The question I get most often, from people who are seriously considering coaching but haven’t done it before, is some version of: what do I actually get?

It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is it is more about the human support than the training plan. You can get a training plan for free. You can get a very good one for the price of a coffee. What you can’t download is a person who knows your history, watches what happens week to week, and changes the plan on a Wednesday because your Tuesday went sideways.

So rather than give you a feature list, let me walk you through a month. Not a special month — an ordinary one, the kind our athletes at The Performance Project have over and over.

Friday: the week arrives

Your training shows up in TrainingPeaks one week at a time.

That’s deliberate, and it’s one of the things that most distinguishes coaching from a plan. A 16-week training plan has to commit to your week eleven before it knows anything about your weeks one through ten. It has no choice. It’s guessing — sensibly, based on averages, but guessing.

I’m not guessing. When I write your week, I’ve just watched the last one happen. I know the long run took more out of you than it should have. I know you flew to Chicago on Thursday and slept badly. I know your easy pace has drifted quietly faster for three weeks and it’s time to have a word about that.

So the week you open on Sunday night is built on the week you just finished. Every session has a purpose written into it — what it’s for, what it should feel like, what to do if it isn’t going that way. You shouldn’t ever be looking at a workout wondering why it’s there.

Monday through Saturday: the daily loop

Here’s the part people underestimate before they’ve experienced it.

After every session, you leave me a comment in TrainingPeaks. It doesn’t need to be an essay. Legs felt heavy for the first 20 minutes then came good. Last two reps were a fight. That’s plenty.

And I read it. All of them. Then I respond — sometimes to say “perfect, that’s exactly what I wanted to see, nothing to change,” which is a genuinely useful thing to hear. Sometimes to adjust the rest of the week.

Because a session is data, and one session on its own doesn’t mean much. Three in a row where the second half falls apart means something. A tempo that felt easy at a heart rate 5 beats lower than last month means something rather good. The daily loop is how I see those patterns while they’re still small enough to act on.

This is also where the adjustments happen, and they happen at whatever speed your life requires — including daily. You slept four hours because of a sick kid: Tuesday’s intervals become an easy run, and the session moves to Thursday. Your calf has been grumbling for two days: we’re not going to “see how it feels” on a hill session, we’re going to deal with it now, while it’s a niggle and not six weeks off. A big presentation landed on your Thursday: we shift the long run and protect the week instead of asking you to be heroic in two places at once.

None of that is a failure of the plan. That is the plan. The plan was always going to meet your actual life; the only question is whether someone’s there to negotiate on your behalf when it does.

The other thread: text and WhatsApp

TrainingPeaks is where the training conversation lives. But you’re not only a training file, and quite a lot of what matters doesn’t fit in a workout comment box.

So we also just text. Athletes message me when work gets heavy and they can see a rough fortnight coming. When they’re travelling and want to know how to handle a week in a different time zone. When something’s going on at home and training needs to get smaller for a while without it becoming a whole thing.

And — this is the better half of it — they message me with wins. A race result. A PB that’s been three years coming. A photo from the finish line, still holding the medal. A promotion. A first run back after injury.

I want those messages. Partly because I’m invested in you as a person, but also because they’re information. An athlete under real stress at work is an athlete whose training load I need to be conservative with, whether or not their Garmin has noticed yet. Knowing what’s going on in your life makes me better at the technical part of my job, not just the human part.

Once a month: we actually talk

Every month, we get on a video call.

The daily messages are excellent for the immediate — this session, this week, this niggle. They’re less good for the zoomed-out view, and that’s what the call is for. We look at the block that just finished and ask what it actually did. We look at where you are relative to your goal race and whether that goal still looks right. We talk about the things that are easier to say out loud than to type: that you’ve been anxious about a particular session every week, or that you’re not sure you believe the goal any more, or that you’d like to talk about fueling properly because you suspect you’re not eating enough.

It’s also where I explain my reasoning. I want you to understand why your training block is shaped the way it is, because an athlete who understands their training makes better decisions in all the moments I’m not there — which is most moments.

Also this month: learning something

Alongside your own training, there’s the education side, because I don’t think you should have to take my word for anything.

Every month there’s Performance Club — a session on one topic, done properly: the physiology of the long run, iron and ferritin in endurance athletes, how to actually structure a taper, what strength training does and doesn’t do for runners. We also run deeper masterclasses on the subjects that deserve more explanation.

They’re recorded, so a 6 a.m. meeting doesn’t mean missing out. And they’re the same material I’d want a coach to give me: evidence-based, honest about uncertainty, and translated into something you can use on a Tuesday.

All month: the group chat

And then there’s the thing I couldn’t have designed if I tried. Community.

There’s a group WhatsApp chat for our athletes, and it has become, without much intervention from me, the best part of this. People post their race results and get a wall of replies. Someone shares an inspiring article, and in turn, everyone else also gets inspired.

Training for something hard is lonely by default, especially if you’re doing it around a job and a family and no one in your immediate orbit particularly understands why you’re awake at five. The group is what makes it not lonely. Your goals are taken seriously there. So are your wins.

What the month adds up to

Add it up and it’s this: a plan built for you, one week at a time. Daily contact with the person who wrote it. Adjustments as fast as your life demands. A monthly conversation that zooms out. Education so you understand your own training. And a group of people who are genuinely pleased when you do well.

That’s not a product. It’s a relationship with a structure around it, and it’s the only model I’ve found that actually works for athletes with real lives.

If you’re thinking about Cape Town

One last thing, and I’ll keep it short.

On 23 May 2027, the Sanlam Cape Town Marathon runs its first edition as an Abbott World Marathon Major — the eighth Major, and Africa’s first. Cape Town is where I did my PhD and where a lot of people I care about still live.

We’ve built a Cape Town Marathon coaching service: everything above, pointed specifically at that course, that climate, and that travel. And I’ll be there on race weekend. In person, on the ground, with our athletes — not following the tracker from another time zone.

That’s the part I’d want you to take from all of this. We’re not a platform. We’re people who show up: in your TrainingPeaks comments on a Tuesday, and at the start line in Cape Town.

If that’s your race — or if you’ve just read all this and thought that’s what I’ve been missing — book a free consultation with Coach Rebecca.

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What a Month of Coaching Actually Looks Like

What does a month of coaching with the Performance Project look like?