Hiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!! Wow ok, so it’s been basically a year since I’ve written a post on here. EMBARASSING.

I think last time I wrote, it was a race report from Indian Wells 70.3 last year. And here I am now, about one month out from Indian Wells this year!

This year has been a bit crazy and I haven’t raced all that much. I did Oceanside 70.3 in April and I honestly did pretty well! Not an overall PR, but I PRed my run time in the 70.3 by like 8 minutes! Then I did a couple of shorter races, including the San Diego International and the Las Vegas Triathlon. Both of these were fine! No PRs, but I did win Vegas overall for women! Which was really cool.

Then I spent a lot of my summer going to weddings and various fun trips! Which meant very little racing and a little bit of an off-season for me.

I got back into my training pretty seriously in September and I’m feeling excited for Indian Wells!

Oh, also! I have a new coach!

Which is what this post is about today. I wanted to share my journey of finding a tri coach.

So here we go.

I started doing triathlon in 2016 and I didn’t hire a coach until June 2022. For most of my triathlon career, I worked off of free training plans and schedules I found online. Then, once I really fell in love with cycling in 2019, I was still kind of loosely following online plans but riding my bike A LOT. Like maybe too much to be quite frank.

I wasn’t getting any better at running because I wasn’t running enough! And I had no one to push me to run because all my friends ride bikes. So all I wanted to do was ride!

ANYWAY. After I earned my pro card last year at the LA Triathlon in May, I decided it was time that I need to step up my game. If I wanted to compete against the best, I needed someone to help me get better at running.

My aunt had worked with a guy who was a triathlon coach up in San Jose. I didn’t really know where else to start in finding a coach and my aunt really likes him, so I decided to schedule a call with him.

In our initial call, he was honest about his coaching philosophy. He expressed that much of my training would be zone 2 runs and rides (totally reasonable for triathlon training) and wayyy fewer group rides. Like basically none.

I was a bit unsure about this but my current training wasn’t really making me faster, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to switch things up, right?

It was pretty rough trying to get used to going from riding 5-6 days a week with my friends to doing all of my training solo. But again, I wanted to stick it out! And occasionally he would let me do a group ride if I asked.

Come September, I did Santa Cruz 70.3 and I had one of the worst races of my life. I definitely did not blame my coach whatsoever for this. I really think it was a fueling issue and also it was my first big race as a pro, so I put way too much pressure on myself. It was just a bad day.

But I moved past it and got back into training for Indian Wells. I figured out my fueling issue (not enough salt) and was excited to race in December.

However, yet again, I had another bad day at Indian Wells. My bike felt sluggish and I was mad that I didn’t hit my bike PR on this course since it’s so flat (my PR bike is Oceanside which like 3,000 feet of climbing, so in theory I should be faster on a flat course, right!?). Anyway, once I realized I wasn’t going to PR the bike, I caught a bad attitude which I think carried over to my run. And that ruined the whole day for me.

Again, none of this was my coach’s fault at all. But once the season was over, I kept thinking about how sad and lonely I felt training alone the whole year. I really did not enjoy my training at all. Really, I would even say I was dreading my long solo bike rides each weekend. THEN I got to the races and I didn’t even get better. So I wondered why should I even have a coach at all?

I parted ways with my coach right after Indian Wells and did my own thing for a while. When I did Oceanside, like I said in the beginning of this post, I KILLED the run course! And all that was from self-coaching!

So then I got comfortable in my decision to coach myself for awhile. Especially since I knew I wasn’t racing basically at all this whole summer. Why pay someone to coach me if I wasn’t even racing!?

WELL. By the end of the summer, I had gotten right back into my old habits of riding my bike all the time and not running enough at all. Again, I had no one to push me to run! And honestly I wasn’t swimming much either.

I started pondering the though of finding a coach again. I kind of wanted a little more structure. Especially since I knew I would soon be diving back into training for Indian Wells, and really also for Oceanside 2024.

And I had just the guy in mind.

So my bestie Hayley is an amazing cyclist. We’re talking road, mountain, track, you name it. I mean she was literally getting paid to race professionally. She has a coach named Pete. Hayley constantly talks about how incredible Pete is and how flexible he is with her training (she dealt with a similar issue of a previous coach who didn’t want her doing group rides). The key word here for me was flexibility.

Funnily enough, I found out that Pete also coaches one of my triathlon friends Jonathan. Jonathan is relatively new to the sport and with Pete, I’ve seen him improve so much. In fact, Jonathan ran the Long Beach Marathon last year with Pete as his coach and he just absolutely crushed it. And it was first marathon ever!

THENNNN, I just kept finding more and more people I know that are coached by Pete! The list of incredible cyclists and triathletes was impressive.

So I finally scheduled a call with Pete to discuss him coaching me.

He had me send him an email explaining my current training, athletic background, my job (hours, how stressful, etc), goals, and more.

After sending that email, we then set up a call to discuss what my training would look like. I was 100% honest with him and told him that I NEED at least 2 group rides per week for my mental health. Otherwise training wouldn’t be fun for me. And if it’s not fun, then what’s the point?

I told him other than those 2 rides, he can have me do whatever on all the other days. He was totally fine with this agreement! In fact, he even said (in his Australian accent), “for the most part, as long as you get the miles in, I don’t care how you do it.”

I was sold!

He even suggested that we can have a call every Monday to plan out the week together in case there are certain group rides I want to do. I LOVED THAT!

Now we’ve been working together for about 6 weeks and we’ve really gotten into a flow. He has me doing about 4 runs per week (one interval/speedwork, one recovery, a brick. and a long run-usually around 25 miles of running. Which is perfect because last year I was running 30+ and it was too much for me. I got so burnt out and struggled with hip pain), 3 swims per week (I was literally doing 1 swim per week before lol so I’m excited to see if I improve my swim time at all at Indian Wells!) and 3 rides per week (2 group rides and 1 interval session on the trainer).

This balance works perfectly for me and I’m very happy with my training right now! And while I haven’t really done a race as Pete’s athlete yet, I’m really looking forward to seeing how I do in Indian Wells (WITHOUT PUTTING PRESSURE ON MYSELF!!)

I will say one thing though. I’m kind of killing my runs lately. I feel like we’ve struck the perfect balance for me where I can still enjoy running and get miles in without overdoing it. And I’ve done so well in my interval runs in the last few weeks. I even PRed my 1 mile time like four different times recently. SO ANYWAY WE’LL SEE.

I guess my coaching story is a very, very long-winded way of saying that finding the right coach might take some shopping around. You may not find your perfect coach the first time around and that’s okay!

The most important thing is to decide what your goals are and what makes YOU happy in your training. Then before you hire a coach, have a meeting with them where you’re very open and honest about your needs. Make sure that y’all vibe together well, otherwise you won’t be a happy triathlete. And that’s not fun!!

And if a coach isn’t working for you, don’t be afraid to break up with them. I think any reasonable coach is going to understand that you need to do what’s best for yourself!

Anyway, there’s a little background on my coaching journey! Stay tuned for an Indian Wells race report in a little over a month! (I promise I’ll remember to write it hahha)