The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS
Coach Adam Pulford delivers actionable training advice and answers your questions in short weekly episodes for time-crunched cyclists looking to improve their cycling performance. The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast (formerly The TrainRight Podcast) is brought to you by the team at CTS - the leading endurance coaching company since 2000. Coach Adam pulls from over a decade of coaching experience and the collective knowledge of over 50+ CTS Coaches to help you cut throught the noise of training information and implement proven training strategies that’ll take your performance to the next level.
The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS
New Year, New Perspectives on Achieving Meaningful Goals, with Coach Jason Koop
Overview: In this insightful conversation, Coaches Jason Koop and Adam Pulford pull back the curtain and reveal the ways they navigate the creation, planning, and execution of athlete goals - and their own goals as coaches and professionals. It's a new perspective on traditional narratives about goal setting, one that is sure to be thought-provoking for athletes and coaches alike.
Topics covered in this episode:
- Who's goals are these, anyway?
- Why coaches and athletes are terrible at forecasting
- Why a granular annual plan can be counterproductive
- How a broadly-based annual plan is essential
- How to guide an athlete with two or more A-goals in a season
ASK A QUESTION FOR A FUTURE PODCAST
Guest: Jason Koop
Jason Koop is the Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning, author of "Training Essentials for Ultrarunning, 2nd Ed", creator of the "Research Essentials for Ultrarunning" monthly newsletter, and host of "The Koopcast" podcast. He is one of the most sought-after coaches in ultrarunning, and for many years he was the CTS Coaching Director in charge of coaching education and ongoing mentoring of CTS Coaches across all sports. Find Jason on Instagram, Twitter, or his website: https://jasonkoop.com
Host
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for more than 15 years and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.
Links
- Long Range Planning Link: Book — Coach Jason Koop
- My Go-To on Periodization: Periodization Theory and Methodology of Training
- Article on Goals: Three Types of Goals for Cycling Success
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform
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From the team at CTS. This is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now on to our show. Now onto our show. Happy New Year, time Crunch fans. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford.
Speaker 1:The end of the year is usually a time for reflection, introspection and inspiration for all the new year to come. Many of you listening today have likely curated a list of goals, big races and new habits that you want to achieve or develop in 2025. I know I've been going through this process with some of my athletes already at the end of the season and some yet to come, from Zoom meetings with professional athletes and their team directors or performance managers to the time crunched athlete wanting to take it to the next level, finding the best path forward to optimize training, health and success and ultimately, their performance. That's the elusive pinnacle achievement we're all striving for here. So what does that process look like, how much time should you put into it and how should you go about it? I'm here today with coach Jason Koop to discuss all this and more. Koop, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2:I'm excited to do this every year, Adam. It's a treat to recap how we screwed it up and how we are going to make it better.
Speaker 1:This is true. Well, one of my talking points actually was probably just that, because I remember having a conversation with you where you challenged me on my goals, so we'll talk about that. But yes, coop, let the cat out of the bag. He's been on the podcast before and, for those who have caught those past episodes, you'll know that Coach Jason Coop is our head ultra running coach at CTS. He has his own podcast called the Coop Cast and he's an author. He pumps out a monthly newsletter and overall he is a slay every day sort of guy.
Speaker 2:I know I've always learned a lot when I talk to him. What's that?
Speaker 1:I like that title slay every day, slay every day man. Yeah, I learn a ton from him every time I talk to him. I hope everyone out there will absorb a ton of knowledge from him in our conversation. So, coop, let's go full sponge mode for all things New Year's. Let's do it, let's do it. Okay, straight up to the point. Have you spent some time brooding over all the ups and downs of 2024? And while you've been laying on your hospital bed, has it made it any better or worse?
Speaker 2:Well, I've definitely had more time to I don't know, and so I was thinking about this today. In some ways I've had like more time to process this, but in a lot of ways I've had less, because normally, uh, running is the way that I like work through a lot of things. I guess for the audience, I just to let them know I recently had surgery on my knee and so running has kind of been off the table and will be off the table for the next few months. Um and uh, I just say that I don't know if it's better or worse, but it's just definitely different because I don't have an active mode to kind of process things. I have, I have a passive mode and, as irony would have it, um, uh, I'm way less efficient with my time now that I'm not running, for a whole host, a whole host of reasons, some of them just logistical.
Speaker 2:Just getting around on crutches and stuff like that, you know, being non-weight, bearing on one leg and you know, you know all these, all these other things, just makes it, makes it a little bit more difficult. So just cranking out, you know, work product, um, has not been the norm, not been the normal flow for me. So I don't know, I don't know how to answer your question, other than it's just a different process for me. But I have spent a lot of time processing it because our quote-unquote season wrapped up in September, october, and so, even before I had the surgery and all this other stuff, I've been able to kind of like work through it and also start to work towards the next year with a lot of athletes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I think I mean that time of injury. Um, it changes a lot of things for an athlete or somebody who is athletic, anything from just your day to day to how your brain unravels thoughts and things.
Speaker 2:You know that, that moving meditation, as I've talked about before on the, on the podcast, so when you don't have that, yeah, totally, and I've had a number of athletes that have had to go through long-term injury recovery processes for one reason or another. Either it was a chronic injury or an acute, you know kind of freak accident or whatever. I've obviously had experience kind of on the other side of the table like helping counsel them through that and kind of their return to kind of return to sport, and I've got to put a little bit of those things into practice for myself. So you know it always comes full circle.
Speaker 1:I guess it always does come full circle and just off the cuff here I mean like in your only a few weeks into this but what has been like one strategy that you've used as a coach that you're now trying to apply to yourself. That may be working, or it's like holy shit, that doesn't work for me, like what do you learn about yourself in that?
