing let's get that let's get that straight they're currently kind of guessing they're guessing based off of you know their friend's opinion they read so and so articles they saw this awesome athlete so that kind of resonated with me or whatever but those are all guesses at the end of the day if there's some conduit that would like pair people up just like in the airline industry you want to find a flight you go to kayak or you know what was formerly orbits or what do people use now still use kayak but if there's something like that to like harness both sides of the information who are you and what

you're looking for and match it up that that would solve so many of those that would create way more good experiences than bad experiences way yeah exactly and i think is you know is both you and i both as both an athlete and a coach um you know that's that's really where the rubber hits the road and that's that's the thing that we want the most at uska is to to see coaches and athletes thriving and that's to your point that's really only going to happen with a really well connected not that you need a system but you know because when you see that happen you know between a coach and an athlete that are just sinking perfectly i mean it's magic it really is and uh and the more that we can get the better and that's what it's all about i think it's worth 10 to 20 percent improvement like if people like people ask you like what's the value proposition it's 10 to 20 percent if you get it right with the right athlete and the right coach 10 to 20 percent better than the athlete having a bad coach or the athlete trying to do it themselves yeah i completely agree i completely agree yeah somewhere in that range i'm a math guy so i always try to quantify things like that all right rick that's a brilliant place to leave it man um i'm going to include show notes uh uh on uska and where they can find the ultra running specific certification but where else can they find you i know that you guys are trying to like increase your social media presence and there's a facebook group and things like that where if they want more information right where they where can they go to find out stuff about uska yeah again to your point we're going to be developing more social right now we're coming out on facebook so if you just go to united endurance

sports coaching academy um that's probably the best place right now um and then our website coach endurance sports.com but yeah we're going to be um having a little more uh instagram presence right now we have a site i think we have two posts up so we gotta do a little work there that's that's pretty sad so yeah we gotta get going on that i find it ironic that you fall into the same trap that most really good coaches do is their social media presence sucks i was all excited to put it up and i put up two posts i'm like all right i won just hire a higher gen z or a millennial to do that stuff right come on i don't even know if i can even spell instagram maybe that's part of the problem there you go all right we'll work on that hey but i for me to you man i really appreciate what you brought to the table here it makes coaching better which i i appreciate the most i appreciate the opportunity to work with you and create this content as i as i mentioned to you before it the ultra running certification but also all the other ones are things that i would encourage any coach to take and i don't say that a lot like usually the stuff i'm sending coaches to are really really really specific but these certifications are really well done you did a great job curating them it's got the right breadth and depth of knowledge to all of them and uh like i said i'm just really appreciative of that because it elevates the the field as a whole and that's an awesome thing that you can hang your hat on well i appreciate it thank you so much and again it's it's been great partnering with you and again thank you so much for having me on the kub cast this is it's been great chatting with you

all right thanks rick thanks kub all right trail ultra runners there you have it there you go much thanks to everybody for joining in on the podcast today i'm really thankful that my voice made it all the way through i've just got this outro to cut before i can give it a little bit of a rest thanks for rick for coming on the podcast today i really appreciate his entrepreneurial spirit as well as what ueska does in terms of raising the bar for coaching as a whole i really think that that is good for coaches and that's good for athletes and for all the athletes out there that either have a coach or think about or thinking about becoming a coached athlete i encourage all of you to undertake some of the things that rick and i talked about during the podcast and namely ask your coach or your perspective coach what they do to make themselves better professionally as a coach i think that singular question will go a long long way in the show notes i'll have a conversation to our athlete services manager domina gunto where we go over a lot of these topics as well and as an extra special prize is it a prize extra special something for all the listeners out there if you're interested in the ultra marathon coaching certification from usco which i obviously think is fantastic but that's a completely biased point of view it is really good people you can get a hundred dollars off that coaching certification by using the promo code KoopCast

100 all in lower case if you just go to the usco website that's u-e-s-c-a or you go to www.coachendurance sports.com you can take advantage of that promo code and see what that excellent content is all about it's for athletes and for coaches alike appreciate the heck out of each and every one of the listeners you guys and as always we will see you out on the trails