Years ago, I used to constantly email my coach with ideas.
I'd see someone doing something. A different type of speed session. Strength training in the gym. A bungy cord in the pool. Some breathing drill or a new piece of kit.
In my mind, that must be why they're faster than me. So I'd bring it to my coach, sure I'd found the missing piece.
Most of the time, he just pushed back.
Not because the idea was crazy. It just wasn't right for me at that time. We only tried what he thought would actually work for me.
That annoyed me at the time. I was impatient. I wanted to try everything.
Looking back, that was the whole value of having him. He wasn't there just to hand me more ideas. I had plenty of those. He was there to help me make sense of and filter them.
Social media has made this so much worse
Instead of just seeing athletes out on the track, on the roads, or at the pool, every athlete now has a front-row seat to athletes all over the world. Carefully filtered by a powerful algorithm, selling you the next must-do session, method, or piece of gear.
Someone posts a session. It looks impressive and gets shared. Suddenly runners everywhere are doing that same session. No idea why the original athlete was doing it. No idea what they were building toward, or what their last three years of training looked like.
A lot of that advice comes from people with no real experience behind it. They sound confident. They just don't have the track record to back it up. Running influencers saying things that sound smart and mean nothing.
Some comes from well-meaning friends, too. Training partners who read the same article you did. Some comes from books and YouTube videos, half remembered and mixed up by the time it reaches you.
None of it comes with context, and context is everything when performance matters.
Trying things blindly
Here's what I see constantly. An athlete sees something. They like it, and they try it immediately.
No thought given to why it worked for the person who did it. No thought to whether it fits their training age, their race schedule, the problem they're actually trying to solve, or their body.
Curiosity isn't the issue. Curiosity is a good thing. A wide funnel, with lots of ideas coming in, that's healthy. The problem isn't the looking. It's the jump from "I saw this" straight to "I'm doing this now," with nothing in between.
The filter is the job
This is where a good coach can help you. Not necessarily by having more ideas than you, but by filtering the ones you already have.
A strong filter asks a few simple questions before anything gets through:
Does this fit where you are right now? Not where that other athlete is. Not where you want to be eventually.
Do you actually know why it worked for them, or are you guessing?
Does it fit your training age, your event, your body, and your life right now?
Is this solving a real problem you have, or does it just sound good?
Most ideas fail at least one of those questions. That's fine.
Wide funnel, strong filter
Keep your funnel wide. Read the books. Watch the videos. Talk to your training partners. Stay curious. That part of you is worth keeping.
Just don't forget to carefully filter.
A strong filter is still what I bring to my athletes now. A second set of eyes to ask if it's the right one, at the right time, for the right reason. Everything else can wait its turn.
