Coaching

Do you have a coach?     No

Have you had a coach?     No

Do/did you think it worth it?    No

I have done dozens of triathlons (sprint to IM) and dozens of road races (1 mile to marathon) over the past 10 years and I have never had a coach.  The first year that I did IM I spent months figuring out a training plan that would get me to where I needed to be and was realistic with what I could accomplish.  By the time race day came around reality looked nothing like my plan.  It's not that I didn't accomplish most of the distances that I had wanted to do, but my life was just not predictable enough to follow a plan.

That was 7 years ago and I haven't bothered to write one since.  I do have an idea in my mind of what I'll need to do in order to accomplish my goals, so I guess I do have a training plan, just nothing on paper.  My weeks are wide open and I sometimes end up getting workouts in when I least expected to and many times have to skip workouts when I counted on getting them in (both have happened this week).  I find this approach much more fun, much more family friendly, and way less work.  But this approach would never work if I hadn't educated myself and gone through the process of writing the plan in 2002. 

I'm not saying that a coach wouldn't be the best approach for someone else, just that it wasn't worth it for me.  Plus I've had fun learning as I go.