My Approach

Having used pre-made running plans from all over the internet, I found that they might work for the person that created them but not for everyone else.  There are many reasons for this, with the main one I found being the work-life balance of the athlete.

 

This made me look in to creating bespoke running plans for myself around my own schedule and comparing the results with the pre-made plans.  There was no competition between the two, with the first bespoke plan knocking 30 seconds off my 5km PB.

 

With this significant result I began delving further in to the world of running coaching.  The information out there is never ending from coaching websites, social media, YouTube and the good old-fashioned books.  With all of this information I decided to create a Facebook page for my local community and share the information I had gathered.  The creation of the first running group on Facebook soon led to another one as I moved location. 

 

The next step was to use friends and family as my running ‘guinea pigs’.  This helped me understand how other people take to training plans and the difficulties involved such as holidays, illness and injuries.  However, after a short time my ‘guinea pigs’ started to see improvements within their running.  Beginner runners started to achieve 5km distances, then 10km distances with one of them even achieving a half marathon distance within 3 months (an amazing accomplishment).

 

All of this was done while I was undertaking my coaching qualifications. This helped me to understand the way England Athletics coach, as well as being able to develop my own coaching style.

 

I find the most rewarding part of coaching is the creation of the plan around the individuals ever changing schedule, enabling them to have a very good work-life balance while still achieving their own personal running goals.