Speaker 2:process. Yeah, I mean, the athletes that I work with will certainly recognize this phrase because I use it a lot and that's to try not to forecast. Use it a lot and that's to try not to forecast. So you know, this is like one of the first things you know. You know you're going into surgery, you meet with the surgeon, you know before it, for whatever reason, and the biggest question, uh, people have on their minds is when can I get back to x? And most of the time x is like what? Normal life, right, but sometimes there's like full weight bearing, right.
Speaker 2:Sometimes there's another kind of inflection point and, um, the surgeons and the physical therapists and things like that, they really hate to play that game because everybody is a little bit different and they don't want to like timetable things out too much and things like that. And, um, you know, so of course the surgeon, you know, satiated that uh request of mine and even the physical therapy plan gets drawn out for six months, you know, to some capacity, just to, just to, just to satiate that. But but I've kind of taken a little bit of my own advice in that arena and I'm just trying to just not quite play it day by day, but more in the short term chunks. So I know, two weeks post surgery I've got this you know kind of inflection point where I meet with the surgeon how did it go, how do I feel, and things like that. Then at that point in time there'll be another chunk.
Speaker 2:That's three or four weeks. That creates some sort of inflection point. I go from non-weight bearing to 50% weight bearing or whatever. So I'm trying to compartmentalize it into those versus like oh my God, god, when am I gonna run, you know hard rock again? Or you know something like that. Like I'm just trying to be really, really patient with the, with the process, and not try to forecast too much okay, so, uh, injury, injury aside, and we'll put the kind of personal coop to on the shelf.
Speaker 2:Please do, please do because that's not material to this. We'll talk about the coaching and the athletes that I work with. How's that Exactly?
Speaker 1:So we'll talk about the coaching process with reflection and some introspection. For you straight up, hard questions are what did you do really bad this year as a coach?
Speaker 2:The scenario that I came up with is it's very, very, very specific and I was I'm gonna have a hard time kind of like articulating like a bigger picture message here. So maybe adam, you can, you know, help me out on what that means for the kind of the broader from the broader public. But let me kind of set the scenario up first and then I'll get into how I've kind of screwed it up. So there are two marquee races, ultramarathon races in the world that receive a disproportionate amount of everything Spotlight, money, attention, prognostication, you name it. They just receive an enormous amount of it, way, so, way more so than any other races Um, and that's the Western States 100 and the a hundred mile version of UTMB. So UTMB itself Um, and I had a number of athletes this year that attempted to do both of those. So the Western States 100 is third week in July and the and UTMB is is usually the the last week in august or the first. The first weekend in september is when they have been trying to like move it back to um, and they're both hundred mile races. They're both exceedingly difficult. They're kind of different in their like profiles the western states 100 is flat and fast and super hot, and the in utmb is more of a mountainous race where there's required kit and a lot of times it can be cold and you know on and on and on. So two, two, two really different races, both kind of at the pinnacle of the sport, and I had a number of elite athletes that wanted to do both in the same year and my.
Speaker 2:My tendency with athlete goals to maybe preview a little bit of what we're going to talk about later is to be not laissez-faire but realize that they're the athlete's goals, not mine, and they can set those up. And then it's my job to kind of put them in the right context. And so with these two things, I would say that that latter part of putting in the right context is something that I can definitely improve upon. That latter part of putting in the right context is something that I can definitely improve upon, because the way that, after everything was all said and done, I had one athlete that did exceedingly well, won both of those races, set a course record at UTMB it's Katie Shy who kind of unanonymizes it, but I guess I really can't do it at that point. So clearly that double is doable, right, and you can do it at the highest level and you can do it at that void. So clearly that double is is, is is doable, right, and you can do it at the highest level and you can do it exceedingly well. She was. She ran the second fastest time with the Western States 100 and the fastest time ever at UTMB. Great, great results. But then I had a number, a number of other different athletes that did really well at Western States and dropped out at UTMB. So you have these kind of like polarizing results, like quite literally the best of the best and then really good but terrible on the other end of it.
Speaker 2:And the failure point from a coaching perspective is I've tried to like internalize. It is to just recognize, recognize better and articulate better how exceedingly difficult it is to race that hard of a race twice in the same year at the highest level. Those, all of those things combined are exceedingly difficult, not impossible, obviously not impossible, but exceedingly exceedingly difficult. And I probably not, probably, I definitely did not kind of put the like, I guess, the gravity of that exceedingly difficult part kind of in front of, uh, in front in front of those athletes, because it really is everything. It's how hard the races are. It's the proximity of the races to each other. And you know, I would say, more importantly and this is what makes it specific that I'm going to have a hard time kind of broadening it out to a bigger audience is to do it on that stage with the most heated competition that anybody would see all year. That's what makes it exceedingly difficult to kind of do twice and to kind of get right twice. Um, but yeah, it's, it's like I said, I didn't, I obviously didn't totally screw it up because I had one athlete that did exceedingly well, not a couple of other other athletes that that did not, and we're kind of working through what that, what that process actually means.
Speaker 2:But anyway, anyway, that's where it really kind of lies. It's like, can you race at the highest level of competition twice in a year within a reasonable proximity to each other, given those races are kind of dramatically different from one another? And I've come kind of come down to the opinion that at least at the elite level this is one of those crawl before you walk before you run things you've got to demonstrate mastery in one of those races before you want to go and put them both together. And that's not to say that you have to be light years better than everybody else to do well in those competitions, but at least you have to have some proven ground in one or one of the, in one of those two arenas before, kind of like, jumping full full boat, before even thinking about jumping full boat, and then you think about, okay, can you actually pull it together? And so I've kind of come back to that and a lot of the kind of the future planning that I've had with athletes that are still wanting to do the same thing right.
