Almost 12 months ago Emily Apolito and I sat down up at Mt Hotham at the climbing camp and had a chat about what to do next.  She'd won the JW15 500m time trial at the Vics as a junior girl in her age group and finished mid-field at the Aussies.  She was pretty keen to do better and so we drew up a plan together.

And so we're at crunch-time.  Tomorrow at around 6:15pm Emily will be racing in the Big V on her home turf in her biggest race.  This time she's not racing for experience, she's there to win it.  Come and cheer her and the other juniors along.  It's not every day you get to see elite sportspeople racing at their very best and Emily and all the other juniors will be giving it their all.  Go Emily, Go!

Vic masters sprint day on Saturday.  No excuses, I have trained all year, gotten stronger, thought I'd gotten faster.  Even lost a little bit of weight!  To no avail ... Flying 200 was 12.95something, slower than last year (12.91) despite better aero gear.  Didn't qualify for the finals.  I didn't do the kilo (never again after last year, the kilo sucks!) and in the Keirin I didn't want to get involved in the stupidity happening at the front and gambled on doing a Bradbury when they all crashed. 

They crashed in the first run of the race, Turbo got brought down most unfairly and I think no-one was watching it happen, the perpetrators didn't get suspended and from where I was, it was clear that they should have.  Modern Keirin does not include pushing down onto a rider who is in the lane and causing them to crash.  Maybe back in the 1970's, but not in 2010.

In the re-run, almost the same thing happened again, I sat off the back and watched, then when the pace went on I didn't have the legs to go with it. 

So, no better than last year.  I think that means, that after a year or so's dedicated sprint training, that I'm not ever going to be any good as a sprinter.  I can live with that, I'm enjoying the sprint series, I'll never be any sort of elite, but that's ok, I love sprinting and will keep doing it and keep trying to chip away at my PB in the flying 200.  I just won't ever be able to give guys like Lou Pascussi any competition, but that's ok with me.  We're all playing with the hand we're dealt at birth and I figure if I can get the best out myself, that'll be enough for me.

Everyone else had a good day.  Dino and Mick were the best of the Vics at the sprint and keirin respectively, I still don't know why Queenslanders and Tasmanians are allowed to enter, and win, the Vic state titles, I'm sure there's a reason for it but I don't know what it is.  Chris Ray rode his best kilo in competition (after a F200 and a bunch of sprints) and got 3rd in the sprint and I think placed in the Keirin as well?  Craig rode well given his very upset year with a lot of personal stuff to contend with too, and on the Sunday Cam and Mick rode scorchers too. 

And I didn't bugger it up too badly ...

Hilton called me on Tuesday morning, he had some family stuff to do on Wednesday night and as I'd been assisting him for the past month or so, he asked me to run the session.  Hilton has a program not dis-similar to our DISC sessions, but more densely packed, much longer (it works out to about 7 and a half hours now, from 2:30ish 'til 10pm) and with more different groups to take care of.  He'd be there 'til about 5:30pm then had to go.  I got in to DISC at about 2:30pm to get an overview of the night's plan (ours is online, his is on a bit of paper) and we went over the various things everyone had to do.  The U17 sprinters had some specific drills, the CCCC enduros were pretty simple, they had take a lap in pairs efforts and then some handicap 500m efforts for a couple of blocks, the pursuiters had scheduled cadence drills and so on. 

So it was a chocka-block program, as usual for those nights.  I would get help from Daryl Perkins at about 7pm but otherwise it was all parents etc to help out where possible.  I had Emily there doing some specifics at about 4pm while Hilton worked with Madison Hammond, she and he were done by 5:30 when the main group of sprinters arrived.  The enduros all get there to start at 7pm which was when it was going to get interesting.  The sprint stuff I mostly have a handle on, and the bulk of the enduro work is variations on a theme (stop them getting bored while doing E3 and over threshold efforts, essentially).  The pursuiters have particular needs as they prepare for the Aussie titles in a week and a bit.

