About Me

* World Champion triathletes including...
- Tim Reed - AUS (70.3 World Champ - 2016)
- Inaki De La Parra - POL (Ultraman World Champ - 2016)
- Mike Coughlin (pictured with above) - CAN (Ultraman World Champ - 2015)

* Professional cycling teams including...
- Team Movistar (consultant)
- Team Exergy (physiologist/consultant)

* International level swimmers including...
- Olympic Gold medalist Ian Thorpe (did my coaching apprenticeship under his coach Doug Frost)
- Olympic Gold medalist Alex Popov (Year-long practicum with Alex & his coach - Gennadi Touretski)
- Australian National Swim Team (in preparation for the 1994 World Champs and Commonwealth Games)

* Professional Triathletes (ITU, 70.3 & Ironman) including
- Tim Reed - AUS
- Inaki De La Parra - POL
- Magali Tisseyre - CAN
- Ruth Brennan Morrey - USA
- Kevin Collington - USA
- Justin Park - USA

* a 'full asylum' of age-group Kona Qualifiers! :-) including...
- Owen Martin - IRL (9x Kona qualifier)
- Martin Muldoon - IRL (8x Kona Qualifier & former Irish National Record Holder)
- Shawn Burke - USA (5x Kona qualifier)
- Paul Linck - USA (3x Kona qualifier)
- Tamara Green - AUS (3x Kona qualifier)
- Ben Moore - ENG (2x Kona qualifier)

I've learned a lot and continue to learn from every athlete that I’m fortunate enough to spend time working with.

So, how did I get started on this crazy path?

My own journey towards pursuing sports science & coaching as a vocation began as many do: As a frustrated athlete!..

My goal growing up as a swimmer in a small country town in Australia was to secure a coveted scholarship to train with the National team at the Australian Institute of Sport. After many years of hard work, I did eventually find my way to the A.I.S. – as a sports scientist! :-)

After graduating from Western Sydney University with my Masters of Science in Exercise Physiology, I was able to secure a practicum at the A.I.S. with the Australian Swim Team. This was right at the time that Bill Sweetenham was transitioning out as Aussie Head Coach and the former Russian National Coach, Gennadi Touretski was transitioning in, bringing his World Record freestyler, & arguably one of the greatest swimmers of all time, Alexander Popov along with him. Needless to say I learned a lot from these very different but equally accomplished World Class coaches.

I spent my time at the A.I.S. living with the athletes in the A.I.S. dorms and got to experience that level of commitment first-hand. This was my first exposure to a truly World Class athlete development program, a situation where the entire living environment was shaped around maximizing athletic development, and it had a huge effect on my own coaching development & shaped my attitudes towards what it means to build a lifestyle of athletic excellence.

Following that, after heading back to University in Sydney, I continued my coaching education and apprenticed under another coach whose pool was just down the road from the University that I was attending at the time. His name was Doug Frost and, in addition to having a Commonwealth Games gold medallist on his squad, he also had a young kid who was dominating the Age Group ranks at the time named Ian Thorpe. Thorpe, 'the Thorpedo' would, (unsurprisingly), later go on to be a dominant force in middle distance swimming and the 200m, 400m and 800m World Record Holder. Seeing some of his long term development, & the progressive steps leading up to this domination on the World level, also left a large mark on me as a young coach.

After completing my studies, I spent the better part of the next decade coaching at a number of High Performance Swim Squads in Sydney before turning my focus to Triathlon.

As my own new-found obsession with Ironman Triathlon took hold, the ‘go to’ web site for that at that time was Gordo Byrn’s “GordoWorld” which followed Gordo’s travels & lessons as he made the transition from out of shape Venture Capital guy to ‘living the dream’ of a Pro Triathlete. Inspired, I moved to Boulder, Colorado, reached out to Gordo and was lucky enough to tag along and ‘live the dream’ alongside him & a number of other pro’s & high level age-groupers for a number of years.

