I love solving complex problems and I love being creative. Coaching calls me to do these things every day, which makes it a great fit for me. I have a background in human biology and a masters degree in education, direct experience as an athlete, and a wide variety of interests that have influenced my approach to coaching.
I believe in clean sport, and relying primarily on nutrition, sleep, experience, and appropriate training load for athletic gains. I have zero tolerance for cheating or taking short cuts. In a sport riddled with doping and corruption, I believe in creating a career you can be proud of that comes from exploring your own personal limits in the body you were born with.
At Stanford University, my major was “Human Biology with an Area of Concentration in Women’s Health and Athletic Performance,” and my coaching is influenced by professional coaches Vin Lananna, Dena Evans, Terrance Mahon, and Mark Rowland, as well as my high school coach Dave DeLong. I believe in macrocycles of training that always include the key ingredients of endurance, strength, speed-endurance, and power, but may vary in the quantity and specific application of each thing depending on the time of season, and the athlete in front of me. I believe in putting world class athletes from different event specialties together as often as is reasonable because excellence breeds a culture of excellence.
I have spent many years studying physiology and training, as well as how to develop the human skills required to be a world class athlete who can enjoy their successes. Because if you can’t deeply enjoy these moments you work so hard for, these weeks that string together to make training blocks, these races that open doors to other races…if you can’t also find satisfaction in them for their own sake, what’s the point?
From a wide-angle view, I believe in coaching the athlete and person in front of me. There are many ways to get athletic results that cause physical, emotional, or mental damage to the athlete. As a professional athlete I tried on several of them in the first half of my career, tending to chew on the question “what makes great athletes great?” with a short term perspective. Over my 13 years as a professional middle distance runner, I learned the perils that come from fracturing your athletic self from your human self. I watched and learned from the athletes who flashed and fizzled, and the athletes who walked away broken, and the athletes who had resilience and satisfaction and longevity to go with their results. And now that most of my peers are retired like me, I have a clearer picture of what makes for a career you can be proud of and look back on fondly.
I love coaching, but I do not have any interest in coaching if it involves stunting the development of the human being, or otherwise creating harm, to do it. And so I only work with athletes who share this goal of world class performance and human development. We develop the athlete’s form, efficiency, fitness, and power, but also autonomy, physiological literacy, communication skills, deep inner confidence, and resilience strategies. The longer I work with an athlete, the less they need me, and the more they know they can depend on themselves. This is the development of an internally motivated, resilient, and confident human being, and it takes time and hard work. Success in sports should be pursued in such a way as to be able to transfer that success into the rest of life after sport. Train and prepare this way, and your upward potential is ultimately higher, as well as your ability to get consistent improvement, and your capacity to feel joy and satisfaction from your efforts.
