Wiki: Endurance Nation Coaching Manifesto

[Rich Strauss]

This article outlines the thinking that has driven Rich and I to combine communities and create Endurance Nation. As background, our collaboration began (modestly) in 2005 with a joint camp held in SoCal. We continued "dating" in 2006, holding another California Camp and adding a mid-season camp in Lake Placid. The latter sold out with over 20 folks and we quickly began to realize our combined value.

As individual coaches, more than 1,000 athletes have benefited from our training plans, camps, clinics and coaching. Over the past 5+ years we have worked with almost every athlete "type" imaginable, from total newbies to Kona qualifiers. Independent of one another, we developed similar "less is more" coaching philosophies, where endurance athletes maximize their training time through the application of intensity and endurance, not simply by piling on "junk" hours of training. In short, our focus and coaching experience has been directed towards the tools and perspective an the age group athlete. Our experience and methodologies enabled Rich and I to build successful coaching businesses on opposite ends of the country...but we knew that we could do more.
With that perspective, we began putting our heads together around how we could combine our businesses and really create something of value for our respective athlete communities. At IMCDA of this year, we brainstormed the concept of Endurance Nation over the course of 2 days - and more coffee than you can imagine - at an Econolodge. Less than five months later, we are proud to present Endurance Nation to the world.

The Endurance Nation Coaching Model
Proven Training Plans + Coach Input + Community + The Real World + Affordability = High Value
Proven Training Plans
Online training plans hit the triathlon world big in 2005, with us as the market leaders, frankly. From the beginning we were committed to delivering a great deal of supporting information at the time of the sale, continued support after the sale, and continuous improvement: each year we learned new stuff, refined our tools and implemented these into our training plans.
The bottom line boils down to two things: what you've been told/heard/read/hope works, what has been proven to work by the smart guys. There is what works for the pro or the time-unlimited athlete, there is what works for the time constrained athlete. Our training plans are effective because they are:

1. Tested across 5 years and 1,000+ athletes -- the plans just get stronger with each revision.
2. Framed within the time constraint box of the common age group athlete.
3. Entirely based on sound, scientific principles.

Coach Input
In the Endurance Nation model:

• Athletes are grouped by training plan or self-grouped by race focus; either way our coaches are able to keep tabs on multiple athletes using our platform's profile information, training data sheets, and our killer online forum.
• Athletes are able to share information and resources under the watchful eye of the EN coaches, ensuring consistency and quality.
• Information is not only readily available via the EN Library; it's accumulated and processed daily in the forums, groups, and between members. Someone is always asking the "dumb" question; hence we all win by learning from the answers.
• Multiple perspectives and / input on a single idea means each concept is well-tested and viable. Don't think so? Add your input to the mix and help make it stronger!

Community
Endurance training can be a lonely, intimidating affair. With so much to learn, only so many hours in the day, and limited local resources, you are typically steered towards online spaces to connect with other athletes, read articles, and Google training ideas and race reports. There are many sites out there that serve the triathlon community, but each has it's own take on what the athlete wants:

• Pro athlete + Industry News that's nice to browse during the lunch hour -- but has zero relevance on an individual athlete's training, racing, or lifestyle;

• Content and Articles from coaches and other smart guys -- resulting in an aggregation of disparate and often contradictory advice and viewpoints. Haven’t you had the experience of sifting through a that the athlete has to sift through, with Article "Do This" article often sitting next to an Article that says "Do That?"

• Online Forums to share information and training advice with no personal accountability leads to name-calling and flaming -- it's hard to find the good information and terrifying for newbies to join in;

• Social Platforms for peer athletes to review equipment, give advice, and share blogs.

In order to solve these challenges, Endurance Nation is not only run and supported by proven coaches, it also combines all of the aforementioned elements into one house:

• High quality training plans in their third iteration and proven across 1000+ athletes.
• Active support via online presence of coaches + accountability to your peer athletes.
• Quality content + new research unified under consistent, coherent themes.
• An online community housed in a state-of-the-art platform.
• Actual online profiles so you can interact...find a Race Report you like? You can email the author or see what else they are up to by searching the forum.

Real World
Race events are amazing gatherings with super-cool, fitness-crazed people just like yourself...too bad you are so busy tapering/racing that you don't have the time to meet any of them. We solve that problem with our social network, but enough about all this virtual stuff. We are committed to having a strong, real world presence. Last year alone we attended IM Arizona, IM CDA, IM USA, IM Louisville, IM Hawaii, IM Florida, as well as several HIM races. The only other folks who attended more IM races were the announcers! Ask yourself:

• Will your coach organize virtual training weekends where you can train side by side with fellow teammates doing the same race?

• Is your coach going to offer a training camp for you + your teammates on the course of your next A race? Has your coach seen that course in person?

• Is your coach going to BE at your race, to create a team atmosphere for you through uniforms, social events, talk you down from the ledge, or jump out of bush on the run course to deliver some well timed motivation, not to mention the mojo of racing with your fellow Team EN members?

• What is the value of being able to plug your family into an organized race day support structure on race day while you're out there doing your thing?

Why Build Endurance Nation?
Just as you want to be successful in your career, a good coach wants to be successful in his/hers. After the first couple years of full-time coaching, becoming or remaining a successful coach is less about what you (the athlete) think of as coaching and more about being a successful business person. Being a good technician only gets you so far, usually to an income cap. To grow above that ceiling, the coach must evolve as a business person or face stagnation. Rich and I have chosen to evolve by changing the game to include athletes; to build a community, not to sell high priced widgets. There is surely a space for one-on-one (1:1) coaching, but it's not in our future. Here's why.

