In this conversation, coach Megan Young talks about where her insatiable appetite for learning comes from, the importance of establishing effective communication strategies with athletes and colleagues, and what she means by living a high-performance lifestyle. Megan told me who and what opened her eyes toward coaching as a career path, what that path has looked like for her over the past 15 years, and why she believes coaches need coaches. She also talked about the importance of care and connection in the role of a coach, understanding the difference between passion and purpose, her personal goal to impact 100 million lives through her work, and a lot more.
This week's episode of the podcast is with Stuart McMillan, CEO of ALTIS, and widely regarded as one of the best sprint coaches in the world. In this conversation, which easily would have gone another couple hours if we hadn’t run out of time, Stu and I cover a wide range of topics, from coffee and music to Stu’s former life as a DJ. We get into all things coaching, including how Stu got his start and how his approach has evolved over the past 30 years, creativity and how it influences his approach to coaching, the “philosopher-coach” and putting an emphasis on critical thinking and question asking, taking a systems approach to working with athletes and life in general, and so, so much more.
This week I had an awesome conversation with Don Swartz, who coaches at North Bay Aquatics in Marin County, California, and is someone I respect, admire, and try to emulate in my own life. I recently sat down with Don for a couple hours at his kitchen table to talk about his coaching journey, how he approached working with swimmers despite never being a competitive swimmer himself, founding the Creative Performance Institute in the 1970s and teaching the mental side of sport to coaches and athletes, how he stays sharp, what keeps him going, and a lot more.
This week I had a wonderful conversation with my good friend Brad Stulberg. In this one, the first installment of a new series I’m calling Coach to Coach, Brad and I discuss the craft of coaching and highlight the parallels and through lines that exist between working with athletes and working with executives and entrepreneurs. We also dive into his new book, Master of Change, and talk about how to navigate change: personally, professionally, athletically, and societally. Brad explains the concept of what he calls “rugged flexibility,” he differentiates between responding and reacting to things that happen to us, and a lot more.
I recently sat down with my good friend and three-time podcast guest Simon Freeman, the co-founder, editor, and publisher of my favorite running magazine, Like The Wind, for the second installment of our yet-to-be named quarterly conversation, which you can listen to wherever you get the morning shakeout podcast or at this handy link. An excerpt of this exchange can be found in Issue #36 of LtW, which comes out later this week. In this one, Simon and I talk all about coaching: our experiences with being coached and what we got out of them, the different forms that coaching takes, the impact a coach can have on an athlete, and a lot more.
In this conversation, Randy Ashley and I tall a little about how he got into coaching, before discussing all things related to working with high school athletes: keeping it fun, building and maintaining team culture, dealing with the pressures of social media, interacting with parents, generalization versus specialization, how he thinks about training, and a lot more.
My guest for this episode is Mark Coogan, coach of Team New Balance Boston and co-author of the new book, Personal Best Running: Coach Coogan’s Strategies for the Mile to the Marathon. In this conversation, Mark and I discuss his book, get into his training principles and the influences behind them, the importance of effort over exactitude, and a lot more.
Mike is arguably the top collegiate distance running coach in the country. This is a conversation about the path Mike’s followed to get where he is today, and who and what have influenced him along the way. It’s also a conversation about his approach to coaching, running, competition, and life that I personally took a lot away from and I know you will too.
I’m traveling this week and don’t have a new episode of the podcast for you but I want to take this opportunity to re-run one of my favorite conversations that I’ve ever had for the show. It’s with Diljeet Taylor, who is the head women’s cross-country coach and the Associate Director of Track and Field and field at BYU, which is one of the top collegiate programs in the country. We recorded this episode nearly two years ago when we were in the thick of the pandemic and it’s a great one to revisit or maybe check out for the first time. In this conversation, which is really a masterclass is coaching and team building, Coach Taylor talked to me about the culture she’s helped build at BYU, why gratitude is so important to the strength of that culture, the importance of investing in people and not performances, and so, so much more.
This week’s re-run episode is an incredibly special one to me. It’s with my college cross country and track coach, Karen Boen, who is someone that’s had a profound and lasting impact on my life. Coach saw qualities and abilities in me 20 years ago that I didn’t know I had, and she helped me to not only become a better runner, but she taught me a lot about hard work, leadership, caring for other people, and what it means to be a good teammate and human being. A lot of how I think about training, and coaching, and life in general is due to her influence and I am incredibly grateful to have run for her during my time at Stonehill College.
