Thanks again for representing us. Please reveiw my thoughts posted earlier in this thread with our thoughts on the business of coaching, our delivery of service model, etc. A few things in my head in the last few days:
Paulo and I "go way back." Years and years ago he hung out in my Crucible Fitness forum. We had many respectful conversations. This was in the days when you had TriNewbies, then Gordo started his forum, you had your Slowtwitch, I started my forum very early, like 2001. The CF forum was very much like this one, in that it was mostly my athletes, training plan customers, former athletes and plan customers, etc. Conversations were always respectful and it was a place where I/we could expand on conversations we wanted to have but would be too noisy elsewhere. Paulo started showing up and...whatever, he was just another guy in the forum. I don't think I recall realizing he was a coach?
At some point he became "SmartAssCoach" on Slowtwitch and just went off the rails. His role was to basically punk people out, constantly. I think it got so bad that was eventually banned, or he said he was taking is ball and going elsewhere...only to come back because people missed him? No idea, too much drama for me .
I think he is/was the perfect example of what I call the technical/boutique coach -- very, very smart guy who likely knows how to coach people. I get that. But coaching as a second gig (he is/was a professor of some type in NM, I think...or I may be confusing him with Francois ) so he can afford to sit in an ivory tower and throw rocks at people who actually have to make a living at coaching people.
The net is that he, for whatever reason, has placed himself as the arbiter of what is, is not legit, on a range of topics and enforces his position in a mean-spirited manner. I just don't get it. No need for it. I feel you learn a lot about a person by observing how they treat people that they don't have to be nice or polite to -- cashiers, servers, bartenders...and people who are not paying you. There's just no need for an adult, mature MAN (ie, be a fookin' MAN, man) to relate to people the way he does.
So the net is...while he seems to think a lot about EN, and me specifically, apparently, I go MONTHS without the slightest thought about him or any other coaches, frankly. I think the best, more effective response to someone's anger (he's an angry guy!) is to indifference. It's only a game if two people play and I just can't be bothered to play. I'm a grown ass man with people to coach, a business to run, and wife who takes very good care of me, and two dawgs who think I'm the shiznit. Things are good, I don't need to wade into a steaming pile of shit to fight a pig
I don't follow other coaches, I don't read what they say about how people should be coached, how they should train. PnI focus on what we see/observe/learn from your and our own training and apply those lessons. We have a pretty good laboratory right here .
But I can tell you that I've been around in the internet coaching world for a very, very, very long time. And I've seen the same coaches in the same spaces talking about the same things to the same people, representing themselves and their coaching knowledge the same way for years. Nearly a decade. Most importantly, they do this in a space(s) that they don't own, haven't built themselves. Again...you and Rich having beers at the Lake Placid Brewery, I'll tell you I think it's because they don't have the balls to develop their own community of athletes who've been attracted to them, for whatever reason. They'd rather take the easy route and go to the same places to talk about the same stuff, setting themselves up to be the smart(ish) guy with the cute screen name.
But, again, I go months and months without thinking one iota about what other coaches are, are not doing. I just don't care, things are pretty good over here, PnI have more than enough work to keep us occupied on improving things for you.
Regarding Jordan Rapp (I hates fuckin' cute screenames):
No idea what his deal is, don't care. If there is a number less than zero that measures the amount of thought/weight I give to what a pro triathlete thinks about us or how we do business...I'm below THAT number. Professional triathletes are soooo below my radar screen....
Frankly, I see this whole episode as pretty funny, as in, doode, wtf are you so wound up?
PnI had this conversation the other day: in real world things like rate of growth, customer satisfaction, perceived value, and retention rates are measures of the relative success of a business. By these measures, EN is doing pretty damn good and we see soooooo many ways to make it soooo much better. When you have _these_ metrics in your pocket and your competition is loudly proclaiming bad things about you, it's just confirmation that you're doing it right. Time to ignore them (more, if that's even possible) and floor it .