At the end of the night we managed to slot in some madison practice for some of the sprinters and enduros and no-one crashed and as far as I know at least, everyone left satisfied with the session.  It wasn't perfect, the pursuiter's warmup was botched a little due to a misunderstanding of the written drill for them during the warm up, but it worked out ok.

At 10:20pm, when we walked out, I was knackered but reasonably happy with how it went.  There's things I need to do better, I need to go faster on the motorbike for some of the sprinters who are really quick, and I need to get a better handle on how Hilton works with the pursuit squad, but that will come with time and I'm pleased with the night.  They're a good squad of motivated people and a delight to work with.

All last week the forecast had been iffy, Saturday was the golfball hailstones ... Sunday morning I woke up and it was belting down rain and the BoM said 'more to come'.  So we made the call to cancel round 5.

As it was, the rain stopped at around midday, and by 1pm the track was dry.  There wasn't much we could do at that point.  The conditions for sprinting were perfect by then.  We'd probably not have been able to run a full program anyway, we wouldn't have been able to set up the track properly until around 12:30, and start the flying 200's at around 1 or so, which would have meant that we'd not be racing 'til 2, and it started raining again at around 5, so maybe ... but it's too late now to change it.  I do think the BoM should only get paid when they're within 10% of their predictions though!

Round 6 ... is 5 weeks away.  The Vic Masters are next weekend, indoors (but I bet DISC leaked over the w'end!) and then Emily's racing at the Aussie titles on the following weekend.  Come along on the Thursday evening and cheer her on as she races the 500m ITT.  We're expecting her to be starting somewhere around 6-6:30pm on Thursday the 18th of March. As this is normally a 'spin' night, spin is cancelled for the 18th.  Come and cheer on Emily and have chicken and chips with us afterwards at Nandos in Ivanhoe instead!

On Monday I was lucky to be a small part of the team helping Liz Randall set her world mark for the hour for her age.  My job was to walk the line, which is basically a simple way to show the rider how they're pacing themselves, as they're not allowed to use any computers etc on the bike during the effort.  It was a good night, some 30-odd people showed up to cheer and encourage Liz and she dug deep into herself to keep going, she explains how it all went here.  It's a good read. Sadly, even though I sent an email to news@bbn on Monday, there's still nothing on the BBN website about it.  I think the world mark is a big deal and something to make a big fuss about.  Leanne Cole was there to take photos.

And on another front, for the last month or so I've been working with Hilton Clarke and the local NTID squad, a lot on Wednesday nights and over the school holidays.  This started off as racking up time for the level two coaching qualification, and sort of evolved into an assistant role.  We (Hilton and I) had discussed the possibility of it being a formal (paid!) job, but it seems that that can't happen at the moment, which is a bummer.  I've much enjoyed working with Hilton and the squad.  I'm going to keep going along and helping for as long as I can afford the time and hopefully something will come of it, so I'll be in at DISC tonight.  I'm learning a lot from these sessions and want to be involved in some capacity.

And ... round 5 of the SSS this Sunday - entries are down, probably because of the clash with the Bendigo Madison but we'll keep haranguing people to come and race.  I've also entered the Vic Masters for MMAS2 (35-40) in the sprint and the keirin, but I learned from my lesson last summer, I'm NOT doing the kilo again!  At the moment there's three of us in the sprint and two in the keirin, so I might get a third and a second place! heh ...

Over the last couple of days I received an email from some guy from an insurance company asking me to be a part of their sales machine.  In the interests of full disclosure, they offer 20% commission for sales or referrals or something, for their insurance scheme for bikes. 

I'm not the only coach that has been approached. They claim at least 7 coaches are on their scheme.

Be aware, if a coach pressures you into taking out insurance on your bike(s), they may not be being impartial.  Ask them if they're getting a cut.

For what it's worth, I refused to be a part of it.  Our clients should be able to trust us to give them independent, untainted advice.  Once your finger is in the pie, you're no longer impartial.

Everyone's trying to sell you something ....

MMAS2, sprint day (Saturday).