Speaker 2:Some of the athletes that didn't do very well in the second race, and even new athletes that have kind of seen how well it can go, are now interested in trying to pull this off. I want to do exceedingly well in Western States. I want to do exceedingly well in UTMB, and how do I like pull these things together? One of the ways that I'm kind of like reframing that is yeah, you're a good enough athlete to do that, but first off, let's make sure that you can just do one really well before you can do two really well.
Speaker 2:And that's a hard thing to tell a really good athlete that's had a lot of success in other areas is let's just get this one right first, and then we can move on and try to like compound it, compound the difficulty, because it's not just doubly difficult. You know how this is, adam, they don't like add on top of each other. There's like an exponential function on getting both of those, on getting both of those right. So anyway, I mean to kind of like wrap it up. It's. It's like, whenever the problem gets like more complicated that you're trying to solve, you just got to recognize the difficulty that you're adding to it, and it's usually an excess of what you can actually envision on paper.
Speaker 1:Yeah, completely agree. I think to get some relatability to the cycling world, it's kind of like, uh, at the like, at the world class level, it's the Grand Tours, right. So the Giro de France of Vuelta, when you have an athlete tied up, gotcha, who wins a couple that year as well as a world championship, I mean it's amazing the guy's on the next level, you got somebody like Roklic who crashes out and always does terribly in tour de france, but he goes on and wins the world. So it's like, and even before they get there, it's you know all the things. Uh, we've talked on this podcast before and I think carmichael, actually, he talks about, um, when you do your first grand tour, it's just, I mean, hopefully you just don't even like die, hopefully you come back to the sport success by lack of failure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'd say, for the time crunched athletes, it's like your first you know a hundred mile gravel race, or 200 mile gravel race. When I'm framing that up, or Leadville 100, more and more I tell my athletes this is your first time doing it, okay, no expectation, no expectation other than finish. And I even have some people it's like you want to do it this year, let's do it next year, cause we need to train this year, right? So it's, it's framing that up. The first time you do something like some epic, stupid shit, like you're going to go through some wild emotions and wild physical sensations and once you do that you'll become better at it. And then you keep on adding layers to it, and that's really what Coop here is talking about with his athletes. So, coming back to it, what did you do bad about it? And also what did you do really well? Because that's my follow-up question to 2024.
Speaker 2:Well, they're both the same, honestly, because once again, again, I had an athlete that demonstrated, you know, great results. That's very, very difficult to do and you know, you know me, adam I don't like to like take hardly any credit for, uh, athletes results. They they have to kind of like own that. But I do recognize how, how exceedingly difficult it is to perform at the highest level twice a year in super arduous races, when everybody puts a bullseye on somebody's back and they know that they're the best and all this other thing. Those are hard things to actually to actually execute on, not once, just twice. Yeah, because there's there's a whole host of things. You try to do everything right, of course, but then you also have all the random things. You can can get sick, you can, you know, freaking, trip over something in the middle of the trail and a rattlesnake could bite you. I mean, there's, like you know, all this kind of like random stuff that you also have to avoid through serendipity, as well as like the fortune that you can actually create. So, like I said, I mean I think I've got a good blueprint to try to get it right. I would say the error, though, is not appreciating how difficult it is, and then kind of articulating that to the athlete, because once again, the athlete comes to you with the goals right, it's always the athlete's goals. Hey, I want to do this and this, frame those goals up and how realistic they are and how realistic they may or may not be, and then create a pathway forward to training for those goals.
Speaker 2:I'll say the latter part. You know, we're very good technicians, right, that was kind of our background. We know how to design training. We can build training programs up, you know, in our sleep. That part of it kind of goes without saying. It's the framing it up piece that I think that that that I need a little bit more work on in terms of, okay, now this whole thing is set up. This is what this actually means. These are some realistic expectations and you've got to be okay with some of the give and take that naturally happens when you're trying to do two things or three things or however many they are, uh, in in a singular year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I want to get to some framework, but before we do, I've got one question and then one more thing kind of related to to cycling. I I'd say with my athletes master's athletes in particular, that may have, um, like a two sport uh goal for the year, so they want to win a road national championships and they want to win cycle cross national championships, or cycle cross and mountain bike or whatever. So the two disciplines, sometimes three, that is really tough, it's super tough to carry over because the people who are usually winning at the top level are the, the age groupers, the masters athletes that are, I mean, specialized, you know, uh time crunched athletes in that realm. But to be able to span to both, or juniors or elites, I mean, you have to respect that process. And, as you said, there's uh we, even with one sport, there's a ton of variables that could just take away from it. You go to.
Speaker 1:You said there's uh we, even with one sport, there's a ton of variables that could just take away from it. You go to double, you know, exponentially. So so before we talk about that framework, um, when you've had, so you had an athlete win both do it. It's amazing You've had uh athletes do one really well and then one really bad from those two races. So, when you've had those successes as well as those failures, when you're talking to those athletes, what's your process or what's some of your language that you use to pull it back on track Whatever that track was that you set in January of 2024, how do you pull them back to?
Speaker 2:maybe they're up in the clouds and they're like hell, yeah, no one can touch me now, or it's like I might as well just quit this sport and just cry well, the the tendency is is everybody suffers from recency bias, so they look at the last thing that they did very well or very poorly, and then they judge their you know, last 18 months or whatever of effort just based off of that.