You couldn't afford all this free advertising if you had to go out and buy it. Its sorta like Dale Earnhart was back in the day. Whether you were a fan or not, you knew who he was and had to respect him for what he did. That's what the advertisers who paid millions to put their logo on his car thought anyway. I say we have wasted enough time on these clowns. Lets channel all this energy to ripping the cranks off in our pain caves over the next few months and come out the other end for some Shock and Awe!! Personally tired of seeing these jerks occupy so much of our space.
Two months or so ago another anti EN rant lead me to the ST post by RnP with a sample saturday bike workout. That made a lot of sense to me and I started my trial membership. I'm pretty pleased so far. I do agree with the scientific interpretation of the brick study but as usual the significance to an individuals training and race performance often differ.
Robert, below is a post I made to the orginal blog article, in reply to a comment left by a reader:
I would counter that if you're going to follow the principles of specificity then, for short course racing, you may want to do one brick per week where you are riding very hard for the last 20', jump off the bike for a quick transition, and run about 1 mile at your goal race pace...right off the bike. Then add another 2-3 miles, if you want, to get in some additional volume. But you'd only need to do this in the last 4-5wks before your race. I would say that your easy, low intensity runs off the bike are neither very specific (not fast enough) or long enough -- what if instead of doing 3 of these runs you combined the total volume into 1-2 runs, creating 1-2 non-running days in your schedule to absorb the work? We could go round and round on what may/may not work for you, as I don't know your complete story, how you're training, etc.
Regarding specificity, the brick run and long course training and racing. Our observation, and our opinion, is that people aren't building much raw speed (call this the potential to run fast on race day) because they either have been sold the LSD running volume script and/or they are too tired from their other training (long bricks) to do the fast running that makes them faster. For example, let's say your current plan has you running 4x/wk for a total of 5hrs at an average pace of 9:00. If, through effective scheduling, I can have you doing intervals over here, running faster before/well after your bike vs right off the bike, doing a faster 2hr long run vs 2:30...the net being that your average pace across the week drops from 9:00 to 8:35's. In our experience you will become a faster runner,
increasing your potential speed on race day.
Race day is then about executing properly and running to your potential. If you look at typical Ironman training and run performances...clearly people are very fit, they are putting in the miles and they ARE running bricks. But you only have to do that run course teleportation exercise I described in my post (stand at mile 1, then go out to mile 18) to see that people are MASSIVELY underperforming. This is NOT a fitness issue! See very fit, running bricks, etc above. This is a pacing, race execution issue.
The short answer is that the solution doesn't always have to be to do more, more often, more harder. Rather, it's about being smarter with the time that life has given you, increasing your potential speed, and then racing smart so that you can realize that potential -- Rich
I watched your video, saw the kind of people you were (almost dislocated my shoulder I signed up so fast), and retired my "trial member" status before twenty-four hours had expired
We are all professionals in one way or another...... so what?
Given all this free advertising, has there been a spike in the number of new EN trials since the original ST thread?
Hard to tell, as it was happening at the same time as our drive. We had a ton of people create trial memberships yesterday and I just finished about 3-4hrs of season plans and screencasts to bring them all on board
I can tell you that for every anonymous slam in a forum about some EN training idea, message, service model, etc, PnI get many, many happy, satisfied comments from members, the public, etc. PnI can tell dozens of stories of people approaching us at races to introduce themselves, thank us for the message that we broadcast, etc.
Lemme tell you...when you're behind an IM finishline in an EN jacket waiting for your athletes to finish, and you're accosted by about a dozen training plan athletes, readers, podcast listeners, DVD watchers to thank you for their performance...that does not suck. Curiously, I've never seen the usual suspects of big name, high dollar coaches back there with me...hmmm....
