ATHLETE-LED VERSUS ATHLETE-CENTERED

Understand the difference and unlock a better relationship with your coach

When the athlete is at the center of the project, NOT leading the project, everybody wins

Years ago, I got the opportunity to crew for several Ultraman races. While I never tackled the multi-day, 420k event myself, crewing taught me quite a bit about how athletes, coaches, and support staff interact for good or for ill when everyone is exhausted, under-slept, and ambitious. During the crew orientation, the race organizers gave everyone a quick tutorial on how to effectively support your athlete during the first leg: a 10k open water swim.

“If you’re new to this,” the race director said. “Then you might think your job is to simply be present and let the athlete lead. While you can’t paddle right in front of the athlete, because you’d be giving them an unfair draft, your job is to paddle a straight line towards the finish and let the athlete swim parallel to your boat. If you let the athlete lead, you are likely to make them swim as much as an extra kilometer as they zig-zag down the lake. Remember, our sighting buoys are a kilometer apart! So YOU will be able to see them at all times, but your athlete will only see them when they are two or three hundred meters from the buoy.”

I realized that the race director was giving a perfect illustration of “athlete-led” coaching versus “athlete-centered” coaching. The first is to be avoided at all costs, and the second is, in my opinion, the only way to coach. Let’s get into it.

The Coach is the Employee

Given our history, in the United States, of authoritarian coaches in the “no pain, no gain” model, it’s easy to think that the coach is the one in charge in an athlete-coach relationship. But when we are talking individual endurance coaching, it’s important to remember that YOU, athlete, are the one paying the coach’s wages. You are the employer, and the coach is the employee.

But it’s more complicated than that. Rather than a traditional boss/worker structure, where the boss sets the course and the worker does their part of the project, think of your coach as a highly-skilled consultant. You hire a person like that when A) you don’t have the necessary expertise to achieve your goal and B) you don’t have the time to learn. I wholeheartedly believe that every athlete could learn to coach themselves effectively, but learning those skills takes a long time and plenty of focus. You probably already have a job, a family, important relationships, and other hobbies taking up that time. You employed a coach so that you didn’t have to learn physiology, psychology, race strategy, training philosophies, and a million other little details that only long experience can give you.

But your coach is an at-will employee that you can dismiss at any time. It’s important to remember that. A good coach is part of a successful athlete’s ecosystem, NOT an authoritarian director. Have a conversation early on, coaches and athletes alike, to make sure you are on the same page about this reality.

The Athlete is at the Center

When we coach (and get coached!) effectively, we place the athlete at the center of the project. When you sign up with a coach, you SHOULD get a conversation during which you talk a lot and the coach listens a lot. If this doesn’t happen, proceed with caution. You may be working with a coach who is more…authority-seeking than collaboration-seeking. Your job as the athlete is to:

  1. Tell the coach your goals

  2. Tell them your hoped-for timeline (they might have suggestions or redirections)

  3. Tell them the resources you have available:

    1. Time

    2. Equipment

    3. Finances

    4. Supporters and stakeholders

    5. Training history (one of you most crucial resources, other than time)

Once a coach has this information, they can craft a plan that—followed diligently but not blindly—will carry you to your goals, incorporating the resources you’ve outlined. A good coach will remind you that they cannot write a perfect plan, much in the same way that mathematicians understand that an equation that predicts how the universe will function is impossibly unwieldy to derive. Things change as you move through a training program, and a coach that values collaboration and compromise is crucial. If you find yourself working with a coach that only ever says “Trust The Process,” then you might be in a Coach-Led experience, which is just as bad as Athlete-Led.

So the athlete sets the destination, the coach builds a path, and supporters and training partners interact with the athlete when and where it is possible, but the model here is a small gaggle of people with a shared destination, no single person leading.

Tactical Versus Strategic

Your job, as an athlete, once a plan is crafted that you have bought into (if this hasn’t happened, do NOT proceed, do NOT pass go, do NOT collect an injury, burnout, or disappointment—go back and work with your coach until you have a plan that feels good), is to focus on your next workout, while steadily communicating with your coach about how that workout felt and if you feel that you’re progressing towards your goals. You should NOT blindly do everything they say. If you have questions about particular workouts, and how they will lead you to your goal, then please ask! But you hired a coach so that they can focus on the big picture and allow you to focus on (and, ideally, enjoy) your training sessions. Trust does not mean silence. Trust means respecting the other person while making sure you still have a place in the program. Your job is to be tactical, or focused on the here-and-now, which is today and the training sessions therein.

Your coach, on the other hand, should be thinking about your whole experience: your training, your goals, your supporters, your job, your family, your other commitments, your ability to make purchases within the sport (endurance sports are SPENDY), and anything else that they need to do their job. Your coach’s job is strategic, crafting a plan with YOU at the center that involves all parts of you and your life.

Conclusion

I crewed three Ultramans over the course of about four seasons, and in the last one I experienced an athlete-led swim, which was…sub-optimal. Sometimes the coach-athlete relationship isn’t what it should be, and regardless of my efforts to keep the athlete alongside the boat, they kept veering off on their own path. I tried using our pre-arranged signals (actual words are difficult), a repetitive hoot timed to the athlete’s breathing that would alert them to the fact that they were off course, but those hoots went unheard. I paddled closer, following their line, and waved to get their attention. I noticed that whenever they breathed towards me, they were closing their eyes, either to deal with the sun or to block out my direction. The system had broken down and we were in an athlete-led scenario.

The swim did not go well.