Category Archives: Interaction

For this post I am simply pasting in a email I sent to Dave and my mentor John.
I know, it maybe a bit lazy but it is real life so …

Hi John and Dave,
I hope all is going well.

I thought I would reach out to both of you and maybe you could jumpstart my process on a topic for KIN 530. I knew I was leaving this dangle and I had hoped something would magically land in my sights but nothing yet.

I have now moved back to Calgary and started with the Province as Lead Coach and with Calgary Canoe Club too.  My role has a leadership component and I do want to better myself in this area. However, I am not sure this area is the most straight forward for me to use as a project.

I am perhaps more likely to prefer something of a more technical nature where questions and answers are probably more straight forward. One of my mentors, Dr. Larry Holt passed away recently. Dr. Holt was my honours advisor at Dalhousie and who continued to be a great inspiration and influence. He was the first person in my academics who challenged me in a manner that was encouraging. Dr. Holt was the first to work with me in a way that made me want to know what was weak in my work and make me eager to identify it, so to become a better student. When working on some directed studies at Dalhousie, he would encourage me to simplify the question. One question builds one answer at a time.

So, for this course I am thinking of Dr. Holt and his advice. I want to ensure my topic is direct and targets a question of interest to my coaching practice. Outside of the area of leadership and in the technical realm the ‘new to me’ things  is the information and sessions I have gained from training peaks data. For the past year (nearly) I have collected and watched the training record of one senior athlete. With this process I have realized that although I have a lot of theoretical knowledge, I did not have the information to apply it to programs or to really know how an individual responds to them.

The most simple questions, I realize are not known (openly) in my sport. At least to me and I have a pretty good handle on what the Canadian coaches are doing. I find myself feeling wholly inadequate when reviewing the work coaches in cycling who seem much further along in ‘evidence-based-coaching’. The Canadians coach as though we are writing a theoretical ‘how-to’ coach manual. Everything is sound in theory but very little individualization occurs in the real world and the gap analysis seems to play only a minor role in steering the program away from that for the 50th percentile athlete.

Even in the ’smaller’ senior team groups where the training data could be manageable, it does not seem to be the basis for evaluation or training. There is so much more now for technology to monitor athletes and their response than 10 or 20 years ago. Yet, our coaching remains mostly unchanged. After nearly a year of watching the training peaks data, I find myself wishing I had explored this sooner. A simple example, I was surprised to see that a workout I had been prescribing resulted in twice the workload that I had expected compared to others. Instantly I learned to cut this in half to hav the athlete perform the planned load. Simple things like this, fundamental but straightforward realizations.

Much the the data that is collected raises more questions than answers. I have not found any literature for paddlers but there is so much on cyclists who have been using this information for a couple decades now. The introduction to training with power on the bike has now become the norm and there is a vast amount of data and the elements the lead to top performance, overreacng and under training. I can use this information and generalize to my sport in some cases but in others I done know if the numbers are good or bad.

One athlete I am monitoring has a critical training load (CTL) that has reached about 100 (Training stress score). The CTL is a weighted rolling average of the past 42 days and equates roughly to level of fitness. Last season the max value was about 80 so now is already ~25% higher than last season and a significant increase. Fitness is good, but how much is needed? When is too much? Is there too much? So a simple question, what is a typical world class CTL range for a performer in this sport?  I can read that a Tour de France rider may perform well at a value of 130-150 but is this true for a paddler who races under 2 min? What do I advise this athlete? How do I make comments ‘evidence based’.

This is just one simple example and one simple question that I have no answer for (I have many others). But the answer would be a powerful bit of knowledge for the coach and athlete (– if anyone has an answer, give me a call –).  If I was collecting data on our team for a few years I may learn this. If I collect data on this one athlete for another year I may start to learn this, ‘for this paddler’.

So I wonder, is there a straight forward way to answer just one question relating to all this extra info I am watching and the questions it creates. Would a topic in this more technical area of monitoring be suited for my directed study in KIN 530?

Posted below are some screen grabs of the data I have been watching for the past 10 months. These will open to larger version if clicked on or if you select to open in a separate window.

Hmmmm…. OK, I leave this email at this point and wait to see if you have comments. Basically, just looking to engage in some conversation that will help me set a direction and get going on a project.

This is my first blog entry since continuing with the UBC Masters in High-Performance Coaching and Technical Leadership.

It is October, I am in Regina with the warm days of summer behind me. Already my mind is occupied with spring training for March and the logistics of a month in Florida.

Escaping the ice and cold of Canada, paddlers from clubs, provincial and national teams make the southward migration each spring. Looking forward, I imagine hot sun, warm waters and dolphins who share the Florida canals. It is more than the escape from the cold and the chance to get the paddlers back on the water, it is a time for me to interact with my peers. More than just a weekend conference or a competition, I get the chance to partner with coaches and engage in a month-long collaborative environment. For most of the season, coaches travel parallel paths, and they develop their own teams but rarely interact in meaningful ways. A few teams have the size, and the budget for a large coaching staff and these enjoy the benefit from each other on a day to day basis. However, most of us are a one-man/women-driven show that can leave a coach feeling isolated.

I have found the Florida camp is a rare opportunity to gather together and function as a coaching group. The opportunity is there to share best practices and methods, share problems and solutions, and feel you are part of something larger than your own team. Not all coaches and teams work with others in this way, some prefer to train in isolation and only meet at a competition. However, I have always enjoyed pulling people together and creating something we don’t experience the rest of the season.