Our most powerful message, and the one I feel is the "grand unifying theory" of how we do business and how we think the question of age group long course triathlon training should be approached, is ROI, return on investment. 90% of AG'ers who are real folks in the real world with priorities, jobs, and other whack stuff really understand this concept. But of course, it drives the lunatic fringe and many 1:1 coaches batshit crazy...so of course I'm all about it now :-)
Yesterday I took the pups for a long walk and brainstormed an series of articles on ROI with regards to swim, bike, run. You'll see the first of those next week.
Brenda, MF's conclusion is the same flawed line of thinking presented by those in the ST post. He has data that clearly says that two groups emerged, both trained similarly, but they were different in their abilities. This is a tell-tale sign that the ability to run to X% of your open 10k potential is not necessarily trainable, there may be a hard-wired upper limit.
Like Al said earlier, the question is not is there a difference. The question is whether or not training affects the difference. When you are well below your potential (newbie, never done a brick before), the answer seems to be unequivocally yes. When you've been playing this game a while, the answer is a whole lot cloudier.
Thanks for your posts and clarifications! I, for one, am comfortable with you creating products and a positive forum environment for the EN peeps! We can have our constructive discussions and work together to continually improve performance, encourage, learn and improve the training programs/plans. We have the right to respectfully agree or disagree with each others' opinions.
Frankly, keep your energy focused on your mission, business model, and the team (i.e. your customers) that you have built! I'm not interested in having you mixing it up with others out on other forums. Let the results of your coaching, plans and products speak for themselves. Each of us have opportunities to make choices. We can follow the plans to the letter or we can make changes based upon our individual needs and/or decisions with no judgment being made. We have the option of making those decisions independently or we can seek advice from our coaches and/or each other!
While others expend energy on these discussions, let's focus our energy on OS and preparing for a great 2012 race season.
RnP - you guys are the best, don't pay any attention to the static and noise from outside. The Haus you built is better than anything I have ever seen. Keep up the outstanding work!
The HAUS is built on a solid foundation, one you can take to the bank, one that will be around for a long time. I met many of the members, watched them execute courageously, consistently overtime, looked both of the coaches in the eyes and seen the integrity that is backed up with actions............
We all have a lot to be proud of in this space......with that comes a lot of responsibility to wear the mantle and represent accurately the EN mantra outside of this space.
For some reason, I just cannot find the cult smilie. Anyone, anyone.....rappstar.......anyone, anyone. Oh, and if this is truly a cult how come we don't all dress in the same track suit and sneakers?????
1) Can I keep my regular job and be on the squad? No, the squad is only for those with total commitment to triathlon.
Add in the parts about unquestioningly following the plan and that "training camp locations will be chosen without regard to social convenience." and it sounds like you are going to sign up to be dropped to die in the Arizona desert. I may just not be hard core enough, but I just can't imagine any sane individual signing up for this? Cult? Toss in some purple Nikes and a reference to comet Hale-Bopp and we've got some serious psychopathology here.
Well to be fair, Paolo is trying to put together a professional squad so I can understand why he would not want his team to have real jobs. What I found odd in the whole thread and the talk of cookie cutter plans is that at his camps, Paolo assigns just about the same workouts to all his athletes.
All athletes in the Squad, without exception, never asked questions about training, about methods, about stuff like training hours or if they should be doing weights. They committed to the Squad, they trust the work we do at the Squad and they believe in what they're doing. Once you do these things, questions like the ones you asked cease to be important.
Now THAT is definitely a cult-like mentality. I presume that high level athletes already have a pretty good understanding of training principles already so they probably don't need to ask many questions to begin with, but I'm surprised that no one would even be curious. I suppose that Paulo's methods are less likely to arouse criticism like EN's, but I guess for me, I wouldn't be comfortable following directions blindly out of a black box.
One of the great aspects of EN that I've really come to appreciate so far is the fact that I can learn and understand from asking questions. If I have a question or concern about a bit of training advice, I can get RnP and the rest of the EN community to help me with the finer points of training and racing. To me, there's a big difference between knowing, say, the name of something, as opposed to how something actually works and why it's the way it is.
