Thanksgiving 2011!

After taking a solid break from training, I'm back at it for 2012 with some solid goals for my racing and for D3 Multisport as well.

Building off last season I hope to improve upon my successful season of 2011. I'm hoping to take my two 2nd place finishes and improve that 1 place. Hopefully that's not too much to ask for. I've been racing since 1988 and I've probably had six 2nd place finishes and dozens of top 3s overall. Unfortunately, I haven't had a first place, but hope to change that this season. Set your goals high or why bother, right?

While I haven't been killing it in training, I have been hitting it hard work wise. For starters, we've brought on two new coaches who are great additions to D3. We'll have more info on them in the next newsletter.

Things we are working on:

1. We've rolled out a great new Swim Analysis service. So, no matter where you are, if you can get a video of yourself swimming, we can analyze your video and and get it back to you quickly. More info here on that here.

2. We have a few new sponsors such as Mix1 which will be offering up an incredible discount through one of our other sponsors, Max Muscle Sports Nutrition of Boulder. We'll roll that out very soon as well. Speaking of MMSN, they are also offering up a sweet deal for our Quarterly Training Plan Members as well - more on that coming up next week.

3. Our Quarterly Plans have been a huge success and I'm blown away with how many people have taken advantage of them so far in the last month. For less than $100 a month, you get a custom training plan, 1x a month check in with your coach, and access to all of our sponsors and other member benefits. We are a tad over 1/2 way to our max on this service so if you are interested, drop me a note and let me know. Once we max out we'll have to start a waiting list. Click here for more info.

4. One more item of note is that I've revised our training plans quite a bit with the addition of a New Swim Focus Plan, Run Focus Plan, Xterra Plan, and many others. I'll be rolling our the revised plans each week. These are great for the athlete who just needs a plan to follow - you load these plans into your Training Peaks account and go with it. Effective and easy to use. We've had hundreds of users benefit from our plans, so give them a chance if you are looking for something.

5. Lastly, we have a few openings for 1-1 coaching as well. Check out our Coaching Page on D3 for more info.

So, as you can see, there is a ton going on D3 wise.

If you have a training question or need help with something, don't be shy. Shoot me an email and we'll help you get sorted out.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Coach Mike

Triathlon Coaches – Get Organized!

Triathlon coaching in the modern hi-tech world of the internet has created its own challenges for coaches and athletes alike. The key to being a successful coach is being organized. Coaches typically take on more than they can handle and the athletes get less attention than they want. Many times as a coach, you’ll feel overwhelmed with how many phone calls you need to return or how many emails are in your in-box. In addition, you have schedules due to your athletes and training logs to review. If you aren’t careful this can turn into a vicious circle of always playing ‘catch up’. Depending on how many athletes you coach (more on this below), you can break your athletes into three groups. For example I coach 12 athletes and I break these athletes into 3 groups of 4 athletes and the maximum number of schedules I write is 4 schedules per week. I like to create my athlete schedules in 3 week blocks and go through the cycle every three weeks. Knowing how many athletes you can coach is usually different than how many athletes you can coach well. What you think you can do and what is reality is usually very different. It took me a number of years to realize that I couldn’t coach 30, 20 or even 15 athletes at a time. I know my ‘sweet spot’ in the number of athletes I can coach and I set a limit. Quality coaching is in high demand, even in these economic times – if you can do a superior job, typically you will get rewarded quite well for it. Trying to coach 20 athletes at $150/month can be much harder than coaching 12 athletes at $250/month. Once you can establish yourself as a high quality coach, you will be able to cut back on the number of athletes you coach and ultimately charge more for your services.

Why is this important to your success? Organizing and managing how many schedules you write keeps your stress in check and allows you more time to meet with and to actually do the all too forgotten ‘in person’ coaching.

Since we’ve started the internet coaching era, coaches do less ‘coaching’ than ever before. One of the best ways to actually see how your athletes are faring in their workouts is to actually ‘see them’ training – even if its’ once per month. Setting up a weekly or monthly training session goes a long way to keeping multiple athletes happy and on track to their goals. A group session let’s you view multiple athletes at once, and it allows your athletes see you coaching which will create a lot of credibility with your athletes.

