Part 3 – There are No Secrets in Training

At this point you may be wondering why I don’t describe in detail the things I do differently.  Why not share this knowledge? Why not make a series of social media posts describing each of the differences in detail so that anyone can benefit from this knowledge and so that I can gain more followers and more potential clients?  If you read Part 2, you already know that the answer to the second question is that I’m not trying to maximize the number of clients that I serve, and I’m not interested in taking time away from supporting my current clients directly (and indirectly by my own learning and knowledge gathering).  Beyond those considerations, there are other reasons not to share the knowledge.  There is an old saying in coaching that “there are no secrets in training”, meaning that the concepts, ideas, methods, tactics, etc. that people use (or eschew) in training are out there to be known.  Someone, somewhere, already figured them out.  I believe that is mostly true.  For each of the things that I suggest my clients do differently than what most other coaches suggest, you can likely find another coach somewhere who makes the same suggestion.  The difference is that it would be almost impossible to find another coach who makes all the same suggestions that I make, meaning that there is still quite a lot of difference between what they suggest and what I suggest.  I could name coaches who clearly understand training very well and have proven they can put together effective training plans, but for each of those coaches, I can point out differences that I believe give my clients and athletes an advantage.  And of course, there are many coaches who cannot even create training suggestions that are particularly effective (at least not beyond comparison to no training at all). 

            I also believe that there is a corollary to the “no secrets in training” concept, which is that “any relevant knowledge that is useful for improving performance [and sometimes that knowledge is understanding what not to do, in the case of dogma] that a coach or athlete doesn’t know is effectively a training secret” because it is unknown to them.  That’s why I spend so much time and energy trying to gather as much information and knowledge about performance (and every factor even remotely related to it).  Every bit of knowledge that I don’t know that some other coach knows is an opportunity for that other coach’s athletes to gain an advantage over my athletes, and conversely every bit of knowledge that I know that another coach doesn’t is a chance for my athlete’s to gain an advantage.  If another coach understands endurance training programming as well as I do, but they aren’t as knowledgeable as I am with respect to other related factors, whether that’s strength training, injury prevention, nutrition, sleep, or any other parameter that affects performance, their athletes are less likely to optimize those other factors than my athletes, and that would be expected to lead to greater improvement for my athletes.

            Given that greater knowledge provides an advantage to my athletes, there is another reason not to share all of that knowledge, and that is that many other coaches and athletes will certainly experiment with it, verify for themselves that it produces better results, and they will, in essence, copy it.  I know this because, while I have certainly had some original ideas with respect to performance, the vast majority of my knowledge was originally acquired by coaches, athletes, and researchers who preceded me and who made that knowledge public, which allowed me to find it, learn it, and incorporate it into the suggestions I provide to my athletes.  But because that knowledge and the differences in training that I suggest to my athletes is what differentiates me from other coaches, that is the source of my value as a coach, and that is especially true for elite distance runners, where optimizing on the margins is critical for maximizing performance (though it’s still highly beneficial for non-elites as well).  If many other coaches had the same knowledge that I have, what difference would it make for someone to choose one of those coaches instead of me?  Likewise, if I gave away the knowledge that gives my athletes an advantage over athletes of other coaches, how is that in service to my athletes?  How would my athletes not be worse off in such a scenario?

            I don’t intend to take the knowledge I have gained to the grave.  Obviously my athletes and clients already know these different suggestions.  And someday when I retire from coaching, I will likely write some blog posts (if not a book) to describe these things.  But for right now, I’m using this knowledge in service to my athletes (and service to my athletes is the reason I coach) in order to give them the best opportunity to optimize their performance (and win races against their competitors, in the case of my elite runners).  The success of my clients is worth more to me than any financial gain I might realize by sharing all of my knowledge.