ONE-TO-ONE COACHING

One-to-one coaching is the center of what we do at Campfire. Camps and clinics and workouts help us reach a community of like-minded athletes, but really the company is all about coaching, and in particular one kind of coaching.

At Campfire, we believe that all athletes, regardless of whether they have just started their endurance journey or are trying to reach the highest levels of the sport, deserve robust attention from their coaches. Coaching calls are a critical component of the coaching relationship, providing flexibility and adaptability to individual needs. We say it in every intake call: “A coach-athlete relationship is like every other important relationship in your life—it lives and dies in the quality of our communication.”

Plan

It all starts with a good plan. The first step your coach will take is a full assessment of your life, your available training hours, your goals for the year, your strengths, your limiters, and anything else that you think is pertinent to your endurance journey. Your coach will build a roadmap for the season laying out what kinds of training you will do and when in order to achieve the success you envision. This is a crucial, collaborative step that gives you a broad perspective of the program your coach is going to build for you.

Communication

With that in mind, we believe that our coaching expertise has enabled us to build a system of communication that makes it almost impossible for an athlete to fall through the cracks. Every one-to-one athlete gets:

• Two 45-minute Zoom calls with their coach per month to discuss how the athlete is doing, any questions they might have about workouts, race strategy, or the annual plan at large. These conversations are crucial and coaches will proactively reach out to athletes who are not taking advantage of them, since it is the highest value thing we do: 90 minutes per month with an expert in your field! Do not miss these calls.

• Daily communication through TrainingPeaks. We have a rule at Campfire that if an athlete leaves a comment, the coach replies to that comment. We hear all the time that other coaches do not respond to TrainingPeaks comments, and that will not happen at Campfire—it’s even in our Athlete Bill of Rights!

• Unlimited email and text contact (but, uh, please don’t text us at one in the morning?)

• Detailed race plans with pacing, nutritional, and mental skills guidelines for every major race on your calendar.

Training Program

The training program is the second pillar of what we do and how we do it. Your one-to-one training program is completely custom, built for you from the ground up. Here is how it works:

1. Upon signing up with us, you’ll fill out a questionnaire detailing your strengths, weaknesses, goals, fears, and season calendar.

2. During your first call with your coach, the coach will expand and contextualize the information you gave them, allowing them to build you…

3. …Your personalized training roadmap (PTR). The PTR is a great document because it allows the coach and athlete to discuss what is important and, crucially, when is important. Focusing on the wrong energy systems in your body at the wrong time will lead to stagnation (or worse). The PTR lets you know that your coach has a grand plan for you, a course to sail by, with the destination your success.

4. The PTR is then used to build your plan in three-week training blocks. Why three-week blocks? A training season is usually about 48-weeks long with a four-week “offseason” (offseasons are rarely all “off,” but that’s for another time). Working in three week blocks only gives the coach 16 times to write an athlete’s plan, or slightly more than 6% of an athlete’s year! We have set it up this way intentionally to make the coach understand that each 3-week block has to move the needle for the athlete in some way, whether we are building towards an event or recovering from one. Three-week blocks also give YOU, the athlete, plenty of visibility of what’s coming up so you can plan your life and your training together.

5. Along the way, things happen: you might get sick, or tired, or have a busy period at work. You might be dealing with a physical niggle, or go through an emotional/mental rough patch. Your coach will change the plan to deal with these obstacles so that they don’t become pitfalls. The coach will adjust the plan to manage the training load and prevent overtraining.

Triathlon Community

We all want to be part of something, and one of the reasons we chose “Campfire” as our name is because it suggests all of the community aspects we want to promote: a warm gathering place to tell stories and be seen by each other. Our triathlon community provides a supportive and understanding environment for athletes, addressing the challenges faced by those juggling busy professional lives and personal responsibilities. We have a vibrant community that shows up to events in person AND cheers each other on online. We use Discord, a messaging and community app that allows us to share images, memes, successes, difficulties, and support. We hold meetups at races and plan workouts together. Once a year we gather in the winter to celebrate the season that was.

Join Us!

If you are ready to get going, click the button below to book a free coaching consultation. Even if you don’t end up working with us, we will analyze your current training and let you know what we would do if you were coached by us:

1. Talk with us to learn more and meet with some coaches. Our normal workflow is to talk with an athlete and then have them chat with two more coaches before they choose.