The Love Of Coaching
After 24 years of full-time triathlon coaching, I look back on the Aeromax years and why coaching is mentorship grounded in intuition.
24 years of this full-time caper. What a rich journey coaching is.
As the experience starts to spill out to mentoring people from other sporting and performance genres, I can see how valuable on the ground experience is. I have such rich memories from our Aeromax years.
I’m grateful to those athletes who trusted me with their careers and the countless age groupers I have worked with, it continues to be an honour. The interesting thing is, from this perspective, it’s obvious that coaching is not a prescription, it’s a mentorship, a sharing of experience and intuition.
We pay nowhere near enough attention to intuition. Racing in the twilight zone is all about the intuitive process of which prescription is one part of the overall process.
It happens through you, not to you.
Life has become very heady. My specialty is to teach athletes how to come back to their body. How to come back to their ground, their feet and their power.
We take the data, the prescription, the technology and integrate that into a functional performance that cannot stand without grounded intuition. That’s coaching.
It’s a teaching, not a preaching. That’s why I love it so much and why it loves me back.
Gilesy
Grant Giles coaches a small number of athletes one-to-one, writes this newsletter from Brunswick Heads, and hosts The Roaring Heads. If this piece resonated, a letter in the post every couple of weeks is the best way to keep in touch.