Let's close this out. I don't want us to take up bandwidth talking about other coaches/personalties in the space. If you see a conversation about EN, how we coach, deliver service, results, etc and you feel like answering (we appreciate it when you do but certainly don't expect you to), if it were me, I'd:
Answer the original poster
Ignore/not reply to negative comments, ie, get into an argument with someone. As you know, there are many people on the interwebs who entertain themselves with internet debates and mean spiritedness.
Just don't respond to heavy hitters with a chip on their shoulder. In this case, a Jordan Rapp or Paulo. I've found that the best response is indifference or silence. Again, it's only a game of more than one person plays.
At the end of the day, what you say about us, you sharing your experiences with us to the world is very, very powerful for EN. As an example, when I scanned one of the latest threads in there about us, I saw that Fred Gilbert/Sailinfast, long, long time CF and EN member replied to Paulo to the effect of "look, you can say this, that, and the other thing, but it doesn't reflect the reality of my experience with EN in general and Rich spefically. I've known EN and Rich for over 5yrs, this has been my experience and my reality..." At that point, the only reply someone can give is to attack your perception of reality, which is just silly, and makes the look like a total dickhead, something that many don't really need help with .
Below is a note I posted to my FB page last night, on a whim:
+++++++++++++++++++
"October was a good month: spent 2 days dirtbiking outside Bishop, CA with my USMC buddy Ed Caricato (actually, end of Sept but who's keeping track?). Went to St George to see Joanne finish her first marathon, then spent the next week dirty-biking around Utah: Escalante, Torrey, Boulder, Moab, Burr Trail, Hell's Backbone, Hole in the Rock, Aquarius Plateau...good stuff! Next, I spent a weekend camping and riding single track in Kennedy Meadows, did a big 300+ mile desert loop last weekend. Riding and camping off the bike in Death Valley in about a week and a half, then doing LA-Barstow-Vegas over T-Day weekend.
On the EN front:
Over 160 athletes decided to train with an EN training plan during our October training plan sale.
Over 70 athletes decided to join TeamEN during our membership drive.
Inside the squad, hundreds of athletes have begun to train with each other in their October and November OutSeason groups. This is our FIFTH OS as a squad. Soooo cool to see the vets/former noobs picking up the new folks and guiding them through the work!
We tracked down all of the testimonials we had received over the course of the last year, compiling them into a blog post several feet long.
Our athletes continue to kick ass at the October races, including Kona, and over 50 are on deck to finish the season at IMFL this weekend and IMAZ two weeks later.
Every day I wake up thinking "how can I make my athletes stronger, faster, smarter, harder than their competition? What improvement can I make to how we coach and service our athletes? How can I deliver over the top customer service and value?"
Lead from the front
Accept responsibility for everything you and your team do or fail to do
Do the right thing, always.
Do cool shit, always
Repeat
++++++++++++++++++
What I didn't add to the October bullet, that I wanted to, was:
Apparently the above has scared the shit out of our competition. That makes me very, very happy.
Under the "wake up every day" jazz, I wanted to put:
"how can I show your athlete how much better EN is, at $99/mo than what you're doing for 2-4x that price. Because, in my world, success as a coach is equal parts athlete success and business success and I want to crush you on both fronts because it pisses me off that there are so many coaches recycling the same shit year after year."
In the end, know that PnI have our heads down, 24/7, working hard for you to make EN a better place. We seldom look up to see what the rest of the coaching world is/is not doing, how what we are doing does/doesn't piss people off. When we do, we've learned that if we pissing off _these_ people, then we are doing the right thing and need to do more of _that_
Comments
Hi Folks,
Thanks again for representing us. Please reveiw my thoughts posted earlier in this thread with our thoughts on the business of coaching, our delivery of service model, etc. A few things in my head in the last few days:
So the net is...while he seems to think a lot about EN, and me specifically, apparently, I go MONTHS without the slightest thought about him or any other coaches, frankly. I think the best, more effective response to someone's anger (he's an angry guy!) is to indifference. It's only a game if two people play and I just can't be bothered to play. I'm a grown ass man with people to coach, a business to run, and wife who takes very good care of me, and two dawgs who think I'm the shiznit. Things are good, I don't need to wade into a steaming pile of shit to fight a pig
I don't follow other coaches, I don't read what they say about how people should be coached, how they should train. PnI focus on what we see/observe/learn from your and our own training and apply those lessons. We have a pretty good laboratory right here
.
