Coaching conversation with Malcolm Brown MBE Malcolm Brown, one of the UK s most celebrated athletics coaches, was the special guest at Godiva Harriers on Monday 13 May 2013 to share some stories, thoughts and words of wisdom from his years as endurance running coach for UK Athletics and the current coach to members of the British Triathlon squad. In his coaching career Malcolm has coached athletes to international appearances at Commonwealth, European, World and Olympic level and was British Triathlon's Olympic Performance Manager for the London 2012 Olympic Games. In 2002 he was asked if he would help two young brothers improve their run speed, and the now Olympic gold and bronze medalists Alistair and Jonathan Brownlee have worked with him ever since then. Malcolm currently sets their run training and oversees their general programme. He was awarded an MBE in the Queen's New Year's Honours List in January 2013. Below are some notes from the conversation which saw Malcolm answering questions posed by club athletes and coaches. What is your coaching philosophy / what gets you out of bed? I ve been coaching since 1980 and three years ago I was offered a salary for the first time so it clearly isn t money! I enjoy helping young people realise their potential. There is a lot of similarity between the roles of education and sport in young people s lives, so coaching is really about trying to enhance young people s lives through sport. I enjoy doing that. When it comes to endurance running, what are the things that haven t changed in all the years you have been coaching? My father was a runner in the 1950s who ran with Roger Bannister he was a Belgrave Harrier if you ever heard of them. Basically I was brought up in a running and athletic environment, and I d say the fundamentals haven t changed too much since the days when my dad ran, which is consistent training going to the same place on the same day with the same coach and doing the same thing. This sounds tedious so the role of a coach is to make it less tedious and to instill a notion that the coach and athlete are on a long journey together and that this is a great opportunity not only to achieve success but to have some fun along the way and make the most of the talent they have. How do you look at training loads for junior athletes to progress through to successful seniors? When kids come to clubs you have to remember they often have very different backgrounds. The Brownlees for example had a background of swimming from an early age, cycling to school every day and leading an outdoor life. Other kids come to clubs as good runners having been identified as talented by their schools, but may not do much else. A key role for a coach is to recognize which type they are and then think about the training loads they can tolerate as they get older. With the Brownlees, because of their background I felt I could increase their training loads at 18, 19 and 20-years-old to world class levels, which is not something I could do with some other athletes. Is that why endurance athletes in the UK are often not as good in their twenties as they were as juniors?
In the early 1990s I did a study of winners of the 5k European junior championships which featured a lot of UK athletes, and then a study of European senior medal winners - and it wasn t the same people winning senior medals as juniors. The juniors didn t appear to have made the progress to success as seniors, so I looked at their training diaries. All of them were doing a lot of running at the age of 17, 18 and 19 90-100 miles a week. I also looked at the seniors who were doing a lot of 1500m speed work sessions. I then drew the wrong inference from this by thinking that the answer was focusing on speed rather than volume. Experience has shown though that you DO need to do some volume when you are young, however if you JUST do volume and neglect technique, drills, strength, speed sessions etc then you put a ceiling on the athlete s ability to improve when they are older and reach 20-23-yearsold. I want people to learn to be versatile runners basically I want to make everyone look like an 800m runner. In the Olympic triathlon final a commentator referred to Alistair Brownlee setting off on the 10k run like an 800m runner and I thought Great, my work is done; I can retire now! How do you balance the trade-off between technique work, drills etc and the athletes desire to want to go out and train as hard and often as they can? You have to plan technique work that prevents them from doing more damaging stuff. Triathletes are especially prone to things like hamstring dragging or over-rotating when they run, so I do some specific work with triathletes on positive technique, which often prevents them from going off and doing the wrong kind of session. I want to make them all faster runners with a light touch, fast legs, who know how to respond, how to change pace etc. I want them to be versatile runners and technique is hugely important in achieving this. You often have to remind athletes this is a long term process so there is more to be gained by focussing on technique than some things they may want to do instead. What do you wish you had known 20-years ago? Most of what I wish I had known is intangible rather than tangible. There is lots of information available on the internet or in books about coaching, and loads of different training plans out there for you to look at and learn about. However what I have found valuable is what I ve learned along the way about creating the right training environment and culture, establishing integrity as a coach, understanding the reason why a coach is coaching, how you create a working relationship with athletes year after year, and how you create a training group that is solid enough to withstand a particular athlete coming in or going out. You definitely need to establish groups the Ethiopians, Americans and Japanese are all creating groups. The questions a coach needs to consider is can you create a group, are the athletes all good group members, are there any energy sappers and what do you do about that everyone has a responsibility to give to a group as well as take from it if you want to create a high aspiration training environment. If you have athletes with different strengths in a group, how does everyone feel as though they have the chance to achieve in that group environment? A coach can t be all things to all men, so you have to have trusted lieutenants in the group, people who are sensible, steady and consistent. In any group I need voices that are not my voice but which have the same principles and philosophy. What are the core attributes of athletes whom you have enjoyed training? When I give athletes a plan, some will change it to adapt to what they want to do, while others will do it exactly as I ve given it to them to the last mile they are the