Hot, gusty northerly.

98.4", disk wheel.

Held starts (!%#$CV#$RT@#$!!!!!) not gate starts.  500m ITT, 42.02s (~0.5s faster than last year) - good enough for 3rd, beaten by the Wizard and Jamie Goddard.

Flying 200's - same gear, 13.4 (hand timing, lots of variance, one had me at 13.2 .... results as such of no value as very inconsistent).  Qualify 4th (!) - Wayne Arazny rode a 12.9ish f200!  Wow..... Very gusty northerly making for fast but inconsistent times.  A lot of luck with the gusts, or bad luck, depending on when you got a blast of wind.

I drop down to 91.8" for the sprints.

Race Jamie Goddard in the semi, he wins after leading me out for 2.5 laps.  I didn't come off his wheel with enough power, maybe a chance lost?  Jamie's bloody quick ... I dunno, if I'd come at him harder?  Maybe?

Race Wayne Arazny for 3rd place, I win, Wayne's cooked, he needs more sprint training, he's fast, but he runs out of efforts very quickly, if his 200m time was right, and we think it was close, he's much faster than he raced against me.

So two third places.  Given that The Wizard would win, and Jamie .. they're both a level above me, I'm pleased with the days efforts.  The F200 was my best for the summer, although the time is not to be trusted.

Dino won the 500 and the sprint in MMAS5.

Em won the 500 and the sprint in JW15.

It'll be a busy night at presentation night for the aboc sprint squad.

Em on fire at state team training, reports of a blisteringly quick standing 125 ... Watch out at the Aussies ...

Yesterday I spent at DISC, I was there at 9am working with Liz Randall as she gets ready for her hour record (1st March), then I hung around and waited for John Beasley, to assist him with the Malaysian squad, but I got it wrong!  They weren't in on Wednesday!  Doh!  So I ducked home for a couple of hours, and went back in to get there at 4pm to work with Hilton.

Welcome to the madhouse.

I had been to watch a few Wednesday night sessions over the years as a casual observer, but this time I was in the thick of it.  It starts for the coaching team at about 4, Hilton and Daryl Perkins (from now on, Perko ...) were sorting out stuff in the NTID/VIS/CCCC cage, I helped a bit, carried some stuff, then we had a look at the program for the night.

Many of you reading this have been to our sessions, and will know that we publish the plans ahead of time and have done so for a couple of years now.  So we're no strangers to planned sessions, but this is a whole new scale and intensity ... The session starts at 6:30pm sharp, with warmups for the sprinters and then the enduros (30 mins sprinters, 40 mins enduros), then they had 3 groups - Sprint, NTID/Pursuit and Enduro.  

I did the enduro warmup on the motorbike, Hilton did the sprinters.  The original request was 20 laps at 35, 15 laps at 40, 10 laps at 45, 15 laps ramping up to 58km/h.  When I took it up to around 55km/h with about 7 laps to go, Perko waved me to slow, the bunch was HUGE - there was maybe 35 enduros chasing the motorbike and with the bunch that big it was too fast, so we dropped back to 50km/h for the last 5 laps.

Then the carnival began.  The groups were NTID sprint (mostly, a couple of non-NTID riders were in the squad) doing MACCs, pursuit (NTID) doing pursuit cadence drills, and general enduro training.  For 3 hours it was hectic, a contingent of CCCC guys and Perko helped, with getting the various groups ready to go and misc helping out.  I timed the MACC efforts for the first 2 (of 4) 300m MACCs, and Hilton got me to ride the motorbike for the third set of efforts - I hadn't done it with his guys before and was a bit conservative with the speed I took them to, but that'll be better next time.  Hilton did the last effort for them while I timed again.

I also did the pacing for half of the pursuit training stuff, the first time I walked the line for them I got it wrong and went the wrong way!  Sorry guys!  We fixed it from then on.  Mea Culpa!

Overall, it was a mind-bending experience.  A lot of stress, a lot of people with a jam-packed program of training.  It all mostly worked out and the program was mostly adhered to.  I got home at about 11pm, totally knackered!