Speaker 1:So we always be in cycling, we say you're as good as your last race. That's how people view it, but literally it's.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's a there's a clinical term for it, it's called recency bias, right, and whatever you've done last or remembered last or saw last, that's going to have like the most material impact on you and your psyche and how you feel about the world and stuff like that. So one of my jobs, is one of my roles as a coach, is to broaden that lens out and say, okay, even, and even when they smash it, even when they you know, go and do great things, set prs, finish the ludville trail 100, whatever it is, you still have to broaden it out and say, okay, let's like look at the whole thing, and part of that whole thing is training, and usually I just drill it back to that. I'm like this is how the training went. Let's just look at how many green days you had on training peaks. Sometimes it's just as simple as that. Right, what's the percentage of green days? Is it over 80? Okay, good, like we can, we can kind of look at that. So so that's the first thing is kind of broadening the lens out, good, bad, or I think that that process is kind of really the same.
Speaker 2:And then usually what I do is I'm very surgical about. These things went exceedingly well, these things were just kind of average and these things went really poorly. And if you can hit a normal bell curve distribution across those, great, you kind of call it good because you don't expect everything to go perfectly and you don't expect everything to go poorly. If everything else just goes average. 80% of the stuff just goes average and you compound that over an entire career, not only just a season, you're going to have a really well-developed athlete.
Speaker 2:So I don't think it really gets any more any any kind of work any more complicated than that. Sure, there's nuance and and what is average and what is what is good and all this other stuff. But I like to just broaden the lens out and try to, like, remove the recency bias because you know, know, people always love a winner. That's great, you need to celebrate and everything. But you do need to look back during the year and be just as critical about, uh, when you're winning about that year as when you ended up on a loss. So I, like I said, I don't think the process is any different. It's just broadening the lens out and trying to use as wide an aperture as possible when you're evaluating what actually went on.
Speaker 1:I do something really similar and I did a podcast with coach Jim Miller and we both kind of said the same thing, where it's like when we have a big win, we celebrate for 24 hours, then we get back to work. Right, you get back to work in the process and when you have the big win or the big loss, go to the data, go to the trends and see what got you there. Because if you can't determine what made you win or lose, how are you going to do it again?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so in that way you figure out what works and what didn't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a hundred percent, and you're always looking for ways to improve. Right, and sometimes those are the lead end of the spectrum. It's very rarely more, because sometimes they can do a little bit more, but most of the times they get really good because they can do a lot. One of the big pieces of emphasis that I've had on a lot of my elite athletes over the past few years is who can we bring into your team and build a more cohesive team at the same time? So it's not good enough to have a coach and a massage therapist and somebody to analyze your blood and a massage therapist and a nutritionist and have all those people kind of exist on different islands. It's not a good, it's not good enough to have that. How do you integrate all those people into like a cohesive unit?
Speaker 2:And that's a lot of work. Like it's a lot, a lot, a lot of work. It's way more so than than you would, than anybody would imagine, if you were trying to trying to just uh, trying to trying to figure it out on yourself. It's, it's, yeah, it's just a lot, a lot, a lot, it's, it's, it's way. The cost per athlete, the time cost per athlete, is more, not less, even though you're not doing all the programming. So just to give a quick example, I'm capable enough that I can do a reasonable job strength training and a reasonable job prescribing. You know some, but not all, of the nutrition side of things and I can obviously program the run side. You would think that offloading the strength training and offloading the nutrition stuff to professionals saves me time, which is true from the programming side of it.
Speaker 2:But you lose that time two or three fold trying to coordinate everybody and that's fine, yeah, and communicate in that and that's fine, that that loss of efficiency or whatever is totally fine, because you're not. Efficiency is not your goal. The best result is your goal. So, however inefficient the process is is, however, however inefficient it actually is, you don't intentionally try to make it that way, but you kind of don't care about the time cost. You want it, you want it to be right first and foremost. So anyway, I don't remember my point with that is, but when we're looking at these big, when we're looking at these big picture things and what actually to change?
Speaker 2:Very rarely is it more. A lot of times it's like how do we coordinate this better? How do we set this up? How do you actually like pick and choose the events that are like perfect for you from a timing perspective? How do you build the right teams around you? It kind of becomes those things that you know a lot of people would view it as like marginal, but at the elite level they've done so much training at a certain point that you can do, you can just do go back to the well and do more training, but everybody's going to go do that. So you've got to find some alpha, some edge somewhere that still has efficacy to where the athlete can still improve relative more relative to their competition. Who's all improving at the same time?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I, you know people listening to this podcast, I would say are similar in the way that they've been training. They're into it right. We have some new athletes coming in and they're looking for that better edge and all this kind of thing. But you know, my message there is keep on going and do more up to a point, still do it properly, still do it right. But for, like I said, the Masters athletes that are trying to, you know, double up and win the road, win the cross for the junior, all that you have to do it better. And that refinement, I think, is where I'm at too. It's I'm not drastically changing anything, it's it's refining the process, for my own process, the process of the athlete. And I think that's a really important message for everybody out there, because I'm guessing those who have been training for five, six, seven years in you know they haven't done it Like, if you've been going that long in this sport and you're getting to those big races and having some successes, you're not doing anything drastically wrong. But the refinement process, I think, think, is where you need to tune into. So in that way I want to, I want to share some of my framework of, uh, how I work with an athlete. When we're talking about goals, what it, what it means, like kind of my definitions of sorts. I want to just blow through it a little bit, see if you do the same thing, um, and then we'll go to back to some reflection on that aspect. So when I'm shaping up these goals, what the process looks like is end of the year, just like Coop and I talked about. We look at what we did well, what we did poorly, how we got there, and then as we go forward into the next year, I organize it in two different ways outcome goals and process goals. Into the next year, I organize it in two different ways outcome goals and process goals. Outcome goals is what we want to achieve win, finish, leadville, whatever it is. Process goals is how we get there. So we define the zigging and zagging a little bit more with words of that actual outcome.