The internet is an easy way to keep in touch with remote athletes and believe it or not you can actually see and converse with your athletes live with web cams. If your athletes can get videotaped while swimming, biking or running, you can also see how they are training and make adjustments without actually being there. Nothing will ever take the place of actual in person coaching, but there are ways to successfully coach from a distance.

At D3 Multiport, we use an incredible training program system from www.TrainingPeaks.com – this system allows us to load our plans quickly, keep track of our athlete’s progress and to know when an athlete has completed a workout. On top of that we have access to food logs, downloading power and heart rate monitor files. I know when an athlete has completed and logged a workout on Training Peaks when a simple email is delivered to my inbox, with the athlete’s comments. I can check this rather quickly and if action is needed I can email or call the athlete immediately. This makes managing my athletes quite easy. I typically set aside Mondays to look over the training week to see how the actual time spent training compares to what was scheduled. On Tuesday and Wednesday I have my scheduled phone calls taken care of and on Thursday morning I write my next block of training. This leaves me with Friday to either follow up on athlete questions or make changes to schedules if needed. Once again, there is no perfect week, but I try to stick to this schedule as best I can and if something comes up unexpectedly I have the time to take care of it. Being able to have the time to be accessible to your athletes will go a long way towards promoting yourself as a high quality coaching service that delivers the goods that your athletes expect.

Getting from Good to Great

Author Jim Collins writes about what it takes to go from good to great in his book of the same name. Collins talks about getting the 'right people on the bus', Level 5 Leadership, Confronting the Brutal Facts, and the Hedgehog Concept. While these may seem like random phrases, once you read 'Good to Great' you'll see why this book was a best seller. When I get side tracked about the pettiness that goes on sometimes amongst other coaches, I have to remind myself that I am not in competition with any other coaching company, but I am doing is trying to build a Good to Great Company. The other minutiae is just that.

As far back as I can remember I wanted to own my own business and have the freedom to do what I wanted when I wanted. It started in high school when I started a landscaping company. I worked a few other part-time jobs on the side as well, but I always felt if I needed more income, I could pick up another lawn customer or I could work more hours at my other jobs. My landscaping job eventually paid for my college tuition. My other jobs included a Sunday morning paper route, life guarding and being in the Marine Corps Reserve. Add to this playing a varsity sport in college, and you could say I was pretty busy.

Coaching as a business is reliant on getting customers and that means getting people in the athlete pipeline. For the month of September, I set a goal of accomplishing six things. Each had to with getting athletes in the pipeline for D3. I made a list of all of our former atheltes, their contact info and the last time I had contacted them. Next I made a list of every athlete that contacted us in the last eighteen months. Combined these two lists added up to about 120 athletes. I sent a personal to each one. What happened? I ended up with about 8 new athletes for the D3 coaches. The next goal was to write an article for one of the major magazines. I contacted one of the editors with an idea for an article and we agreed on a January 2009 article that will appear in the leading triathlon publication in the industry. My 4th goal was to work on advertising. For the last two years I haven't spent a dime on advertising. You may think this is crazy or even self destructive but the only thing that happened was that our business grew. We didn't grow off the charts but we grew. Lastly, my fifth goal was to put together group workouts here in Boulder. Mission accomplished. From these few things which only took a matter of hours, I improved our stable of coached athletes. It's not always the big things that make the difference but the little things that are done on daily basis - building your business one brick at a time, taking the time to make sure each brick is level and strong enough to put the next brick on top of it. Repeating this process over and over is how a strong successful business goes from good to great.

