Crowd sourcing a running coach

Ben Kaplan’s EachCoach project is elegantly simple.

Following each work-out, a runner logs their run in to the system by posting a brief summary of what they did followed by a question that they have. This query is then forwarded to another runner in the virtual community who answers it. A selection of these questions and responses are then printed in the running section of Wednesday’s National Post.

As more and more people enter the world of online coaching, EachCoach is a crowd sourcing website that allows runners to ask questions and share knowledge in an informal, free and relatively anonymous manner.

“I like to think of it as a bunch of friends hanging around the bananas after a race, trading stories”, says Kaplan.

Kaplan is a discerning gatekeeper and advice, in order to make it to press, must meet a certain benchmark.

“If someone says, you know, just go out and run for ten hours to someone just a beginner, I won’t publish that. But in general, especially with running, where so many people disagree on even basic ideas like stretching and the value of minimalist shoes, I like to hear a variety of opinions,” says Kaplan.

Questions range from specific inquiries regarding running just after pregnancy to attempting to break a four-hour marathon to trying to qualify for Boston. However, a runner attempting a series of globe spanning 5K races posted the strangest question.

“I got one question about trying to run three 5Ks in three countries in three weeks. That, on the face of it, isn’t odd, but the contributor wasn’t asking about airfare or packing, he wanted to know about pace,” says Kaplan.

As for the worst advice, that may have come from yours truly.

The question involved a desire to qualify for the Boston Marathon without overdoing it. My response affirmed that the marathon, being an immoderate activity, required a comparable approach and while temperate training might facilitate surviving the distance it would not lead to a Boston qualifying time.

“What was said wasn’t necessarily wrong, but it cost us a member and made me answer some tough questions: will I take coaching if the coaching is tough? Ultimately, I had to make a decision and I decided, yup, I would. Our community is friendly, but the marathon is not”, says Kaplan.

However, is it fair or even appropriate to call what is essentially a weekly crowd sourcing version of Dear Abbey for runners, coaching? Certainly some of the best coaches I have had in the past were the ones who were brief in their interventions, but they also carried the kind of credibility earned by plying their trade in obscurity, in some cases, for decades. And unlike EachCoach they weren’t just a first name and a small picture but a physical presence on the track and at the top of the hill week after week, dolling out equal measures of accountability and assurance.

There is an aspect to EachCoach that is a reflection of a culture where almost anyone, regardless of experience or ability, can become an authority on anything. This isn’t without value, but there is potential for EachCoach to be just another voice perpetuating the myth that everyone is an athlete and everyone is a coach and that qualification and ability aren’t particularly important.

In May 2013, during an interview for Sky Magazine, the musician Dave Grohl was asked about what he thought of singing contests like The Voice and American Idol. He responded that these kinds of shows were destroying the next generation of musicians because it mades kids believe that to become a musician, “you stand in line for eight hours with 800 people at a convention centre and then you sing your heart out for someone and then they tell you it’s not good enough. Can you imagine?”

Similarly there is a sense in the modern incarnation of the running community that potential athletes need to learn to run and what was once a sport built on the basic premise of quiet, diligent and most often, anonymous effort, has now become inexorably tied to marathon survival clinics and celebrations of collective participation over solitary achievement. Unsurprisingly, this ideology hasn’t proven to be all that inspiring to young people, leaving distance running, by default, to large groups of middle age people seeking to lose weigh while achieving self-actualization along the way. This isn’t destroying the sport but it certainly is changing it.

EachCoach thankfully doesn’t pretend to be the definitive source for coaches and coaching. Due to the fact that no money is changing hands and that all membership is voluntary, there is potential for this site to do something that has become anathema to the sport — tell people the truth. If EachCoach is prepared to give people unqualified feedback — that tepid effort leads to lack luster results and that dogged training may not always lead to a desired outcome — than there is a place for this kind of site.