But I can tell you that I've been around in the internet coaching world for a very, very, very long time. And I've seen the same coaches in the same spaces talking about the same things to the same people, representing themselves and their coaching knowledge the same way for years. Nearly a decade. Most importantly, they do this in a space(s) that they don't own, haven't built themselves. Again...you and Rich having beers at the Lake Placid Brewery, I'll tell you I think it's because they don't have the balls to develop their own community of athletes who've been attracted to them, for whatever reason. They'd rather take the easy route and go to the same places to talk about the same stuff, setting themselves up to be the smart(ish) guy with the cute screen name.
But, again, I go months and months without thinking one iota about what other coaches are, are not doing. I just don't care, things are pretty good over here, PnI have more than enough work to keep us occupied on improving things for you.
Regarding Jordan Rapp (I hates fuckin' cute screenames):
No idea what his deal is, don't care. If there is a number less than zero that measures the amount of thought/weight I give to what a pro triathlete thinks about us or how we do business...I'm below THAT number. Professional triathletes are soooo below my radar screen....
Frankly, I see this whole episode as pretty funny, as in, doode, wtf are you so wound up?
PnI had this conversation the other day: in real world things like rate of growth, customer satisfaction, perceived value, and retention rates are measures of the relative success of a business. By these measures, EN is doing pretty damn good and we see soooooo many ways to make it soooo much better. When you have _these_ metrics in your pocket and your competition is loudly proclaiming bad things about you, it's just confirmation that you're doing it right. Time to ignore them (more, if that's even possible) and floor it
.
Two months or so ago another anti EN rant lead me to the ST post by RnP with a sample saturday bike workout. That made a lot of sense to me and I started my trial membership. I'm pretty pleased so far. I do agree with the scientific interpretation of the brick study but as usual the significance to an individuals training and race performance often differ.
Robert, below is a post I made to the orginal blog article, in reply to a comment left by a reader:
I would counter that if you're going to follow the principles of specificity then, for short course racing, you may want to do one brick per week where you are riding very hard for the last 20', jump off the bike for a quick transition, and run about 1 mile at your goal race pace...right off the bike. Then add another 2-3 miles, if you want, to get in some additional volume. But you'd only need to do this in the last 4-5wks before your race. I would say that your easy, low intensity runs off the bike are neither very specific (not fast enough) or long enough -- what if instead of doing 3 of these runs you combined the total volume into 1-2 runs, creating 1-2 non-running days in your schedule to absorb the work? We could go round and round on what may/may not work for you, as I don't know your complete story, how you're training, etc.
Regarding specificity, the brick run and long course training and racing. Our observation, and our opinion, is that people aren't building much raw speed (call this the potential to run fast on race day) because they either have been sold the LSD running volume script and/or they are too tired from their other training (long bricks) to do the fast running that makes them faster. For example, let's say your current plan has you running 4x/wk for a total of 5hrs at an average pace of 9:00. If, through effective scheduling, I can have you doing intervals over here, running faster before/well after your bike vs right off the bike, doing a faster 2hr long run vs 2:30...the net being that your average pace across the week drops from 9:00 to 8:35's. In our experience you will become a faster runner,
increasing your potential speed on race day.
Race day is then about executing properly and running to your potential. If you look at typical Ironman training and run performances...clearly people are very fit, they are putting in the miles and they ARE running bricks. But you only have to do that run course teleportation exercise I described in my post (stand at mile 1, then go out to mile 18) to see that people are MASSIVELY underperforming. This is NOT a fitness issue! See very fit, running bricks, etc above. This is a pacing, race execution issue.
