How it Works
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1. Initial Meeting
A good coaching relationship opens and thrives with good communication. When you sign up with CBCG, your coach will sit down with you (in-person if possible, and over the phone if necessary) to perform a full download and analysis of your goals, fears, strengths, and weaknesses. We ask about your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly schedule, identifying opportunities to optimize training and recovery in the service of meeting your goals. This initial meeting sets the tone for everything to follow, and our biggest hope as coaches is that you walk away understanding that we can't do our job without regular and thorough communication. Like any good relationship, the coach-athlete connection is strongest when we talk a lot, through several different media.
2. Training Blocks
Once we're off and running, the fun part begins: the coach builds training blocks, and the athlete gets to work. At CBCG we work in three-week training blocks, giving you, the athlete, a wider perspective of what we're trying to accomplish in this microcycle (a season is broken up into microcycles like our three-week blocks; mesocycles, which may be anywhere from six weeks in length to twelve; and macrocycles of four to six months, of which you usually only get two a season, leading up to each "A Priority" race). Knowing your training for the next three weeks returns control of the schedule to the athlete, allowing you to look ahead and anticipate conflicts and communicate those to your coach. On the coach's side, three-week blocks force the coach to think in terms of progression, and makes us ask ourselves "what is the goal of this block?" Having that goal in mind each time we sit down to write your program keeps us focused on your overall development as an athlete.
3. Communication
As you log workouts in TrainingPeaks, you can leave comments about those workouts. Our rule at CBCG is "leave a comment, get a reply." This channel is an excellent one for maintaining robust communication (see #1), and allows us to discuss individual workouts on a granular level. Regular use of this feature, we've found, binds you and your coach closer together, and the more you know about each other, the better you are as a team.
4. Phone Calls
Once we've begun and you're logging workouts regularly in TrainingPeaks, having achieved daily conversation, we add in weekly or bi-weekly phone calls. This is another hugely important feature at CBCG, and isn't one to skip. Even if you feel like you have nothing to say to your coach about the past week or two weeks, the calls have huge value. Your coach can tell, just through hearing your voice, whether or not you are tired or fresh, motivated or burnt out, courageous or nervous. The weekly phone call is a great opportunity to communicate upcoming travel, work, or family commitments; to work on the mental aspect of your game; to review races; or simply to catch up and talk. As endurance athletes, we spend a lot of time in our own heads—it's surprising how good downloading those emotions and thoughts to another person can feel.
5. Race Plan
As you near your goal race for the season, we begin to work on your race plan. You'll receive, on the Wednesday before your race, a plan of attack from your coach, either written or communicated over the phone. We'll talk pacing, nutrition, and mental strategies, reviewing the goals we started with and discussing anything and everything that's going through your mind as you near your goal.