For most of my running career, I have been self-coached. When first starting, this made perfect sense. Many runners never hire a coach and make significant gains. I made gains for a few years and then plateaued. I discovered that a friend and coworker also had a side hustle as a coach for a reasonable rate. The gains came rapid fire and I knew I had made the night decision until it wasn’t. In this post I will describe the things that lead me to resume this coaching relationship.

First, I needed to resume the relationship because back in September of 2015 I sustained my first, and so far only, significant injury, a distal hamstring strain. It no longer made sense to pay for a coach when I could not run. Looking back, I can see that I was burnt out as well. I stepped back from coaching expecting this step back to be temporary but a few months stretched into a year and longer. I began running with Mom on every single run. I built back up slowly until I was at a point where I started considering competitive attempts again.

Second, I had to try self-coaching again. I will admit that this was partially driven by my frugal tendencies, the urge to save money and do it myself. I also wanted to ease myself back into competition mode, hard-core training. First, I trained just to finish Tobacco Road in 2016. A fall marathon did not work in my schedule so I trained with Mom for Hilton Head in 2017. Then I decided to train for Chicago and chose a self-coached plan which did not work as I had hoped. I went ahead and chose to be self-coached even though my test with self coaching for a half marathon just a few months prior, did not work. I did not come close to my stated objective, a BQ.

Third, I needed to figure out why my self-coaching hadn’t worked. I narrowed it down to a couple reasons. One, I chose plans that did not work for me as a runner for a variety of reasons. One, I chose plans that did not work for me as a runner for a variety of reasons. Two, I had insufficient investment in the plan and thus easily abandoned or changed the workouts if they seemed to difficult or I didn’t feel like running that particular workout that day.

Fourth, I finally reached out to my old coach and asked if he would coach me again. He quickly agreed. Now, since I am paying him, I have the investment I need. I am making a commitment to running deeper, digging in and hopefully making significant advances in my running.