The Man on Top of the Mountain

As a sat looking up at Mt. Princeton on Sunday night, I wondered what it was going to take tomorrow to get up that mountain. It was Colorado's 10th highest 14er and it sat at 14, 197 feet above sea level. I have done five 14ers over the last few years and I am usually in late season triathlon shape for these epic climbs. This season, I have taken a lot of time off and am not quite in the shape I have been in the past. I made sure to fuel up at dinner and more than anything I steeled myself mentally for the effort it was going to take. Yes, I have some experience with the outdoors, and I consider myself in better than average shape, but you need a lot more than experience and fitness to get to the top of a 14er. My thoughts wandered to not only getting up the mountain but the return trip as well. Getting to the top is only half the battle. If you don't make it down, well, I wouldn't consider that a successful trip. There have been lots of casualties over the years on Mt. Everest - people who took the chance to summit, but they never made it back down to share their success. Climbing a mountain isn't all fun and games. Its dangerous, and you have to be prepared. Even though our trip would only be around 6-7 hours, we were preparing for an overnight. That's the way I was taught to be prepared when going into the wilderness. Going on a 2 day overnight? Pack enough dry clothes for 4 days. Bring extra matches, batteries for flashlights and food to last in case you get lost. Preparation may take a little longer, but you'll be a lot safer and more comfortable should things go wrong.

This made my think a bit about what it takes to create a great company - not one that just pumps out training plans and gives people advice, but a company that creates jobs for people who are passionate about coaching, who work hard, and want to not just be good at what they do, but to BE great and to DO great things. I wonder why some coaches don't make it to the top of the mountain. Is it because they don't have the 'can-do' attitude or is it because they don't have the skills? Maybe they want to give 90% but not 100%. Maybe they don't know how to do the little things that it takes to be successful. In the past month, I've narrowed down my weekly objectives to three things and its been making a difference. I am 2 weeks closer to my BHAG then I was when September started and I am excited to see what the next few months bring. In my next post I'll share with you one of the objectives that I have been working on with my business. Its not by accident that people make it to the top of the mountain. Its by hard work and sometimes its by sheer determination.

After all is said and done, the man at the top of the mountain didn't just fall there.

The Road to Coaching Part II


Tony B. was the coach who drafted me 1st overall when I went from minors to majors in little league (LL). His son was on the team, but he wasn't one of those coaches who had to have his son play shortstop. If I were pitching, Tommy played short, and if not, then I was playing short, with Tommy at third. We had a good team and had a lot of fun that summer playing baseball, having pool parties and just hanging out. Tony instilled a lot of confidence in me that summer. We had a great season and came within 4 outs of beating the undefeated Fiore team one Friday night. I had 14 strikeouts while pitching that night and it was the highlight of my LL career. Tony knew how to get most out of everyone and really knew how to make a team gel so much that I was friends with some of the guys on that team all the way into college.

Armand B. was our basketball coach in grammar school. He had been coaching so long at our school, that my brothers had played for him in the late 60s! Here I was playing for him in 1982. Armand was old school; yelling at you for messing up a play, or throwing a chair when he didn't like the call. He was the original Bobby Knight. Armand would make us do hundreds of lay-ups, free throws and sprints. We went over our plays so many times, we could do them blind folded. He wasn't the nicest coach, but definitely one of the best at teaching fundamentals.

Al Morro was my high school football coach and the toughest SOB and at the same time the smartest coach I've ever had. He did more with less than any other coach out there. My high school was a public school, one of four city schools. Unlike a lot of public high schools, we had to take an admission test to get in because it was a college prep school. I think our starting freshman class had 450 kids, and we graduated 220. Coach Morro didn't have a lot to work with, as he had a bunch of 'smart' kids who weren't that athletic. We were small and quick. That's what Al told us everyday - 'we are smart, we are quick, and we love to hit'. That was our mantra, every practice, every game, every season. Al had our defense disguised long before Bill Belichick's schemes and he called us 'organized chaos'. We always started in a 4-4. That's 4 guys on the line, and 4 guys right behind them. It worked well, since our offense stunk, as I remember losing a bunch of games 8-6, 14-0, 14-6 and so on. My junior year was Coach Al's last one as a head coach. We wanted to win one for him. Coach played in the 1940 Sugar Bowl with Boston College. In the 1950s he led our high school to state football championship like 8 out of 10 years. Our last game of the season was for all the marbles. If we won, we'd be playing in the Super Bowl. Coach Morro was different that week - our practices were short, we didn't go over the plays time and again. I am not sure if Coach didn't want to set himself up for a big disappointment or if he didn't want the attention of being in the big game again. In the end, Coach Morro didn't want to win - he had seen first hand how winning had ruined some teams. He thought losing built character and thought winning created big egos and showboating. During the game, we hung in there with the best team in our division and with the exception of three plays we matched our opposition head to head. Our opponent returned a punt for a touchdown, ran an interception back for a touchdown and had a 80 yard run from the line the line of scrimmage for a touchdown. It was a heart breaking loss. The most important think Coach Morro taught me was that to succeed in life you need the 5 D's of life: Drive, Desire, Dedication, Determination, and Discipline. To some of you reading this, that may sound familiar. When I moved to Colorado in 1995 I created a page to represent the things the motivated me on my refrigerator. I had a picture of the mountains, an American flag, and D4. The mountains represented strength to me. The flag represented making team USA in short course triathlon, and the D4 were the Ds that Coach Morro taught. I had decided that Drive and Desire were one in the same. While I was thinking of a name for my coaching business, I thought about that picture on my fridge, and figured D4 would be a good fit. After thinking about it some, I decided triathlon being three sports, I should name my company D3 and that's how the name for D3 Multisport originated. Thanks Coach Morro!