Initially, it developed from an exchange with a coaching friend, “Where are you holding your camp this year? Cool, we did _____ last year, but that sounds interesting”. So it goes, two coaching friends partner. Over time, others hear about the mixed group and like the sound of it. When word gets out, you are operating a camp that is open to others, more coaches ask to take part.

In some cases, they are part of small groups that could not do a project like this on their own. Soon 2 coaches grow to 3,4 and 5 etc. Some coaches have years of experience and others are relatively new, all learn how other coaches work. In this way, all of us share and grow as professionals. It is not always easy and working as a group with athletes from competing teams mixed together can be tricky. If you are a hard-line ‘my way is the best way’ kind of coach, then it is not the place for you. However, if you can loosen the reigns on the program details and are open to collaboration, it can be exciting. Each coach brings their own style and process to the team, and we generally put two coaches in one coach boat that goes with each group of paddlers. Over the 4 week camp, coaches change partners and move between groups, so the athletes, too, get the chance to experience different coaching.

One coach explained to his paddler when they complained about the weird instructions of another coach. “Good, I wanted you to be confused, each time a coach challenges how you think about things you come to me. The result is that we have a conversation about it, figure it out, and in the process, both understand things better. If you hear the same thing over and over and nothing new, you will, we will not grow. We are here to grow”.

This season I have organized my training camp and again look and am looking forward to coaches and paddlers attending from different teams. I do most of the camp organization and try to make it easy for others to join in without a lot of logistics. This may involve booking accommodations, budgeting, transporting equipment and general communication. I call it ‘my camp,’ but in the end, I hope everyone feels it is ‘our camp.’

I like the practice of developing my own leadership and interaction skills to facilitate the group. I want all the coaches to feel they are part of the plan and have the freedom to be themselves. In this kind of camp, ‘robot-coaches’ who simply implement the workout on paper with a stopwatch and start/stop commands are not who we want.

Each coach must feel free, to be creative and make use of opportunities in the moment. The expert is the coach who is with the athlete in the moment, not the print on a paper program created days or weeks before. Each coach adds their flavour and sees something a little different from their ‘coaching-eye.’ This leads to some pretty fantastic follow-up conversations between athlete and coach, coach and coach, and even athlete to athlete.

Interacting with others is something that can be organized and something that can be practiced. Finding opportunities and making the most of this significant growth, skill is a performance accelerator.

This past weekend I spent 4 cold, rainy and miserable days in Seattle.  It was fantastic.

Nearly a decade ago when I was still coaching at the Calgary Canoe Club and Serving as the Southern Alberta Provincial Coach I ‘mistakenly’ started what is now called the Seattle Frostbite Training Camp. At the time, I was looking for a reason, a carrot, a tool to motivate my atheltes until the end of the fall season but there were no events left to train for. I knew from experience motivation and even attendance at training started to drop around this time. I needed an event. So by partner provincial coach, Joanne Devlin, and I gave the coach in Seattle call. Seattle was just a day’s drive away (16 hours) so just close enough and perhaps even exotic enough to get out group psyched up for a road trip.

Hi Aasim (pronounce Awesome), I know right… ‘Hi there, I’m Awesome (Aasim)’. Anyway, so I called Aasim and asked if he would mind us showing up for a week and mixing in with his training. We could end the week with a fun, yet casual, 10km race. It will be great! So in 1st week of November, Joanne and I with 13 paddlers crammed into a van and towing a trailer full of kayaks headed for the border.

Well, we had a fantastic time! The people at the Seattle Canoe Club are some of the best I have ever met. So kind and giving. They welcomed us, put us up in their homes, organized meals and well…. we loved it. Yes, we did train and even did that 10km race.

The next 4 years we returned with more and more people and each year we found others were wanting to join us. We saw BC paddlers making the trip, Californians, and even paddlers from Georgia and Washington DC on the east coast. Eventually, we even saw Canoe Kayak Canada’s Coach Development Director come see what was going on in this rainy and cold corner of the US. The year after a USA National Team coach made it part of his annual plan.

Why all the buildup, any word that got out was simply word of mouth. Well, it was the people. Despite the bitter chill from being out all day in the cold Seattle rain you just feel great to be around these people. Yes, the training and coaching were good, we made sure of that but it is not what I value most.

Until this year, I have been away from Alberta and 5 or 6 Frostbite camps have gone by.  While in Ottawa, I was not about to load up a van and make that kind of drive, so I have not been back.  Aasim has been gone too and is now in Oklahoma City coaching a team there.

This year, however, I am a little closer and my good friend Jason gave me a call. No van but a flight this time. I was to travel in luxury, 6 hours rather than 16.  The invitation to be a guest coach was one I gladly took up.  Soon I was back in under the grey skies in the cold rain with the warm paddlers of the Seattle Canoe and Kayak Team.  If I can I’ll be back shivering in the rain again next year.

Below are my two super wet, cold and cute athletes, Emma and Zoey, loving it too.

At the end of the camp we had a 2.5 hour drive north to Vancouver where we would catch our flight back to Regina.  What do you think they talked about?  It was how nice their billet family was!

In only a few days of returning I already hearing rumours that more paddlers have heard about the experience from last week and are talking about attending in 2017.  Kindness makes a difference and word travels fast.