The short answer is that the solution doesn't always have to be to do more, more often, more harder. Rather, it's about being smarter with the time that life has given you, increasing your potential speed, and then racing smart so that you can realize that potential -- Rich
This is exactly why I joined!
I watched your video, saw the kind of people you were (almost dislocated my shoulder I signed up so fast)
, and retired my "trial member" status before twenty-four hours had expired
We are all professionals in one way or another...... so what?
Hard to tell, as it was happening at the same time as our drive. We had a ton of people create trial memberships yesterday and I just finished about 3-4hrs of season plans and screencasts to bring them all on board
I can tell you that for every anonymous slam in a forum about some EN training idea, message, service model, etc, PnI get many, many happy, satisfied comments from members, the public, etc. PnI can tell dozens of stories of people approaching us at races to introduce themselves, thank us for the message that we broadcast, etc.
Lemme tell you...when you're behind an IM finishline in an EN jacket waiting for your athletes to finish, and you're accosted by about a dozen training plan athletes, readers, podcast listeners, DVD watchers to thank you for their performance...that does not suck. Curiously, I've never seen the usual suspects of big name, high dollar coaches back there with me...hmmm....
Our most powerful message, and the one I feel is the "grand unifying theory" of how we do business and how we think the question of age group long course triathlon training should be approached, is ROI, return on investment. 90% of AG'ers who are real folks in the real world with priorities, jobs, and other whack stuff really understand this concept. But of course, it drives the lunatic fringe and many 1:1 coaches batshit crazy...so of course I'm all about it now :-)
Yesterday I took the pups for a long walk and brainstormed an series of articles on ROI with regards to swim, bike, run. You'll see the first of those next week.
Brenda, MF's conclusion is the same flawed line of thinking presented by those in the ST post. He has data that clearly says that two groups emerged, both trained similarly, but they were different in their abilities. This is a tell-tale sign that the ability to run to X% of your open 10k potential is not necessarily trainable, there may be a hard-wired upper limit.
Like Al said earlier, the question is not is there a difference. The question is whether or not training affects the difference. When you are well below your potential (newbie, never done a brick before), the answer seems to be unequivocally yes. When you've been playing this game a while, the answer is a whole lot cloudier.
Coach Rich and Coach Pat,
Thanks for your posts and clarifications! I, for one, am comfortable with you creating products and a positive forum environment for the EN peeps! We can have our constructive discussions and work together to continually improve performance, encourage, learn and improve the training programs/plans. We have the right to respectfully agree or disagree with each others' opinions.
Frankly, keep your energy focused on your mission, business model, and the team (i.e. your customers) that you have built! I'm not interested in having you mixing it up with others out on other forums. Let the results of your coaching, plans and products speak for themselves. Each of us have opportunities to make choices. We can follow the plans to the letter or we can make changes based upon our individual needs and/or decisions with no judgment being made. We have the option of making those decisions independently or we can seek advice from our coaches and/or each other!
While others expend energy on these discussions, let's focus our energy on OS and preparing for a great 2012 race season.
RnP - you guys are the best, don't pay any attention to the static and noise from outside. The Haus you built is better than anything I have ever seen. Keep up the outstanding work!
The HAUS is built on a solid foundation, one you can take to the bank, one that will be around for a long time. I met many of the members, watched them execute courageously, consistently overtime, looked both of the coaches in the eyes and seen the integrity that is backed up with actions............
We all have a lot to be proud of in this space......with that comes a lot of responsibility to wear the mantle and represent accurately the EN mantra outside of this space.
SS
For some reason, I just cannot find the cult smilie. Anyone, anyone.....rappstar.......anyone, anyone. Oh, and if this is truly a cult how come we don't all dress in the same track suit and sneakers?????
Keith, you didn't get the track suit in the mail?!?
