It was 2016, and I wanted to melt into the floor of embarrassment. I was presenting my PhD proposal at our weekly Department meeting. The proposal is when you present the series of research studies you plan to do as part of your PhD. After presenting, Professors, students, and anyone who came to listen can ask questions and/or provide critiques. Tim Noakes, who is well-known, and the founding Professor of the Department raised his hand after my talk and my heart started racing. He proceeded to have MANY critiques of all of my proposed studies and finished with saying something along the lines of, I just don’t think this is going to work. The room went fuzzy after that, and I was absolutely destroyed.
Later that day I slinked into my supervisor’s office to go over the presentation. I blurted out, “Tim Noakes hated my proposal!”. My supervisor gave me a moment to be upset and then calmly said, “Well I didn’t think the presentation was that bad. I wrote down the feedback from the Department. Let’s go through them together.” We then went through each critique and decided which ones were useful and which ones were not. We ultimately decided that we did believe that the research studies with some minor adjustments would indeed work.
Four years later I did earn my PhD after conducting five research studies. But what that day really taught me was how to receive feedback in a professional manner. Not all critiques will be useful, but many are. Although I was mortified, none of the comments were directed at me as a human being – the audience was imparting their expertise with the intent to improve the quality of my research.
Recently, social media has reared its ugly head with some nasty disagreements in the coaching industry. Our profession does not look very professional when top coaches in the industry resort to social media to have arguments. We can disagree with points that people make without attacking them as human beings.
The situation I am referring to is that coach Jason Koop created a reel about third party testing of the nutritional information of Spring Energy’s Awesome Sauce gel. There was interesting information presented, but he also laid blame at the hands of coaches David and Megan Roche of SWAP coaching. They were involved with taste testing and naming the product years ago as well as being previously sponsored athletes by Spring Energy. You can watch the video for yourself and decide if the critique is fair. I found it to come across as unprofessional and would have preferred he focused his energy on Spring Energy.
To be fair, he has made critiques of the Roches that I agree with but the way he does it is, in my opinion, unprofessional. For example, I do not agree with deleting/hiding athlete’s training logs after they end an athlete-coach relationship. I was coached by David Roche for a brief two months in 2019. It was not a good fit, and there were no hard feelings either way. He is a friendly and positive person. However, the shared word document that had the training sessions as well as my and his feedback after training sessions disappeared from my google drive upon ending the relationship. I do not do this to athletes I coach for a number of reasons:
- It is important for athletes to have an accurate training diary with as much information as possible to ensure optimal training in the future. Whether that is with me, another coach, or a self-coached athlete is irrelevant.
- Although my written workouts are technically my Intellectual Property, there is so much more to coaching than writing workouts. I suppose an athlete could repeat the same training the following year for the same race, but it wouldn’t yield the same results. Athletes and their life circumstances change so much year to year, the training even for the same race will look different. I am also not worried that athletes will ‘steal’ my workouts and give or sell it to other athletes if they choose to coach. Each coach should and will have their own unique style of coaching. In a similar vein, each coach should and will have their own unique ideal athlete.
- It is unprofessional. Many athletes that I have previously coached will return for coaching in later months or years. If I hid or deleted training logs it would make this return more difficult and also less likely to happen.
The nuance here is that despite me disagreeing with this specific point about their coaching does not mean that athletes shouldn’t go to them for coaching. There are many athletes that seem to enjoy their relationship with them very much and have impressive results. This means they chose the right coach, and I am happy for both the athletes and the Roches. I want the coaching industry to continue to improve and be of a higher standard. We can and should impart expertise and critiques with the intention of improving all of our work and the athlete experience. But we must also make an effort to do this in a respectful and professional manner. Argue about points and topics. When done this way we can work as a team to improve and hopefully have positive exchanges with one another.