A Coach's Athletic Goals

As a coach, I frequently ask athletes to share their goals with me. Sometimes, even if they don’t really have goals in the front of their mind, I push them to set goals. Once they’ve made goals, I spend a lot of time thinking about where an athlete is along the path towards the goal and regularly check in with them about it. Are things going well? Is the goal realistic? Could we have done something better in the past year of pursuing a goal?

When i was an athlete, I also set goals, but was not always comfortable sharing them. I didn’t really like getting feedback in relation to my goals, unless it was to congratulate me on achieving them. I understand that it can be challenging for athletes to share their goals. As a coach, athletes ask me to help them with their goals, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still challenging and uncomfortable to put those goals out there.

When I started coaching, my ideas were driven by what was in my mind from my own athletic experience. However, through the past few years my coaching has been driven less by my own athletic experience and more by my own coaching experience with other athletes. That’s not a bad thing and I think it’s made me a better coach, but I also think every now and then I forget about what it’s like to sit in the athlete seat. I still get out and exercise and train in a sense, but it’s really on my terms. If I don’t want to go hard, I don’t. If I don’t want to go easy, I don’t. One of the things I do the least, that I ask athletes to do all the time, is take on the discomfort of sharing my goals. But, I still have goals. I thought, more than doing efforts to feel what my athletes feel, maybe I should take on some of the anxiety of putting my own goals out there. So with that long prelude, I’m going to do it! I wrote them on my fridge actually at the start of the year and now I’m sharing them with anyone reading this blog. Here are my goals as an athlete for 2020. They all pertain to running:

Even as I write this, I’m feeling some real anxiety about putting these goals out there. It seems funny, because they probably don’t matter to anyone but me. It’s a really nice reminder to me that as a coach I ask people to share things with me on a daily basis that are not always easy to share. It’s good to remind myself of that. As for my goals, I definitely care about them and I really pursue them with a lot of effort. I think that is a large part of what makes it scary to put them out there. Whatever goals athletes’ have for 2020 and beyond, I hope they always feel confident in saying them and pursuing them. Thanks for reading!