Premium 1:1 Coaching is a Business Model, Not a Coaching Method
This ceiling is largely a function of the business track that most coaches follow: a person (we’ll call him Bob), usually the local fast guy but sometimes also the local smart guy, is approached by local athletes to "help me with my training." Money and training schedules exchange hands and over time and usually through word of mouth, more and more athletes seek Bob's services. Bob reaches his first fork in the coaching road—raise : raise his fees or take on more athletes. After an initial period of "I'm- not- worthy" self-doubt, Bob gets over it and raises his fees. More people want to work with Bob at his new, higher fees and Bob reaches the next critical fork in the coaching road: scaleable or unscaleable. Recognizing this fork, when it happens, however, requires a good deal of strategic thinking, and in our experience, most coaches are too busy thinking tactically (what do I need to get TODAY to eat tomorrow) to take the elevator up to the second floor, look down and make strategic decisions.

As such, the coach is usually led down this road:

• Raise fees but still more people come.
  Hire associate coaches to provide coaching services to athletes attracted by the brand.
• These associates in turn raise their fees.
• Before long the brand has a squad of X athletes demanding local services: swim, bike, run workouts, training camps, and maybe an actual physical location to perform training and other high-end services.

But the core of this coaching business is providing 1:1 coaching services for a premium fee. In our evolution, we realized that 1:1 triathlon coaching is a business model first, a coaching method second. In other words, did Coach Bob Incorporated make a conscious decision to offer expensive 1:1 coaching because it felt it was the best coaching method available? Or was Coach Bob Incorporated led down the path toward this tier of service by making a tactical decision at a fork in the coaching road, choosing the high end 1:1 coaching model as default business model? Our experience dictates that it's the latter.

The Future of Coaching
Like other service-based industries, endurance coaching will eventually consolidate into two segments: expensive access to elite coaches and low-cost access to generic templates and very basic information. There are already coaches out there who offer 1:1 coaching @ $1500/month (that's $18,000 a year). As you well know, there are also countless magazine articles and templates out there for free. The assumption inherent in this comparison is that the high-dollar, premium coaching is a "better service" because it costs more. You believe this because you are working with a "professional," and because you have access to their attention and input.


The the media, industry, and culture founded on the 1:1 coaching model have conspired to tell you that you are special and unique, and that you need a custom solution different from everyone else out there. Yes, you are special, but not as special as these people (and your mom) have lead you to believe. We are all human beings, subject to the same laws of physics, physiology, and, as age group athletes, similar time constraints. As such, through our experience with well over 1000 athletes, we've learned that a library of training plans can provide a 95% solution for almost any athlete. The remaining 5% is the exception, not the rule. We've learned we can address these exceptions by:

• Creating learning tools to help you become a better self-coached athlete so you can figure out on your own what you need: the Wiki, podcasts, videos, articles, etc.
• Making ourselves available to you to help you when you get stuck, via forums, conference calls, webchats, and other highly efficient tools.

And so the role of the coach in a 1:1 relationship is to perform items #1 and #2 in a 1:1 environment. The very nature of this business model means that your coach has little time to learn, reflect, innovate and bring all of this to you -- s/he is too busy reading emails, checking files, working a full-time job somewhere else, etc. The true power of the Endurance Nation model is that your membership enables us to provide you with more outstanding information and resources; we are not limited by the number of people in the house; in fact, we are incentivized by it.

But before we finish, this is a short list of support products we've provide to ALL of our 300+ athletes, none paying more than $15/wk, in the four months since our founding in November, 2007:

• ENForum, with over 10,000 posts.
• Podcast, Planning Your Triathlon Season
• Webinar, The Basic Training Week
• Virtual Training Camp: MLK
• Webinar, Epic Training Weekends
• Webinar Series: Training and Racing with Power, 3 x 90' sessions with expert panelists.
• The Endurance Nation Beginner Triathlete Project
• 17 podcasts recorded for our ENGroups Off-Season athletes, one for each week.
• 20 podcasts recorded for ENGroups Ironman program, one for each week.
• 16 podcasts, HIM, on due end of January.
• 35 videos uploaded.
• Plenty more on the way...

So ask yourself: what has your $$$ coach done for you lately? Is it worth a 500-1000% markup on this list above? And remember, we are not over-night startups in this business. With 13+ years in the business between us, we’ve both been at $350+ per month, with full coaching rosters, for years. We’ve made a business decision to go a different route, reserving our 1:1 services for local athletes who we can create value for with our physical presence and leadership.

Conclusion
The future isn't high-dollar 1:1 coaching, it's a hybrid -- an online athletic community run by coaches and populated with your peers. As a member of Endurance Nation you will be an active participant in defining this cutting-edge community. There is no other place like it in the triathlon world. Membership in Endurance Nation will give you:

• Access to other smart gals/guys as we bring their expertise to the community via video, audio, etc.
• A community that will, with few exceptions, participate in every long-course triathlon in the country next year. Talk about value!
• Accountability and feedback from your peers and us coaches. Feedback is right there, 24/7. You will get faster, there’s no doubt about that.; there is no interpretive bias, feedback is instantaneous, and you'll get faster!

Whether you are a hard-core athlete or a total newbie, Endurance Nation has a place waiting just for you. See you on the inside!