Speaker 1:Then we categorize these races as ABC, maybe, lesser races, training races, okay, so that a race is the pinnacle, that's the big one, maybe in, probably. Usually there's one, sometimes there's two B races building up to a C races and training races are just practice races to get there, the, the. The objective of those races is just to refine that process. And then, finally, one thing that I've been doing slightly differently is I for my athletes, where it matters, I encourage them to have a tactical goal, technical goal and an outcome goal at each of the races or events that they're doing. And we can expand on that a little bit more.
Speaker 1:It's a little self-explanatory, but finally I build that all into an annual plan. I don't take a ton of time doing that necessarily, but I lay it up with the timing of those A races, in particular the B races, and then trickle in C's, but C's and training races kind of like come and go. We can decide on those as we move throughout the year. And then I check on it quarterly and I think that is important just to make sure that we're still in that same training process. Or you know, was the athlete injured? Did they get sick? What derailed us in just making sure that we stay on the rails? So high level coop. To you, is that similar or drastically different than what you do?
Speaker 2:It's similar. I don't have the formal, like quarterly or whatever check in process, but because a lot of my elite stuff we're based on, we're doing it on a team basis. We try to do it around the inflection points. So when a season changes, or when you go from high volume to high intensity or low volume to low intensity, whatever, like whatever the structural change in the training is or the material change in the training is. But a lot of times you can't make, you can't make those meetings, like with uh, like laser, like precision, just cause you're trying to coordinate everybody's calendars and you know that that just is what it is. So the check-in process is a little bit different. But but starting from starting from this like 30,000 foot level of what are you actually going to do 365 days from now, from, uh, you know, I'm not, maybe not even from a time perspective right how many hours per week are you training? But what are the general themes of the training? Is it high volume? Is it high intensity? Is it more tactical? When does the nutrition get laid in? Are there specific interventions like a heat training or anything like that? Just bring everybody on the same page as to when those actually would happen.
Speaker 2:I think it is the kind of the most material things because you're giving the athlete a heads up at that point and, honestly, that's the value for, at least for me as a coach and I'm probably speaking from a little bit of a biased perspective because I've been doing it for so long the value proposition for creating a long range plan or an annual training plan for me as a coach is not so that I have my stuff organized. Maybe there's a little bit of value in that, but I've been doing it for so long that I can kind of do the architecture in my head. It's to communicate it to the athlete and to the team, who hasn't been doing it for 25 years, and a lot of times I actually like, in full admission. There's another thing that I screw up is not articulating that long range plan correctly, because I know it all in my head but I don't realize that the athlete doesn't always know it in their head as well. So they're going to be like, hey, when are my long runs?
Speaker 2:And that's the key to me, that I didn't articulate it that well right, when I get training questions been answered in some in kind of some other format. But the process is is. I would say it was similar, maybe not as granular as you, in terms of the outcome goals versus the tactical goals and things like that. Like I, just I tend to keep it process versus outcome and divide it into those categories do the long, do do the long range plan in a really, really, really high level and then just leave it at that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I'll just share. It's like that structure that I went through. Anybody can use it and it's it's out there, existing Um. So I would say I would encourage everybody, if you haven't done an annual plan like, do that, shape it up, rewind, listen to that again. It's not all that complicated but, like Coop said, when you do this for 20 years, like we have it's existing and it's ever going Sometimes I even take a nap, I wake up, I'm like boom there, because it's just always going in the back of your brain.
Speaker 1:However, what I've done poorly in years past has been not articulating that, not building something up. So to your point, coop, yeah, it's, it's more about like communicating it to the athlete rather than I'm organized as a coach because I can do this literally in my sleep and it's good, Right. I think when you walk through the process of it, you do it a lot better, and especially when you articulate it and then you have to if you're working on teams like you. Just that is part of the process of um. You know, forecasting or not forecasting, but um, demonstrating that you are competent, you have a plan and go, otherwise you won't have a job with these elite sometimes here's here's a good anecdote and I don't know why this is the case.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I I, I think this, I think statement, because there's no way to evaluate it. I actually think I do the training architecture better when I don't do a long-range plan and I do just keep it in my head when I do put it on paper. Because, like when I put it on paper, here's we're just to go back to my very first point about surgery recovery. We're really bad at forecasting things like really bad. Everybody wants to forecast like what's the weather going to be like tomorrow? When is my knee going to be better? When am I going to be able to do XYZ type of training activity? When is my FTP going to be 300 watts? Like we're trying to like forecast, like we're trying to like model. We're not that good at it. Let's just like face it. All these are just wild, educated guesses and when you're doing a long-range plan, you're for that's what you're doing you're forecasting something so that something is going, or that you're forecasting that the right type of training is going to be x, six months down the line, eight months down the line, nine months in a 12 months down the line, and things like that, and it doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes you get it close, sometimes it's like your week off here, your week off there, or whatever.
Speaker 2:Um, so sometimes, not all the time I've gone, I've found myself, when I, especially when I create I don't do this anymore when I have created, um, rather detailed, long range plans, that it kind of paints you into a corner, so to speak, because you set the athlete's expectation up that in August of 2025, they're going to be doing this type of training and if that doesn't materialize, for whatever reason, the development doesn't go as you expected, there's a training interruption that you didn't anticipate.
