When I graduated from graduate school a million years ago, I found myself teaching at a small school in Vermont called The Putney School. I applied for and took the job because, well, it was the one I had in front of me. I knew little about teaching, but I’d had great teachers, and had worked with kids for years at a camp in Maine. Putney, it turns out, was a perfect fit. A socialist school (really!) that ran due to all the work the kids put in around the place, it was founded back in the 1930s by a woman named Carmelita Hinton who prescribed to John Dewey’s progressive method of education. Dewey believed that “education should be responsive to the needs and interests of children as opposed to teaching a set curriculum proscribed by traditional practice.” I taught there for three years, during the formative part of my teaching career, and my own philosophy of working with students was pretty much set by the time I moved to Oregon to work at The Catlin Gabel school, another independent school that valued progressive education (sort of).
I’m mentioning all this because it’s a roundabout way of describing my manner of working with athletes. Coaching, just like teaching, should be responsive to the needs and interests of the individual athlete. In that vein, I try very hard to listen to my athletes and respond to what they need, rather than just stuffing them into a program that has worked for others.
I offer two levels of coaching services. Both come with a premium TrainingPeaks account which I set up for you.
ONE-ON-ONE COACHING, $250/MONTH
The one-on-one program is my premium level of coaching, and the athlete gets what I get from my coach (that seems fair, right?): phone contact once a week, unlimited email contact, a constantly evolving training plan that changes due to the immediate needs of the athlete, nutritional counseling, race schedule advice…pretty much any and everything. I limit my client load at this level to ten athletes to keep the quality of their service extremely high.
THREE MONTH TRAINING PLANS, $75/HOUR
The training plan option gets you three months of workouts, crafted to meet your athletic demands, life schedule, and racing schedule. You and I sit down for a comprehensive consultation about your sporting history and goals, and then I build you a schedule that fits your life. There is less contact in these plans (hence the lower rate): we sit down once a month to go over everything you’ve been doing, and there is regular email contact through TrainingPeaks. The first three month plan usually takes me about six hours ($450), and subsequent three month blocks usually take about four hours ($300), since I know you pretty well by then.
We spend a considerable amount of time building a client’s custom workout program from scratch, so all packages require a one-time $100 set-up fee.
