vanchize wrote:
Unpopular opinion but coaching is overrated. Most of us are tri junkies and there are plenty of resources out there to put together a great plan. At the end of the day, no one knows yourself better than you.
Disclaimer: I coach triathlon
That said...
If a coach is just throwing workouts at you without customization, then you might as well just use a plan downloaded from the internet. If you have been at it a long time you might be able to build the knowledge to develop your own plan. However I know plenty of people (some Kona qualifiers) who have straight up told me they don't actually understand the gory details of the process, don't care to learn the gory details, and would rather their coach figure it out for them. There are plenty of people who simply want the responsibility of figuring out what they should do for training to be outsourced so they can focus on other things.
I can tell you from my own personal experience that despite the fact that I am fully knowledgeable enough to build a very good plan for myself, I would not be able to coach myself. I rely on my own coach to keep me in check. I don't need accountability to actually do the work. My motivation is my own and I don't need help there. What I do need help with is keeping my enthusiasm in check, and also to keep my failures in perspective. If I was my own coach, I might be tempted to re-do a failed workout, or improperly reschedule a missed workout. Maybe the workout was only a failure in my mind because I was only holding 245 watts instead of the target 250 watts. I rely on my coach to keep the irrational part of my brain from declaring failure on something when in reality that ride was still perfectly acceptable. I need my coach to prevent me from going off the deep end trying to fix something I perceive as a weakness (maybe my FTP is too low for my tastes) and losing focus on other things (like if I decide to try to raise my FTP, but end up losing run fitness as a result because I backed off running). Basically when things go a bit off-piste, the rational part of my brain goes away and I need someone to tell me to slow my roll. I am certain if I were to try to build my own plan I would subconsciously either make it too easy (because a swim that hard doesn't sound like much fun in the winter), or make it too hard (hey I am trying to KQ here!) and possibly hurt myself. I wouldn't even really know I was doing it.
From my perspective as someone who coaches others, building a plan is the easy part of my job. That isn't remotely a challenge, even for a "complicated" plan that includes many different races and types of races. It's everything else that goes around the plan that is the hard part. Sometimes it's simply knowing when workouts need to move around to accommodate "life" things and when they need to be chalked up as missed. It's knowing when a workout is truly a failure and talking an athlete off a ledge. It's keeping athletes uninjured, but if injuries do occur, knowing how to maximize the capability they still have while they recover from the injury. There are a ton of other subtle things that go in to coaching someone else that you cannot always do for yourself despite having the technical knowledge for building a plan. I am sure there are people who are perfectly capable of designing their own plan and sticking to it, and able to rearrange it appropriately when needed, staying rational when things don't go right. I am not one of those people. I am great at doing it when I can stay disconnected and rational as I can for my own athletes, but when my own training is concerned that's a different can of beans.