It's not 100% confirmed, but tomorrow I'm working with Hilton Clarke from ~5pm, as an assistant with the NTID squad he coaches.  I'm not sure what sort of formal work/pay thing this will involve (I can't do it for free!), but hopefully some of these details will get sorted quickly.

I'm quite looking forward to the new challenges this will bring about, and working with some very talented cyclists.

I get the Peaksware email every week or so (I own copies of WKO+, which is the industry standard power analysis software).  Every week, they're trying to sell me something ... this week it's some protecting protein story.   Apparently there's some 'concentrate' that prevents high intensity training from catabolising muscle.  Or something like that anyway ... The email points to a website full of nonsense and inscrutable jargon, and it doesn't actually tell you anything useful, "sign up here for my program" instead.

Uhuh ... 

At least the study being cited is linked to, so you can work it out for yourself ... The study just says, in a nutshell, that high intensity exercise damages muscles.  OH REALLY?!  The tout is then for a program of 'food concentrates'. Here's a tip, they probably mean protein and carbohydrate supplements, whey isolates and glucose, I'd bet.  If it's not like c4p I'll be amazed .... 

Then there's the RBR newsletter, every week or so, full of pointers to ebooks you can buy, and a couple of useless 'tips' as bait while they try and flog more articles to you.  Got to make a buck, I guess ... It just seems really crass and slimy to me.

At aboc, we publish everything and keep no secrets (outside of client confidentiality concerns).  There's no hook to a sale, if you want to know something, ask us and we'll put up an article if we can find the answer.  

For giggles, see if you can make any sense of this : http://prospro.posterous.com/eating-protein-vs-protecting-proteins-1

I'm waiting on an update to my video editing software (PowerDirector 8.0, in case anyone's interested) to resolve an uploading to YouTube issue, so have a few moments to kill between editing videos for the sprint round last weekend.

I'd like to write a big report for the club teams championships last Saturday and the sprint round on Sunday, but this will be a very brief one.

CTC, a team of three of us, myself, Dino and Russell Poole are the Blackburn 'Open Masters' No.1 team.  I'm the first rider, Dino is No.2 and Pooley is our third after the Wizard couldn't commit.  We did ok, the event was a bit of a mess, no starting gates(!) and no split timing etc, but it was the same for everyone (except we'd spent a lot of time practicing gate starts!).  We ended up qualifying fourth so we just scraped into the final, to race off for 3rd place against Hawthorn's team of The V-Train, Aaron and some other guy who's name I don't know.  They'd qualified about four seconds faster than us, so we were never going to be in it,  but we went a little faster and they went a little slower but it was still three seconds too much, so we had to settle for fourth place.  Better than last year, so that's good ...

Round 4, I did my best flying 200 for the season, but still too slow, on a perfect day, I should, in hindsight, have used a bigger gear than 91.8", I'd felt strong during the week and probably would have done better on 94" or so, but it is what it is and 13.6s would have to do.  B grade was big, 10 of us, and I was one of the slower ones in qualifying. 

A very long story cut short, I beat Craig Towers, Ed Osbourne drilled me a new one, and Stewart Lucy took advantage of a huge tactical blunder on my part to win easily too, so not the best day's racing for me!  Still a lot of fun and the series continues to get good feedback.  There's a crew over in South Africa that want to copy the format and some in NSW as well, so that's very pleasing.  Our dream of a national series is gaining some momentum!  Jodie Dundas did a great job on the video camera, Lucie took ace photos and Sue ran the day like clockwork.  We got help from Will Thomas on the scoring duties as Anne Apolito was unavailable.

In other news, Emily teamed up with Caitlin Ward to roll the JW17 club team sprint by 2 seconds, quick kid, that Emily ... more medals for Dino to find homes for!  Thanks to the Thomas's and Bev for looking after Em on the day.