As Gordo’s own athletic career wound down, he founded Endurance Corner and, together with bike-fit guru, Mat Steinmetz and Pro Triathete, Justin Daerr, we set up a coaching business and exercise physiology testing lab serving Pro's and top age-group endurance athletes in Boulder. With Gordo’s influence and our location in *the* hotbed of endurance training, I was fortunate to meet, test and consult with some of the greatest endurance athletes on the planet.

It goes without saying that I learned a lot of ‘real world’ lessons from the high performance athletes I came in contact with during those years & it’s these lessons, along with what I took from my time working with some of the best swimmers in the World and from my own experiences as a young coach that I continue to pass forward today as a coach & consultant to endurance sport athletes.

In combining my theoretical background with what I've learned from my time in the 'real world' along with some wisdom from the ages....

...I've come up with 7 core principles that continue to guide my decisions and that I seek to pass forward as a health, fitness and performance coach:

My 7 Core Principles of Good Coaching

1. Above and beyond performance level/performance goals, first and foremost, movement is medicine. It needs to be taken over the lifespan and is most important in the latter years. If you don't 'take your medicine' regularly, at some point you're going to experience significant pain. As such, our #1 responsibility & first priority, as coaches, should always be to facilitate a healthy, long-term relationship with physical activity & "do no harm".

2. A serious commitment to endurance sports training provides an outlet (and some societal legitimacy) for us, as adults in the modern, 'developed' (non paleolithic) world, to move the amount necessary to preserve health and function over time &, beyond that, the amount that we (as humans) are designed to!

3. As in medicine, when prescribed the right 'dose' at the right time, ALL healthy athletes will get better (though at different rates). As in medicine, when the wrong dose is prescribed, ALL athletes will fail to respond to 'treatment' & eventually get sick. As in medicine, when no organized 'treatment plan' is prescribed, the athlete will progressively deteriorate over time. In other words, plan first and foremost for *consistency* & #TakeYourMedicine

4. It follows that, a large part of 'good coaching' comes down to prescribing the right dose of the right medicine for a given athlete at the right time (In my opinion, not quantifying the dosages that you're prescribing amounts to irresponsible medicine & bad coaching).

5. The 'right dosage' that amounts to an athlete getting better, not sick, overtrained or injured, varies greatly among individual athletes (according to training background, gender, age and genetics) . The 'right dose' is also very strongly related to other (non-training) stressors in their life. Therefore, good coaches (& athletes) monitor non-training stressors & adjust the training accordingly.

6. Athletes who can handle truly competitive 'big doses' tend to be generally 'robust' - strong, supple, muscularly balanced with good general health and constitution, i.e. they lay a foundation of moving well in a variety of ways, at a variety of speeds, with a variety of loads. Even then, big doses can only be sustained for short periods of time and by going out of their way to facilitate recovery (sleep, nutrition etc). This includes actively minimizing/managing other sources of stress, i.e. they eat nutritious foods and live a simple, stable, low stress life.

7. When it comes to the 'medicine of choice', intensity is no substitute for aerobic volume. The effects don't last and high intensity training has significant negative 'side effects'. If the goal is continued athletic development over the long term, there is simply no substitute for a strong aerobic base.

And that's what I've been spending most of the past decade doing: Having a great time, guiding, assisting & passing these lessons forward to a bunch of the best kind of fellow 'crazies' who call this Ironman thing fun! :-) Pro's & serious age-groupers - great, humble, hard-working people, with big goals who value their health & derive huge joy in the process of discovering their potential as an athlete while also spending a good chunk of their life discovering their world via swim, bike and run.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve also picked up a new obsession – computer programming! More specifically, the application of Machine Learning & the broader, exciting field of Artificial Intelligence! I’m spending a lot of my current time applying Machine Learning to my first love of endurance sports: Coding predictive performance models that bring our ‘machine friends’ in as really, really smart ‘assistant coaches’ to speed up the learning process & better quantify some of these individual dose-response relationships in the real world. The aim is to provide better data accessibility & visibility to enable myself and other coaches & athletes to make smarter (& healthier) decisions, at scale, for generations to come.

And I’m not done yet! There are more lessons to learn. More puzzles to solve. Maybe puzzles like you!

Here’s to continued learning together on this ongoing journey!

AC

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