Why I Coach



I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about why I coach and why I feel so drawn to coaching. So I thought I’d put it down in words, here on my blog, as a way of crystallizing my thinking.

If we are lucky enough, each of us will find something in our lives that stirs our souls. I say it “stirs our soul” because it seems to go beyond flesh and blood, it is something that strikes a chord with our very essence as a person. Something that awakens deep passions and emotions in us. For many people this is art, or music, or dance. For me this is excellence in athletic performance. When I see an athlete, who has dedicated themselves to their sport, go out and lay it all on the line and excel, I get goose bumps and a lump in my throat. I think more specifically, it is when a dedicated athlete accepts a difficult or impossible challenge, and faces it head on and attacks it. It stirs up passions and emotions in me that I can’t begin to explain – it stirs my soul.

I remember many instances in my life when I found myself watching or being part of such an event, when an athlete is laying it on the line and excelling, and tears will begin streaming down my cheeks and I’ll get all choked up. It’s at these moments, that the athlete’s human spirit, their soul, seems to rise up and carry their bodies beyond what they would otherwise be able to do, and the results are amazing. To me, that is more moving and more breathtaking than any Picasso painting, any sunset over the ocean, and any Mozart composition.

I can only imagine what these moments are like for the athlete, life changing I am sure. Once Marty Liquori, one of the best milers in the world in the early 1970’s, said after he took part in one of these amazing moments, that if you could bottle up what he felt at that moment and give it a young kid, that kid would spend the rest of his life striving for a similar experience.

Because this is the way I think, and the way that I am wired, I am dedicating myself to helping athlete pursue these moments. I want to help them chase their dreams as an athlete, to experience the joy and sense of accomplishments that dedication and excelling can bring. I want to help them be a good steward of the wonderful athletic gifts they have been blessed with.

I am blessed to be working with a few athletes that approach this zone on a semi-regular basis. So if you see me at a track or on the side lines of a race one day and see me looking a little teary eyed, or brushing away tears from my cheeks, nothing is wrong, I am just being blessed with another opportunity to have my soul stirred.

So why me and why running?

So what makes me think I can help athletes and why running in particular? Those are good questions that I have also been thinking about.

In a nutshell I think it comes down to stewardship. I have been blessed with some unique gifts and some unique experiences, all which seem to come together in the sport of distance running. I want to, and feel an obligation to be good steward of these gifts and use them to help runners chase their dreams.

I have a very analytical mind; I have almost a compulsion for finding out and understanding why and how some things work, what the components of them are and how they all interrelate. This helped me tremendously in my previous jobs in the corporate world where I was responsible for putting together financial and business models and leading analysis project. In running it has driven me to experience, experiment and research all forms and theories on training. I just didn’t want to know what worked, I wanted to understand why it works and when, so I could learn to use it most effectively and come up with variations that may be even more effective in certain circumstances. I have and still do read volumes of work by Lydiard, Daniels, Vigil, Noakes, Coe, Squires and other legendary coaches; and I constantly study what Canova, Rosa, Salazar, and other successful coach are doing today. I do not and never want to stop learning. The more I learn the more I can help others pursue their dreams.

But just as I my compulsion dictates, and as I did in the corporate world, I have to synthesize this learning and understanding down into a dynamic model of how training for running works, which allows for individual differences while staying true to overall beliefs and truths in the world of physical training. And just as in the business models I use to build, I have to constantly re-evaluate and add to and update this model as I learn more, have more experiences and as is appropriate. It becomes a living model of all that I have learned, believe and experienced in my 30+ years in the sport.

This has become increasingly an obsession for me over the last several years, but a good one and one that has shown much fruit. I have had a very high success rate with the runners I coach, from new runners to national class elites and from kids to masters runners. The model is working and because of this, I feel an even greater need to be a good steward of these gifts.

So for me coaching the sport of distance running, is a bringing together of so much of my life and who I am. It combines what stirs my soul, with the gifts I have been blessed with, and the compulsions I feel to understand how things work and put that into a dynamic model. I feel incredibly blessed and humbled to have reached this point in my life and I stand resolute in my determination to be a good steward of these blessings.

Coach Mark Hadley