Balancing The Science and Art of Coaching

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It’s been said thousands of times before: coaching is an art and a science. A coach needs enough knowledge of how the body responds to training to be effective at keeping runners healthy and improving without drowning in physio-babel. They also need to know their athletes well enough to know when the human element takes over the science of what’s supposed to happen according to the training plan.

In our high school program, we tend to have pretty good success improving student-athletes over their four years of running with us. We even won a state championship this fall, the perfect confluence of hard-working athletes with some talent and smart coaching. We’re not doing anything secretive or selective in our training. It’s mostly filled with boring, repeatable workouts. You can track it down on Strava if you really want to.

Training and coaching runners is like making chocolate chip cookies: everyone is using the same ingredients, but how those ingredients are mixed together creates different results.

The one thing we do focus on more than others (in my opinion) is acknowledging what our student-athletes go through the other twenty-two hours of the day when they’re not at practice. The list of stressors high school student-athletes deal with is long. They’re not professional athletes with time to kill; their days are…