A coach is obviously someone who has had past experience as a runner or has spent many years studying the art of running and every aspect of it. He knows the best steps for you to gradually transform into a faster runner without feeling the pain or putting in a lot of useless effort. A coach knows how to blend different workouts to achieve the desired goal.
The graph of any runner is not a straight incline. There are days that a runner may feel as though they are retrogressing in their fitness goals. A coach understands all these and will be there to point out to the runner that they should focus on the long-term plan and not how they feel on a daily basis.
There are long-term and short-term plans that coaches consider when designing their plans for their runners. They know when it may be too early to go for a long run or do a particular speed workout. While they may issue a daily or weekly program to a runner, they already have a bigger map on when and where to introduce different workouts and to withdraw others. Your work as a runner should simply be to worry about hydrating well, eating healthy, and finishing your daily dose of workouts.
You may spend many years of hard training, only to realize after almost ten years that you would have achieved much more with your running if only you had known some things when you started. A coach, through their experience in running and in coaching other runners, will quickly take you ten years into the future in your training. Improver training is not only inefficient but causes injuries and illnesses, among others.
Doing every workout at the right pace is perhaps the ultimate remedy for a perfect training and race. A coach is not only there to push you to run harder, but even more importantly, to run slower when necessary. There are some runs that need to be run slowly in order to reap the best out of them.
Coaches are always determined and eager to get good results from their runners.
“If only I would turn back to be as young as you are right now, I would break the world record!” I overheard a coach once telling his runners. A coach always sees great potential in their runners and any success that the runners achieve always makes the coach very proud.
Sometimes you may end up with some hard decisions to make regarding your career in running. A coach should always be there to reason with you on the best way to move forward.
Experiences from living among the world's best runners in different training camps since 2007 and working as a sports freelance journalist from 2011 up to now have taught me a lot of valuable lessons on how to train well and that I seek to impart to other runners. Especially, the happenings from 2016 to 2018 have inspired me tremendously to take up the job of helping others improve their fitness levels through my online coaching programs