What Makes Coaching so Important and Why

Despite my flu, last week was a massive success.

For once, falling ill didn’t derail me. I focused on mobility and kept the momentum alive, which is the most important thing for keeping up an active lifestyle.

Last week was also a real life test of my AI coach. It’s easy to follow a predefined plan, but that’s not how life works. My coach understood the challenge and was able to suggest a working solution to overcome it.

I also had a revelation. It’s much easier to stick with something when it’s someone (or something) else giving the instructions. I suspect this will be among the top benefits an AI coach can give: having a rational outsider guiding you.

Why Coaching Matters

The revelation got me interested, so I did some research. Turns out, outsider advice working better than your own is a well known psychological phenomenon.

There’s at least two factors at play here:

The Self-Other Assymetry

When people are advising themselves, they tend to be emotionally attached and inconsistent.

When people are advising others, they tend to be more objective, unemotional and strategic in their advice. This leads to more rational advice with a fresher perspective.

As I wrote in my last blog post: https://www.1stmarathon.com/blog/getting-sick-when-training-for-marathon - I felt a “f**k this” sort of emotion when I started to get sick. I was emotionally attached to my situation, feeling a setback strike just as I had gotten started.

My AI coach however, didn’t have that emotional attachment. It was rational.

Even when sick, there’s still a lot you can do to train for a marathon. The unemotional AI coach could look at my situation, and come up with rational advice that made the best out of the annoying situation: focus on mobility and get some very easy, sub-140 heart rate runs in.

I surely could have come up with the advice myself, it’s not like it was rocket science. But I didn’t. I would have either trained harder despite the sickness, or stopped everything and waited until I felt better. Both would have been bad advice.

The Advisor Effect

The other factor at play is the advisor effect, the well known phenomenon where external sources of structure and authority boost follow through. It’s part of this experiment I’m running, but I’ve decided to take my AI’s advice, for better or for worse.

I’m just going to do what my AI advises me to do, as so many athletes do with their real human coaches.

There’s been many studies on the topic of can AI and other digital interventions carry the same advisor effect as human advisors. One meta analysis in Nature magazine recognized that:

“Findings from this systematic review and meta-analysis indicate that chatbot interventions are effective for increasing physical activity, fruit and vegetable consumption, sleep duration and sleep quality. Chatbot interventions were effective across a range of populations and age groups, with shorter- and longer-term, text and voice-based chatbots, chatbot-only and multicomponent interventions being effective. However, future large-scale trials, with rigorous study designs and outcome measures, and long-term follow-up are required to confirm these findings.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-023-00856-1

Believe in the science, and join 1stMarathon’s Early Access program at: http://1stmarathon.com/starter-assesment . Maybe you’ll overcome setbacks like I did.

What About Week 3?

It’s back to training normally. My scheduled workouts:

Monday

Rest day. I’ll be carrying furniture. AI presciption is to consider it a strength workout and focus on mobility in the evening.

Tuesday

Easy run: 3-4km gentle return to running after moving

Wednesday

Strength session: 20-25 min, focus on runner-specific work with my kettlebells

Thursday

Easy run: 3-4 km and reintroducing drills to rebuild running economy and form

Friday

Strength session: 20-25 min to reinforce “Tuesday’s work”. I don’t have a strength session on Tuesday, I have it on Wednesday. AI messes up simple days of the week?

Saturday

Long run: 5-6km to rebuild volume + drills at the end.

Sunday

Rest day: Recover from the long run.

What success looks like this week:

• Complete all 3 runs at truly easy effort
• Hit both strength sessions with runner-specific focus
• Reintroduce drills without injury
• Feel stronger by Sunday than you did today
• HRV trending back toward your 77 baseline by week's end

This week rebuilds your foundation after the illness/recovery period. Week 4 will progress volume if your body responds well.

Pretty easy schedule, except for the 5 days of working out every day without rest. Luckily the days are easy, so shouldn’t be too bad.

As a former regular runner, a 5-6 km “long run” feels quite sad.. but it’s still more running for the week than what I’m used to. Better start slow