Happy First Birthday Hope!

A year to the day (09.04.07) Hope Ricci came into the world and pretty much turned mine upside down. Not knowing the sex of our baby kept us guessing, and it wasn't until her little rumpus came out that I saw she was a girl. Her head, shoulder and back were all telling me 'linebacker'. At 9 pounds, 11 ounces, 21 inches and 15 inch head you'd be fooled too. :)

Hard to believe she'll be a year old this week. She been walking for 6 weeks, climbs up onto everything, and if chased, will run (and shriek) from you. My journey down the path of fatherhood is just beginning, and every day I am amazed at how delicate, tough, focused, adorable, and just plain old precious she is. It's true that you don't realize how much your parents love you until you have a child. You say you might take a bullet for a best friend or even your spouse, but for your child you wouldn't even think about it. You want nothing more than for that little baby to be safe from everything evil in this world. Over the last year I realize how tough that job will be, but how much I look forward to embracing it. Happy Birthday Sweet Pea!

The Road to becoming a Coach, Part I

Growing up the youngest of 4 boys, I was always schooled on the fundamentals of athletics. I was late to the party, arriving nine years after my closest brother and 15 and 16 years after my two oldest brothers. I have vivid memories of my brothers hitting me ground ball after ground ball at the age of 9 and on. I remember shooting free throws for hours on end, or practicing my jump shot from the left side of the key, off the dribble of course. One day while I taking grounders from my brother Kevin, I took one to the face. I was pretty shaken up, and kept lifting my head away from the ball on the ensuing grounders. Finally, my brother walked over to me, put the ball on the ground in front of me and said, 'Can that ball hurt you? Are you tougher than that ball?'. While I started to argue, that yes, in fact the ball could hurt me, he was already walking away, getting ready to hit me more ground balls. I didn't really have any excuse to lift my head away, because I knew I would be giving into my fears. I didn't want to disappoint my brother but at the same time, I wanted to be the best baseball player on the field when I was playing.

Fast forward to 1979, and I am trying out for the local little league minor leagues. I hit well that day, gobbled up all the ground balls and showed that I could pitch too. All that practice was rewarded when I was selected first in the draft, to the worst team in the league (um is that a reward?). In my first game, I was playing second base and in the final inning we were clinging to a small lead. The opposing team had a runner on first as the batter hit a high chopper up the middle that was going to be a sure hit into center field. I ran behind second base, snared the ball, ran back over the bag for the force out and threw out the runner at first. A game ending double play and needless to say, my training had paid off.

Over the years, I've had some great coaches, and some, um, not so great coaches. The great coaches were my Little League coach, Tony B, my grammar school basketball coach Armand B, and my football coach in high school, Al Morro (the legendary hammer coach) I've had other coaches as well, and all of these coaches, good or bad, have impacted my coaching style. Some were yellers, and some were not. I've always been motivated by 'good job', 'nice play' or 'you'll get 'em next time'. I've never been motivated by the 'get your head out of your butt' comment. Even though some of the above coaches used the negative reinforcement tactic, it didn't really inspire me to get better. This is one of the most important parts of coaching: an athlete has to trust the coach! If not, all the talent and the greatest training plan in the world are worthless. I'll touch more on this in a later post. In Part II I'll write more about the men who helped mold me as a coach.