And yet, I about dropped on the floor laughing reading the recruitment blog for Paulo's elite triathlon squad.
http://thetriathlonbook.blogspot.com/
Especially the part,
1) Can I keep my regular job and be on the squad?
No, the squad is only for those with total commitment to triathlon.
Add in the parts about unquestioningly following the plan and that "training camp locations will be chosen without regard to social convenience." and it sounds like you are going to sign up to be dropped to die in the Arizona desert. I may just not be hard core enough, but I just can't imagine any sane individual signing up for this? Cult? Toss in some purple Nikes and a reference to comet Hale-Bopp and we've got some serious psychopathology here.
Interesting except from Paulo's blog:
Now THAT is definitely a cult-like mentality. I presume that high level athletes already have a pretty good understanding of training principles already so they probably don't need to ask many questions to begin with, but I'm surprised that no one would even be curious. I suppose that Paulo's methods are less likely to arouse criticism like EN's, but I guess for me, I wouldn't be comfortable following directions blindly out of a black box.
One of the great aspects of EN that I've really come to appreciate so far is the fact that I can learn and understand from asking questions. If I have a question or concern about a bit of training advice, I can get RnP and the rest of the EN community to help me with the finer points of training and racing. To me, there's a big difference between knowing, say, the name of something, as opposed to how something actually works and why it's the way it is.
All:
Let's close this out. I don't want us to take up bandwidth talking about other coaches/personalties in the space. If you see a conversation about EN, how we coach, deliver service, results, etc and you feel like answering (we appreciate it when you do but certainly don't expect you to), if it were me, I'd:
At the end of the day, what you say about us, you sharing your experiences with us to the world is very, very powerful for EN. As an example, when I scanned one of the latest threads in there about us, I saw that Fred Gilbert/Sailinfast, long, long time CF and EN member replied to Paulo to the effect of "look, you can say this, that, and the other thing, but it doesn't reflect the reality of my experience with EN in general and Rich spefically. I've known EN and Rich for over 5yrs, this has been my experience and my reality..." At that point, the only reply someone can give is to attack your perception of reality, which is just silly, and makes the look like a total dickhead, something that many don't really need help with
.
Below is a note I posted to my FB page last night, on a whim:
+++++++++++++++++++
"October was a good month: spent 2 days dirtbiking outside Bishop, CA with my USMC buddy Ed Caricato (actually, end of Sept but who's keeping track?). Went to St George to see Joanne finish her first marathon, then spent the next week dirty-biking around Utah: Escalante, Torrey, Boulder, Moab, Burr Trail, Hell's Backbone, Hole in the Rock, Aquarius Plateau...good stuff! Next, I spent a weekend camping and riding single track in Kennedy Meadows, did a big 300+ mile desert loop last weekend. Riding and camping off the bike in Death Valley in about a week and a half, then doing LA-Barstow-Vegas over T-Day weekend.
On the EN front:
Every day I wake up thinking "how can I make my athletes stronger, faster, smarter, harder than their competition? What improvement can I make to how we coach and service our athletes? How can I deliver over the top customer service and value?"
Lead from the front
Accept responsibility for everything you and your team do or fail to do
Do the right thing, always.
Do cool shit, always
Repeat
++++++++++++++++++
What I didn't add to the October bullet, that I wanted to, was:
Under the "wake up every day" jazz, I wanted to put:
"how can I show your athlete how much better EN is, at $99/mo than what you're doing for 2-4x that price. Because, in my world, success as a coach is equal parts athlete success and business success and I want to crush you on both fronts because it pisses me off that there are so many coaches recycling the same shit year after year."
In the end, know that PnI have our heads down, 24/7, working hard for you to make EN a better place. We seldom look up to see what the rest of the coaching world is/is not doing, how what we are doing does/doesn't piss people off. When we do, we've learned that if we pissing off _these_ people, then we are doing the right thing and need to do more of _that_
Lead from the front
Accept responsibility for everything you and your team do or fail to do
Do the right thing, always.
Do cool shit, always
Repeat