lightheir wrote:
You can both look at feedback and write a good plan in 5 mins
In my own experience it is rare that I can check status and provide needed feedback in literally 5 minutes. Hell logging in and selecting the athlete takes 1.5 on the system I use.
But it all depends on what the coach is doing or providing.
For some athletes, at some stages, yes 5 minutes is all it takes. This person just basically needs to put in the time, did he do the workout? is it shaded green? yes, great, then carry on. But this is not the case the majority of the time.
But even so, in this most simple of cases the work was done upfront in laying out the plan. What days should he do which sport, compare to his schedule and what days and times he is available to do those sports. Once that is settled then you need to look at the intended race schedule, how does he need to progress to get from here to there, staying within the confines of a workable week for him. Now you have the idea of how to get there, now craft the workouts and put it in.
Crafting the workouts themselves can be easy or hard, depending on the sport and the focuses. If you are working from a library, then cut and paste works pretty quickly. But even using my own library I usually am changing things around. Even within sports, run and bike are somewhat more easy. I can write a workout that says 1 hour run at moderate pace and the person knows what moderate is for him and off he goes and does his run.
But for swimming, such a workout description can cause a revolt. Fully half of my time is done in crafting swim workouts for a given triathlete. Figuring out which skill to work on if any, how to describe the skill, finding videos that illustrate said skill and crafting it into a workout that makes some sense. Even the main sets which are pretty straightforward, take some time to put together.
But all this kind of assumes the easiest part.
A much more likely scenario is to open the week and view the files. The threshold intervals on tuesday should have been at 250 watts did he hold those watts for the intended time? Yes or no, progress to next week accordingly, this is easy, but it still takes time to review. Saturday's race simulation ride should have been 4 hours long, holding 200 watts on uphills, 190 on flats and 180ish on extended rideable downhills. Did he do this? Did he spike too much on uphills, did he get the proper amount of calories in. What was the heart rate response and the temps? were they what you might expect better or worse. OK so you see how he did, do you change the power targets up or down for the next race prep ride or brick.
Now onto the 2 hour run, did he hold his pace? And so on like the bike analysis.
earlier on you probably went through an exercise looking at historical data to get your first estimates of sustainable efforts. What is the best power he has held for 2:45 minutes? Can he run off of this in the next half iron?
What is his best 13 mile run? How close might he come on race day, these are now the first estimates of race day intensity, figure out how he can test them and not burn himself out.
For me that is a much more typical week's planning. There are also the times with the occassional injury or when athletes are reaching their limits and you need to adjust the schedule to account for that.
In the end, even if I can look at a week and figure out next week in ten minutes, I probably spent 2 hours or so setting up the 12 week cycle we are in now. And as I said the ten minute situation is rare.
I've done this analysis and typical for me is 2 hours to setup a 12 week block and an average of 40 minutes per person per week. There some higher and some lower.
Now, that is me, some people do it differently. Some do more, some do less I am sure.
But for me and what I do, 5 minutes per week is very rare.
As for the original question, is coaching expensive, yes it is. And some coaches are undoubtedly overpriced. Ask around for satisfied customers.