Speaker 2:Blah, blah, blah, blah blah. You tend to want to still aim at that same, at that same goalpost, even though that's not the right goalpost to be aiming at, because you created it nine months ago. So, anyway, I think it's just a good like mainly for the coaches out there, maybe not so much for the athletes that you have to realize that when you're coming at, you really are. When you're coming up with these long range, with this long range framework, this long-term framework, you have to really think about your, your, your capacity and your accuracy on how, how well you can actually forecast that out with so much uncertainty. That can go on.
Speaker 1:For sure. But that's why I think I got away from it for so many years Well, many years, a handful of years, of not building a lot of annual plans for my athletes is because, like it didn't matter. It didn't matter for them, like they're especially masters in amateur athletes. Their life is just so messy. That is like I knew where we were going, I know how to get them there, I know it's going to get a, you know, just a messy bundle of everything. So, like why put the stress on them to communicate that aspect?
Speaker 1:However, I've done an about face a little bit and say, okay, in general, here's where we're going, and I spend, like I said, not a ton of time on this but like, give the framework so you can cast the vision of what this looks like. And I'd say, for masters and amateur athletes, it's still good to do because you need some general guidance as you go. But if you're the type of person that gets overly like down in the weeds of, like I need to be my specialization period at 302 watts in July to win, it's like nah, man, like you missed it.
Speaker 2:I'll give you two. Okay, I'll give you two anecdotes to that. First off, the most popular section of my book and I get all the data on this from the digital version of the book, but then also the inquiries that I get through my website is the one on long-range planning. So athletes are more so than the workouts, more so than the nutrition section, more so than the foot care section, whatever. There's all these different things in the book, the most popular one, the one that really gets the most interest, is the long-range planning piece of it. So it tells you that people are interested, right? I also have this anecdote. This just happened to me recently and this is more a coaching pet peeve of mine that we can go over. Maybe there's a learning lesson in it.
Speaker 2:I did a consult with somebody an athlete that I, that I didn't work with, that just kind of reached out to me and wanted some help on something and his, his, he was working with a coach and all of his training was in training peaks, and so I said, okay, just connect me to training peaks, let me go and look at it and I'll tell you what kind of like what's going on here, and I get into the conversation with the guy and I asked him like what his coach athlete relationship was like, and he said you know my the the coach would quote unquote build two weeks of workouts and then, when I got to every single friday, there would be two more weeks of workouts and then I get to next friday, two more weeks of workouts would come through. And I would always interject these like comments or provide some sort of communication, but there didn't seem to be any like adjustment to the plan that was actually going on. And so I talked with him for a while about this framework, because I wanted to kind of understand why the coach was trying to do what. What the coach was trying to do, and and I finally figured out that the coach was leveraging this feature in training peaks that allows you to build workouts however far in the future that you want to, yeah, and then just reveal them or unhide them as you go along. And so what the coach literally did was built out nine months of training in training peaks. I don't know whether it was a static training plan that got put in there or whether you built up a hand or whatever that's neither here nor there but built out nine or 10 months worth of training and then every two weeks just unhid those two weeks without any reference to what was actually going on.
Speaker 2:And so the sum total of this was is there was this big mismatch between the athlete's actual trajectory and his projected trajectory, that at a certain point, six months down, the whole training thing kind of came into a collision, to where he was like I cannot do this volume of work right. And it all has to do with this poor forecasting that we were talking about earlier. That coach could be the most skilled coach in the world Somebody like you and I. You very rarely get that forecasting element right.
Speaker 2:If you and I were to like sit down and say you know what I think, take all of our athletes, take anything that you can forecast the volume that they can do, how much total training they're going to have at a certain point in time, or whatever we're not going to be within. Maybe there's like 10% of the athletes that we get within 10% of that guess, but for 90% of the athletes we're going to be outside of that margin. And that's actually a pretty big margin when, when you actually think about it, like, if you say, ride 10 or 11 hours. That's a big difference when you compound it, when you compound it over time. So I guess my my point with that is is is just goes back to this Like when you're, when you're doing these like long range planning, get, get the themes right, but try to steer away from like the details, especially if you're trying to put numbers on it, because it's just so, even for professionals, it's just so, so difficult to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, this goes into like my big message of really what inspired, like this podcast which I remember having a conversation with you and, as I'm sitting here and like thinking about it, it might've been I think it was a podcast Cause you came to my house here in DC and do you remember when you asked me you challenged me, you just laid it and do you remember when you asked me, you challenged me, you just laid it what are your goals as a coach?
Speaker 1:And I was like I don't have any goals, Coop, and you just like stop talking, Like you were speechless for a minute which doesn't happen very much, by the way and you're like I don't believe you, I call BS on that, and I was like I don't really Because.
Speaker 1:And so, to frame this up, okay, like I've also heard, like Dean and Tullis and all, when they were talking about their goals as a coach, they're like my goals are my athletes goals? Right, and some and some coaches are, you know, I want to win X, y, z with athlete one, two, three. That never resonated with me because, like I get it my, my goals are my athletes goals, but kind of not, because my job as a coach is to help them reach their goals, and it's a very different angle on things. And so in that way, I would say, over the year I don't know how many, two, three years ago was face-to-face, so not during COVID either. Um, I refined that process. So not during COVID either. I refined that process.
Speaker 1:And so what I tried to frame up is like what are my goals, how do I do it? And I nailed down to like five things and it doesn't really change. These big things don't change. It's the refinement and the process behind it is what does change. And so those five things are do it better this year than last year, learn each year, each week, every day, stay curious, stay fit and coach athletes who inspire me. So in those ways, in those five things, I'd say that that if I do those five things every year and if I refine those, I'm becoming a better coach and if I'm becoming a better coach, my athletes become better athletes.
