Accompanied

A nice day to myself today.

Yesterday I was down the pool with my mate doing a bit of coaching, tomorrow afternoon I will be down at Lake Monger with the Front Runner crew siphoning off knowledge about running and Friday it will be back to Claremont Pool for the Friday SwimSmooth Threshold Session. None of that was today though, today it was all about me.

That doesn't mean I necessarily did much with my day, but I did take the chance to do a bit of exercise. The exercise I decided to go with this morning was a bit of paddling on the board. I went that way because I enjoy it and because it is one of the few opportunities I have during the week to do so.

Lots of other types of exercise I can incorporate into my coaching. In fact being fit enough to actively coach is one of the reasons I am still exercising. I am certainly finding that the best way to coach some sessions is to be a bystander. Standing to one side and watching a session means that you get to see everyone and it also means you can concentrate on what others are doing, rather than your own exercise. Pool swimming is like that, and running at Lake Monger tomorrow will also be like that. Standing in one place and watching everyone else work around you means you  so that you can see everyone and devote all your attention to them.

However, other sessions I think the bystander approach won't work so well. Long rides for instance. Long runs too. These are sessions where a person may disappear and come back several hours later. If you are simply a bystander for these sessions you are going to be pretty bored. It is true that for a lot of these longer sessions they will typically be uncoached. Athletes have to be self guided at least some of the time after all. I mean a coach won't be there to help them in a race, so an athlete does have to be independent.

However, I have also trained with coaches who have been fit enough to take part in these longer sessions and I have never found it to be a bad thing. Sure you don't necessarily want a coach there watching over you every minute, but it can be a great time to get feedback, discuss elements of the sport and racing and also just a great time for a face to face chat.

Anyway, I have always felt that a coach being able to keep up with some of their athletes was a good thing and it is an approach that I am planning on taking. All of which is just a very long winded way of saying that since I wasn't coaching this morning I decided to go out and do some exercise that was untriathlon related, which I did.

It was grand.

Back to triathlon related stuffs tomorrow.