We all need to be held accountable in life.  It is in our human nature to be slothful when left to our own devices.  How easy is it to pick up the tub of icecream at the end of a hard day after the house is quiet and no one is watching.  Five minutes and 700 calories later you are wondering what in the heck you were thinking.  (Okay!  This is a personal experience and I’m just really hopeful that someone else out there knows what I am talking about………If not, I’m in a lot more trouble than I first thought).  Without accountability, I know that my will-power can wain as quickly as it came on.

When it comes to health, wellness and exercise…….IT IS HARD WORK!  It is tough to pull yourself out of bed at 6:30 a.m. to walk on a treadmill in a cold, smelly gym for 30 minutes all by yourself.  Add a workout partner to that equation who will call and wake you up if you dare leave sitting in a cold car in front of your house and your chances for success increase exponentially.  This is why most people invest in personal training.  Not many of my clients come to me incompetent or even uneducated.  They simply need external motivation.  They need someone to be holding them accountable to their goals.  Test the theory out for yourself and start food journaling.  Just knowing that you HAVE TO write down what you are eating helps you make better food choices.  Stupid human nature!

I am no different than most of my clients.  I find it challenging to eat right.  It is hard to follow my own training schedules sometimes (especially when they haven’t really changed in the past 5 years).  It is even harder to know when NOT to follow my own plan.  This is where my new endeavor comes in.  Drumroll please…………I’VE HIRED A COACH!  For quite a while now I have tossed around the idea of getting a coach.  I’ve listened to other athletes talk about their coaching experiences and seen the benefits they have with some “professional intervention”.

Since my first triathlon race in 1999, I have been “self-coached”…..if that is what you call it when you put together some sort of calendar with a bunch of workouts hoping that you will be alive to attend the event highlighted in yellow a few months later.   I’ve done well and seen great success, but I feel that there is more to unlock from this body of mine, but I just don’t know how to get to it.  I’m an experienced personal training and fitness professional, but when it comes to looking and training myself it becomes difficult.  Like I admitted before with the icecream incident……I’m far from perfect.  It is easy to tell someone else how to accomplish their goals…..I have the answered…..It’s just not so easy to apply that advice to myself.  I’m very coachable.  I love to listen and learn from other fitness professionals.  I love to learn.  So I’ve taken the plunge…….

Just before I travelled to Boston, I had the pleasure of meeting the coaches from HT Training, Heath and Mahogani Thurston.  They are knowledgable, experienced and just plain down-to-earth people.  I’m so excited!  After a week of rest post-Boston, I received my first week of workouts on TrainingPeaks, this awesome tracking software that maps out all my workouts.    I felt like a kid at Christmas!  All of the sudden I was free!  I didn’t have to think anymore.  I just had to perform and report on how it went.   Comment, upload and save!  Someone else would interpret the data and adjust the plan.

Though, I’m pretty sure that Coach M was trying to kill me this week, I can already see how her experience and knowledge is going to be able to take me to an entirely different level of training and racing.  I did things this week I have never done in training before.  It left me wondering what exactly I had been doing.  I can’t wait to race this summer and reap the benefits!

For the first time in my life, the trainer is now the trainee.  That is a roll I think I’m really going to enjoy……………