Father And Son Coaching!

There have been some interesting father and son coaching teams in the past....think Seb and Peter Coe (most excellent!), and Andre and Mike Agassi (not so much). So now my boy Terrible and I are going to give it a go. I have tried on a few occasions to coach my son in his youth and young adulthood to mixed results. Some of it worked well, and some of it was more than a bit frustrating for us both.

Now Terry is turning 37 soon, and has a huge amount of wear and tear on that muscular small frame of his. He has done many years of national class running and professional bike racing. My goal for him will be to try and make one last major run up to age 40, and a couple of years of hoped for national class masters success. After that, it would be nice if he shifted to triathlon, but he and his body will have to decide that.

I believe that his strengths include stellar genetics, a monster engine (his heart, both literally and figuratively, is huge!), the requisite pain threshold and willingness to visit there, and the ability to visualize success. His weaknesses include many miles of wear and tear, on and off troubles with his stomach that he is working on with a doctor, some mechanical issues with his pigeon toed supinating form that he is working on with both new orthotics and exercises, his self flagellation with bad racing and training, and patience, patience, patience. When given a training plan, he tends to look down the road many weeks and goes "crap, I can do that now!". What then usually happens is a few really good weeks, followed by breakdown, poor training, and frustration.

So, one of my jobs in this process will be to try and keep him patient and focused on the here and now. I will also avoid giving him too much future training information too soon. We will follow a Lydiard/Benson Heart rate based training program working thru base, hill, tempo/strength, economy, and speed periods a few times, and then restart again in cycles as we build toward the ultimate 40 year old age peak training and racing cycle. He will be racing along the way, but saving those well digging efforts for more important goal events toward the beginning of his masters career. The most difficult part of all of this now will be to see how much mileage his body can stand at this age, and more importantly, with the number of miles he already has on his body. While 50 to 60 mile weeks would be a good base for 10K to half marathon success, 70, and for a short period, 80 miles would be best for his marathon peak, but it is unknown what his body can absorb at this stage. That we will discover slowly together.

So now we will begin this journey of where to start, setting some short term and intermediate goals, and seeing if "TEAM TERRIBLE" works. Terry will use the blog to post his successes, failures, anger at his coach, and whatever else goes on while we move forward. For those wanting to follow along, please feel free to critique either of us, and enjoy the ride!