Nate's COVID Year Reflection
/There’s been so much said about how glad people will be to see 2020 go. A lot of it has been pretty funny, especially when it’s a fun photo combined with comical text. I enjoy that stuff, but I have to say I will look back on 2020 fondly. However, there will also be a lot about 2020 that I will remember with sadness and disappointment in the mark that COVID has left on the world. But in our small world of endurance sport and coaching, I feel I’ve learned a lot and it’s been a year that has also contained a lot of positives. As I reminisce and think about what I’ve learned in coaching, I realize much of it is concepts I thought I already knew, but that 2020 really showed me the importance of. Here are some of my main takeaways and things I want to apply to coaching in any year, COVID or not:
Often the training is good, but the time course is not.
This was a big one for me in 2020. I had a lot of athletes go a long period without racing. For some this was a challenge, and training wavered. For others, training was their rock that gave them something fun to do in the day. For those athletes, the realized product was just steady consistent work over a longer period of time than we would normally go without races. What I saw by the time they started racing was that they had made way more progress than I would have expected. I think a leading factor was the long period of time, without racing, to apply consistent work. For many athletes this period ended up being around five months. With these athletes that did not really want to take a break, I was so afraid of burning them out that I kept the rate of progress very slow and allowed the work to accumulate consistently. On the other side of it, the progress we’d made had been bigger than I expected! It reinforced the idea that big progress takes time, and trying to get to an end result too quickly often has complications. For me, as a coach, the important thing is not to build workouts based on where we want to be at some point, but to build workouts based exactly on where we are at a current moment.
Cycling between phases of base and intensity in repetition is an important aspect of long term progress.
Again, this sounds very simple and I would say that on some level I already knew it. However, the level on which I thought about it prior to 2020 was in the context of year to year. As in, you build a base prior to the start of a season and then focus on intensity and then take a break and go back to base as needed. What I realized in the long break from racing was that I would have athletes rotate between training focused on aerobic base, then training focused on intensity and then back to aerobic base, over a few month period. It felt like over time, athletes were progressively stepping up each time we repeated a phase. So in some ways it was cyclical, but in others it was the opposite of cyclical and much closer to upward trending progress. Going into 2021, this gives me the confidence to introduce an intensity focused phase of training even if we are far away from races because I know we will reap the benefits of that down the road when we come to intensity again in a couple months time as long as we go back to focusing on the base between. In an arbitrary, non-scientific way, I’d say that the amount of intensity that can be done before needing to go back to base focused training is a direct product of the amount of base that has been done prior to that block of intensity. The bigger the base the bigger the block of intensive work an athlete can absorb and respond to. Again - non measured, non scientific.
A sustained period of high level training requires motivation that comes primarily from intrinsic joy in the process of training and improvement, not from extrinsic sources like race results.
Again, one I think I knew but 2020 drove home. I also want to make it abundantly clear that how I’ve written this above makes it sound like a choice, when in my experience it is not. An athlete can understand that really enjoying the process and focusing on their improvement as an individual athlete will allow training without races to be easier, but it doesn’t mean that at the end of the day they’ll feel that in their heart. I’ve had the privilege to work with some amazing athletes that feel the total opposite of this. It’s not that these athletes don’t enjoy training, but it’s that they are racers. They are natural competitors. They know how to win, they’re driven by winning, and they’ve built excellent careers off of that. In the world of sport, it is a massive thing. But in a global pandemic with widespread cancellation of events, and an unknown timeline for returning to those events, these athletes struggled with their training. I think what I really learned from that though, is that as a coach it is really important to understand people’s motivations and work with them not against them. At some point, if an athlete is really struggling because events have been cancelled, telling them for the tenth time that this is a huge opportunity for them to improve themself as an athlete doesn’t help. They can understand, but it doesn’t change the loss and fundamental challenge. I think carrying that into 2021 and beyond post-COVID, still provides a huge asset.
There is a lot I’ve learned in 2020, but soon it will get too long. Also very soon, it will be 2021 and it will be time to apply and continue moving forward. A lot of those balls are already in motion and I couldn’t be more excited. Thanks for reading, and I’m wishing everyone a happy, healthy, and successful 2021!