And if you haven't heard (get out from under the rock!) Mike Goldie from Carnegie-Caulfield was hurt in a low speed tumble at a training session at DISC last week,  from all of us we wish him a speedy and uncomplicated recovery.

Over the last month I've spent quite a lot of time in at DISC working with (assisting) Hilton Clarke with the NTID sprinters and also John Beasley with the Malaysian sprinters.  Some of you reading this know both these blokes, and it's fair to say that they have vastly different styles and they both get great results from their riders, one of the Malaysian lads won the keirin at the Beijing world cup two weeks ago and Hiltons' NTID lads are currently ripping it up at the Aussie titles.

All I'm going to write about in this blog entry is their warmups before a track sprint training session.

Without going into any inner philosophy stuff, here's what they both do :

John/Malaysia : 40 laps behind the motorbike, starting at 35km/h, gradually winding up to 45km/h, the guys then have a bit of a sprint for the last half lap or so and then a couple of activations (short slow-start sprints).  They're usually on 84" or 86".  After this they sit down and rest, they do no more activations etc between efforts.  John has them riding at 100% or sitting on their backsides.

Hilton/NTID : 50 laps behind the motorbike, starting at 30 km/h(10 laps), 35 km/h(10), 38km/h(10), 42km/h(10) then accelerate from 42-60km/h over 10 laps, all on 84".  They then do two activations or entries off the bank depending on what drills they have to do during the session.  Hilton also has them do two activations before every effort.

So Hilton's NTID warmup is a lot bigger than the Malaysian squad's warmup.  

Some trivia, one of the Malaysian lads rode a 9.8s flying 200 on Tuesday, it was lead out by the motorbike with John riding the bike and swinging off at the 200m line, I was timing the effort and had to ask John if I'd made a mistake, nope .. He's that fast ..  Wow!

Every now and then you'll read or hear about some dramatic new (or, more likely, recycled old!) training method that gets huge gains in performances from some group of people.  This happens in most sporting fields.  There'll be some new product making big claims about 20% improvements in some measure of performance and so on .. Glossy adverts, flash websites making big claims, and they've got studies to back them up!

How does this happen and what does it mean, and how can you, as a skeptical cyclist who's seen it all before, make sense of it?

Leaving out sloppy science and badly designed studies paid for by companies trying to sell their product, let's see if we can make some sense out of training and performance.

Firstly, take a look at this graph :

 The X axis is time spent training, the Y axis is performance and hopefully you'll notice that there's a ceiling, that's your genetic potential.  Everyone has one of these, and ultimately that's what decides if you can be an elite athlete or not. The only way to go above your genetic potential is to get involved in doping.

The graph starts at "untrained novice".  In our context, this would be someone who's never ridden a bike in any sort of training sense but can ride without falling over.

As you can see from the graph, initial performance increases are rapid.  A novice, very quickly with good training, progresses and makes rapid gains.  This isn't unique to cycling, it's the same in weight training, running, rowing, you name it .. anything that has a significant physiological fitness component responds in this way to training.

What's interesting, and often misleading, is that even poorly designed training plans can lead to rapid initial advancement, it's call the 'Novice effect' which I've mentioned before.  It approaches the genetic limits slower than an optimally designed program would. 

An extreme example of this would be setting a couch potato up with a program of lap swimming as their cycling training - initially their cycling would improve but it would rapidly plateau, much more rapidly than a program of well designed cycling intervals would.  The novice effect is basically 'something is better than nothing' in this context.  This often leads to much confusion, as we, gullible humans, see what we did initially working (even if it's not optimal, how do you know?) and assume that it's the best way to train.  It might be, or it might not be, the novice effect can be deceiving to the unwary.  This includes a lot of exercise physiologists who use poorly designed studies and very unwise extrapolations to lead coaches and athletes down dead-end paths.  So-called 'evidence-based coaching' is fraught with peril, as so many studies are poorly designed and the subjects badly chosen.