Speaker 1:And this all laces in nicely, because we didn't even talk about this when you said try not to forecast, because I think the reason I got away from like I don't have any goals Coop is because life is so messy and so crazy. You think someone's just like going to crush everything and then all of a sudden they get a concussion, they crash, they get mono. Like you can't forecast anything in human beings. All you can do is guide them along the way and help them adjust when shit goes sideways. Yeah, and I think, as a coach, like if you learn to do that well, you're a good coach. If you're an athlete that can do that yourself, you're very good at detaching and removing bias and guiding yourself, and kudos to you for that. But I haven't met anybody that does that solely very well, that solely very well. So those are my so Coop five years ago.
Speaker 2:Whatever, I've got five things five goals for you and those are my goals and I wanted to share that with you. On this, I'm glad you went from from zero to five and I'll uh, I'll take, I'll take credit for all those next time we get together for a whiskey, How's that?
Speaker 1:That sounds good. You can put those in your book too and make billions of dollars.
Speaker 2:Golly man I get don't talk to me about it, but I mean, it's the, the part that's really interesting to me, because we we both have had a lot of influence, a lot of really good influences, on our coaching careers and we wouldn't be where we are today without those, without those influences. Those influences aren't always congruent with each other. They, they come into conflict many times, and I think this element that you mentioned that I'm going to articulate slightly differently. But how personal do you take your athletes' goals and the outcomes that actually happen as a byproduct of that? Are they exceedingly personal to you? Where, like as you mentioned earlier, your goals? Are your athletes' goals exceedingly personal to you? Where, like as you mentioned earlier, your goals are your athletes goals, or are they the athletes goals kind of in and to themselves, and you're kind of the and you're the conduit to it, and there's a myriad of things and there's a myriad of things in between. I don't profess to know like, what, the like, what the right answer is. However, I do think that it's important from an athlete's perspective that they own them. So so it can't be directed from the coach, it has to be directed from the athlete. So, in this whole goal setting process.
Speaker 2:A lot of people kind of get it twisted to where the coaches come into the table saying, oh my God, you're a great time trialist. Or oh my God, you'd be great at this race. Or oh my God, you'd be great at that race, or whatever. And I know, and I know a lot of coaches that do this, that have a much more we'll just say proactive approach with that goal setting process. I I don't take that. I take much more of a react, reactionary, uh, uh more, much more of a reactionary stance with it, where I take a step back, I let the athlete do 98% of the work and then I dress it up with 2%, and then, of course, we'll do into architecture and things like that later down the road and the the.
Speaker 2:In my opinion, the advantage to that is is the investment piece of it. It's really coming from them, and so what you're challenging them on is to make their goals meaningful to them and to own up to the process of achieving those things. And when it comes almost wholly or 98% or 90% or whatever from them, that aspect is that is is, is that much more powerful. Now, I think that that's different than being personally kind of attached to the outcomes and things like that, like you can have. You can have the personal attachment without having being the director of where that goal setting piece of it is, and I very realistically have that.
Speaker 2:I mean, I get super emotional on both sides of the coin.
Speaker 2:When I have athletes do exceedingly well, I get really emotional about that, and when I have athletes that do really poorly, I get exceedingly emotional about that kind of on the other side.
Speaker 2:But that just comes from like caring about the athlete, not necessarily being like wholeheartedly invested in that that's not the right way to put it. Not being wholeheartedly invested in the goal setting process right, I'm obviously wholeheartedly invested in the athlete, but it's their goals at the end of the day. And there are a lot of times where athletes come up with goals where I'm just like, okay, if that's meaningful to you, great, let's go for it. And I have to shut that voice down a little bit to make sure that the athlete owns it. And I've learned that over the course of time that when you do that, when you kind of depersonalize the front end of it and then hyper-personalize the end part of it and then the process to get there, at least I operate better as a coach. I feel more invested in an athlete feels more invested because they've kind of initially created whatever they're aiming at Yep, that's exactly how I do it.
Speaker 1:And when it, when it comes to some of these conversations of what are your goals for next year, they say well, what do you, what do you think I should do? I'm like I can't tell you anything. Like I, like I really this is a two way street. Like you have to drive that ship and then I'll drive the rest. But because, if that I don't know what the clinical term, psychological term you tell me, cooper, like that internal motivation of, if that like quantum energy, of whatever drives us to run for 30 hours or, you know, ride for 30 hours or train a thousand hours a year, 500 hours a year, in order to achieve X, y, z, no idea. But but if that quantum energy is not internally stoked, they ain't going to do anything. So the the beautiful training program that you build or the weird training program that the other person builds and unhides every two weeks like it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, here's a different spin that I'll put on that I think people will resonate with. Um. A lot of people will ask a lot of people will start their goal setting process with what am I going to be good at right? What do you think I'm good at? In an ultra marathon world, it's, it's by distance and terrain. Am I good at 50ks? Am I good at mountainous stuff? Am I good at flat stuff like, and?