What should, I hope, be obvious from this visual depiction of progress in the graph above, is that it's relatively easy to get significant improvements from untrained athletes, and also, that it's much harder to get improvements from athletes who are close to their genetic potential.  A 20% improvement in a novice is fast and easy, in an elite athlete close to their potential a 2% improvement may take months or years or never.

Marketing people love to use novice improvement to 'prove' that their product is better than everything else and thus, sell you something.  Sometimes, their product is very good, but the data is misleading if it's not viewed in the context of the above graph.

About a week or so ago I found, on the front porch of aboc HQ, four books.  One was one of mine that I'd lent out, 'Breaking the Chain' by Willie Voet, and three others that weren't mine but were very cycling-specific.  It's a mystery as I'm not sure who I lent Breaking The Chain out to so I don't know what the story is with the three others?  Am I to keep them?  Borrow them and return them?  I don't know .. If it's you?  Please let me know!

Also, I think I lent my copy of Practical Programming for Strength Training 2nd Ed out, but again, I'm sloppy with loans and can't remember who I lent it to, if you have it, can I please have it back, it's one of my main references and I'm missing it a lot!

Alex Simmons up in Sydney is starting up a spin session.    $40 a session, which is $160-$200 a month depending on the number of Mondays in the month or something like that.  Wow ... They are supplying computrainers, and they're expensive ergos, but still .. That's a lot of pony up for for an hour or so on an ergo.  I wonder if they provide dinner?  We do.  The Computrainer increases your cycling power by 20-30% and your speed by 2 to 4 MPH (3.2-6.4km/h) or so the Computrainer website claims anyway. I'm not sure I'd ever make that sort of a claim and I'm a little surprised that Alex, who is by all accounts an ethical sort of a guy, would quote that claim on his site, even if he did add in "it has the potential to" which is one of those wishy-washy weasley phrases used by companies that sell placebos that"have the potential to INCREASE MUSCLE BY 1100108.76%!". I know Alex, not all that well, but I did spend some time with him at the level two course last November and he's a good guy, very devoted and certainly a very good prescriber of power-training drills and a very keen coach. If there's a market for it up there in Sydney, good luck to him with the venture.  It's a tough gig to make money being a full time cycling coach and a bit of hyperbole is to be expected, I guess.

As a few of you reading this know, I've been working with Hilton Clarke and John Beasley in at DISC getting hours up for mentored coaching as part of getting the level two cycle coaching qualification.

I've got the hours up now (23 mentored, I needed 20), and by way of trivia, I've logged all the time I've spent coaching since the start of January.  So far, 90.5 hours, in a month.  Phew ... That's a combination of time spent running spin sessions, having meetings with riders, strength coaching in the 'haus, time at DISC with Hilton and John, coaching Em at the Junior Vics and so on.

Along the way I've had to use the stopwatch. The stopwatch all the elite coaches use here is the Seiko S149.  It's not a cheap bit of kit, RRP in Oz is around $700 but you can get it online from the US for around $400 or so, which is what I did.  Why such an overpriced stopwatch?  You can get a basic lap/split stopwatch for around $20.  But, this has a printer (big deal?) and it's also the standard that everyone uses, so if I'm working with Hilton, or John, or any of the others we can all use the same timer and know how it works and how to use it.  The printer is handy for working with pursuiters, being able to print out lap splits and cumulative times is of value.  It's also pretty-much bombproof.  John's S149 is about 10 years old and still works, you can't see the writing on the case anymore because it's been handled so much, but it works as well as the day he got it.  That sort of reliability is worth paying for.

Often stuff behind the scenes doesn't get noticed (that's why it's behind the scenes, right?).  At yesterday's Australia Day Madison there was some confusion and consternation, in particular with regards to the race program at the start of the day.  Luckily Blackburn has Rob Monteath as secretary, Rob was under enormous pressure and was lacking in information, as he'd not been made privy to very much, but was the focal point for enquiries on the day and beforehand.   Rob, the club and all of us who raced and were involved owe you a debt of gratitude for your hard work and dedication and calm under fire.  Thank you.  Without your efforts the day would have been a disorganised disaster, instead it ended up a huge success.

I've spent a little bit of time now over the last week with a few very experienced coaches as part of the process of getting level two accreditation.  It's been very educational so far, although I've only scratched the surface of what they do.  There's some interesting things that have cropped up so far.

Some obvious things :

Everyone has different approaches and methods and styles, as John Beasley would say "there's more than one way to skin a cat".  Everyone's also got different agendas and that brings me to the meat of this article.

Who does a coach work for?  The answer is fundamentally important. 

If a coach is employed by an athlete, the coach works for that athlete.  Their goal at that time is to help that athlete achieve their personal goals.  There's a role there for the coach to guide an athlete towards appropriate long term goals but there's no selection policy and the rider's wants come first and if a rider can't or won't do something, the coaches job is to find alternatives that the rider will do.  If a rider wants to specialise in a particular event, then the coaches job is to help that rider achieve in that event.  The aim is to develop that rider, one egg, one basket and handle the basket very carefully, so to speak.  Donna-Rae told me once, and I'll never forget it "As a coach you may have many athletes, but each athlete has only one career".  This is a fundamental defining aspect of the role of the coach for the individual rider.  The rider is trusting the coach to help them achieve their goals.  The rider has the power to hire and fire the coach.

If a coach is employed by an institute or a team or a club*, then the coach doesn't work for the individual athletes any more.  They work for the institute and have to provide the results that the institute wants.  This may not always be in the best overall interests of every one of the individual athletes in a particular squad, or meet up with the wants of those individuals.  The athletes then become tools to be used by the institute to achieve its aims.  A common name for the institutes is the gold medal factories.  They have a very different job to do than that of the coach for an individual rider as their master is focused on different outcomes.  They have selection processes, they have performance criteria and they have to not only select athletes but also de-select them. 

From the outside, the training programs look similar, but from the inside the process and motivation is different.  Somewhat similar to the difference between a training bunch of roadies and a race.  It looks the same from the outside, but inside it's a vastly different animal.  The institutes, development squads and national teams are funded by political decisions and they have to produce politically acceptable results.  In the context of the AIS, this means gold medals at Olympics and World Champions, for example.  It doesn't matter to the political masters how many athletes the institutes churn through to get those results.  While the coach of a squad like the AIS, NTID etc will certainly care for the riders in their squads, they know that they serve a different master.  The individual riders may want the same thing that the coach wants for them and that the institute's funding relies on, but the rider is, ultimately, a disposable entity.  They (the riders) know this and accept it as part of joining the squad.  If they don't make the grade, they're out.  It's a different world.  This is, crudely, the "chuck the eggs at the wall and keep the ones that don't break" world.  Some squads are more overt about it than others, but this is the fact of the matter.

[*] Often at club level this is different, many clubs 'employ' coaches to provide introductions to the sport or general 'club training' and there's no selection criteria or much in the way of performance requirements.  Showing up is often sufficient!

Some of you will be aware that I'm working on getting level two coaching accreditation, I started off at the course a month ago in Adelaide, and there's extra requirements apart from the course.

Part of it is logged coaching time, 60 hours in total, 40 unsupervised and 20 supervised or mentored.

Needless to say the 40 unsupervised hours are already done.  That didn't take very long at all.

The 20 mentored/supervised hours are about to get underway.  I'm doing time with Hilton Clarke tomorrow at DISC with the NTID squad, and with John Beasley on Thursday and Friday with the Malaysian sprint squad, also at DISC.  I'm quite looking forward to it.

From here.

Some extracts :

Defeat is the sporting experience that dare not speak its name. Defeat is the thing that keeps us coming back: for when victory is certain, where is the joy? A mismatch brings no pleasure to the winner, and we call such victories hollow.

And it finishes with :

We are as hooked on defeat as we are on victory. Sport would not be sport without misery, without despair, without hopelessness. Victory is for wimps: it is in defeat that the true spirit of sport is to be found.

Read the whole article, it's more about soccer than anything else, but it's a good article, from a spectators perspective.