Speaker 2:And they think that they should pick races that they're good at, and that's not necessarily true. Maybe you can say at the elite end of the spectrum, if you want to beat the top 1% of people, you've got to put yourself in the environment where you can accentuate your strengths and at least your weaknesses aren't accentuated Right. So if you're terrible at heat management and you're an elite athlete, the Western States 100 would be a poor choice for an apex race, unless you got much better at that. Now I tend to turn that on its head and say well, listen, don't like for the average master's athlete out there, your strengths and weaknesses are really not that big and that far apart. Let's just be honest. Like you're not winning big races and things like that, like the best athletes have pretty big strengths and weaknesses because they're really good at those things. So if you just take a normal endurance athlete, somebody who wins a tour de France or whatever they have a strength within their aerobic capacity you put them in the weight room against the power lifter, that's going to be their weakness, right? Normal people there that discrepancy isn't so big because the peak isn't so far away from the, from the average or from the median or whatever. So I don't think that's a really good way to orient it.
Speaker 2:I think a better way to orient it is what is meaningful to you, like just forecast out even though we're bad at forecasting forecast out a year and you accomplished X what would really be meaningful to you. And sometimes that's not logistically possible you have to qualify for a race or you need three years of development, not one year of development or whatever. But using that piece of it like what is really meaningful to you as the basis of the conversation, not necessarily what you're good at. I think that's a good orientation point for any athlete, whether they're an elite athlete or a master's athlete or an everyday athlete or whatever, because it kind of gets back to the core of why they're training so much Like hey, I want to finish X, y, z in this race. That would be super meaningful to me. And a lot of times what they'll do is it'll be like but I'm not good at this Right, which there's some key to that race. Or but I'm not a good climber, but I'm not good on technical trainer, but whatever's like, okay, we can work on that. That's what training's for Right.
Speaker 2:And now that you've identified this thing that's super meaningful to you, let's a give it enough time to bake. You know, just like any good recipe, right? Any good thing that you're making, you got to have enough time to do it. Let's give you enough time to do it. And then to my earlier point of what I was screwing up is like, let's put the context around it correctly in terms of what is the difficulty, how far are you away from achieving that goal, and things like that. But I always start there. I always start with what's meaningful. Let's try to work flush through that first and then bring either that into reality or some sort of like next best, or some deviation from that into reality. I've always found that to be a really helpful framework when trying to think about these things and when coaches get that question, what should I do next? Redirect it back on the athlete in that similar fashion.
Speaker 1:Yep, yeah, and that's kind of my. Third point of my opening is the inspiration. It's that time of year to I have some athletes that resonates with them. What inspires you? What's your dream? Right, and when we roll off a big season, we take a break and I say, yeah, we were just going to go based mode and we don't need to worry about goals or anything right now. But when you're riding your bike, when you're out there running through the world, like, spend time dreaming of what you want the next year to be. You should let your mind go wild, right, and then we'll figure out the details later. Okay, but spending some time and like thinking of, like, what is meaningful to you, I think that is that's probably the best advice that we've talked about.
Speaker 2:Endurance. Events are hard right, they're hard to do, they're hard to train for, and I always say that life's too short to chase around things that are not meaningful to you. No-transcript had. This with athletes is an athlete has an exceptional result and they don't feel fulfilled because that result wasn't meaningful to them, because they didn't set it up from the get-go. They either did it because their buddies were doing it or they felt peer pressure for it or whatever, and that's just a big of a waste of time. Is anything else right? Because you have this like emotional hole that you now have to figure out what to do with when you've deployed so much of your like, time and effort against it? Um, that that that's hard, even when you do win. It's even worse when you don't win and the outcomes and the outcomes not good. But yeah, chase things around that are that are that are meaningful to you. You're not always going to get your way, it's not always perfect, but start with that and I think that that, and then, by using that as kind of like the basis to go from, you're always going to set yourself up better for success.
Speaker 2:No-transcript for it at all. It's just a reformatted version of annual planning or long-range planning that, like a lot, a lot of people use. It's not proprietary to me, anything like that. That's why it's freely available to the public and I take no credit. But go there. I mean, anybody can use it. A cyclist can use it, a runner can use it, a triathlete can use it and I guarantee you've been in the space for a long enough period of time. You've seen that format somewhere.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and it doesn't. And that's my point. It doesn't have to be fancy, I wanted an example for everybody. If, if, again, if you do like getting organized, I wanted to drop that in there and I'll. I'll actually get the link, we'll put it on our show notes so you can go into Apple podcasts or wherever you get the podcast easily accessible there. But that'll, that'll give you the framework to start taking the wild dreams and then point it into some sort of action.
Speaker 1:But if anything, it's just like spend some time on it. As coaches, we don't spend a ton of time on it because we've done it so much. But even as an athlete, if you've never done it before, spend a little time now because it'll help you carry that meaningful quantum energy down the road. When you question like, why the hell am I doing this, why am I doing these intervals? Why am I out here on the 10-hour run? It'll help bring some meaning to it all. It'll help you answer that why A hundred percent? So, coop, anything else you want to add to the New Year, New Me Time Crunch Cyclist podcast.
Speaker 2:I know, in a lot of cases it looks like, you know, like we all these like results and we've been doing this forever and blah, blah blah. But just to like your point earlier of what your five goals are, we still stay curious, we still try to get better, we still try to stay fit. You know, all those things that we're kind of passing on to our athletes, we, we do take it as a, as a craft, so that's a lifelong thing, you know. You know, even beyond the 25 years that I've been coaching, almost 25 years that I've been coaching, I think those are good, uh, good lessons for everybody in any endeavor.
Speaker 1:There we go. Final word Jason Coop. Thank you, coop, for uh joining us today and uh pulling up your the day after Christmas is when we're recorded. So, uh, I hope you had a Merry Christmas and Santa brought all those hiking poles and pure unadulterated gels your way.
Speaker 2:That's right, I think I was on the nice list this year, so I had a pretty good Christmas for sure.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, thanks again, coop. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you. Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainrightcom backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in-depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast. That'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.