ones I like! It means they are listening to me because they think I have got something to offer as a coach but they are also committed to following a long term plan. Endurance athletics is a tough world, even when it all goes right, so you have to create an environment where all the hard work is seen as an opportunity, it shouldn t all be about sacrifice. Often people who tell me how hard all the training I ve done must have been, don t realise how much fun we have had as well. I used to run with a real mixed group of athletes and it was like attending the university of life, and it engendered the fact that this is what life is. Sport is not something that exists in a separate world. I ve tried to recreate the best of that in other groups. Top athletes tend to solve the problems of finding the right environment themselves. Taking Alistair Brownlee as an example, he knows the value of having training partners, if it was just him and Jonny it would be hell for them both so he knows he needs a large group, and acknowledges the contribution that a group brings to his training. The majority of coaches work with good club athletes who want to be the best they can be, what are the differences between coaching these kind of athletes? Its worth remembering that Lottery funding only came in 1996 so before that it was typical for athletes to have jobs and to be working throughout their athletic careers. With people who are working and have families you can obviously try and build training into their daily route, such as running to work, which will help to get the miles in. How long you can sustain this for is another matter, so while the basic structure of training should look similar to someone who is a full time athlete, the volume might need to not look the same. What is the role of the coach when an athlete has an injury? The next most important person to the coach is to have a really good physiotherapist one who wants to talk to the coach AND the athlete, and who wants to not only sort out the immediate problem but increase the coach an athlete s understanding. A good physio has a good medical network around them. As you can imagine we get a lot of offers of new treatments and magic solutions to the guys at Leeds but I try to keep these away from the athletes and keep things simple it s important not to jump at any magic solutions offered. Is non-running training just for triathletes? What are the lessons for runners from triathlon? It was instructive to see how much training triathletes can do. In my experience triathletes do more training than most senior running athletes, which means we should ask whether our distance runners can do more without there being a negative effect. I have been surprised by how much training triathletes I have coached can do and to sustain this without there being a drop in quality. There is a question for runners can you do more? And if the answer is yes, more of what?... For the triathletes I coach, a quarter of their triathlon training week is swimming, half of their week is cycling and a quarter of the week is running (this doesn t include other strength sessions we might do etc). That means that for Alistair Brownlee 75% of his training is not running, yet he managed 28.32 for 10,000m on the track breaking his 3k, 5k and 10k PBs in the process, so that 75% must be making some sort of contribution. With an athlete like Non Stanford, she trains like a runner. Her early success may have been due to doing a lot of running when younger; I didn t know her then, She runs 60-70 miles a week which is a reasonable amount but not huge in endurance terms. In that 60-70 miles she would do 4k of high intensity track running on a Tuesday and a hard 8-10k on a Saturday so about 15k a week of hard running. Outside of that it s mainly recovery runs, and she rarely does anything
above 140bpm. There is more recovery running done in triathlon than in running because of the other disciplines if an athlete has cycled hard in the morning then they will need to do a recovery run if they are training later that same day. I also think triathlon has shown that athletes often need less recovery than is suggested by exercise physiology. I ve tried and tested things with athletes I have coached over a long period and in running the classic session would be 3 minute kilometres with 3 minute recovery in between. If the Brownlees did that they would freeze between reps, so they have been doing 45 seconds to 1 minute recovery after running 2.45-2.40 for a kilometre and doing this consistently. I think that once you have speed, bear down on the recoveries; this makes it horrible for the athletes, but reducing recoveries in this way makes runners fast, although sometimes it doesn t do their brains any good! 5 x 1km with 30 seconds recovery is a bit brutal but the principle of running fast enough and reducing recovery has a big effect on running efficiency. Is the ideal structure for a training plan based around 7 days? I ve worked with athletes who are in the fire service and other shift jobs for whom a 7 day training cycle is impossible. If you get the key sessions in during a 14 day cycle over a six month period then that will make for good progress. A 7 day training cycle is not critical, its important athletes know what they are trying to get to in a year, this is a long-term effort and we are looking for year-on-year incremental benefits rather than improvements week to week. What is the biggest challenge of cycle-to-run transition? Mostly it is that an athlete s glutes don t work because of lots of cycling, or that there are postural issues we have to consider. If someone wants to run efficiently after cycling then there is postural work to do, stretching hip flexors and getting them to fire their glutes and to feel that they are doing it. As a result of this most of them come off the bike looking like runners and ready to go, others drag themselves into the first kilometre and take a kilometre to warm up by which tie the race may be up the road. When trying to develop a coaching structure at clubs, should junior athletes train with senior athletes? A club environment is very important to athletes but it has to be flexible, because there will always be tension between a club s needs and the individual s needs. I have always asked should I protect a younger athlete, or put them in with seniors to learn from them? You have to be careful that a junior wouldn t be daunted by that environment but I ve tried not to be constrained by a coaching structure based on ages, and juniors can learn a lot from senior athletes if it is the right time for them to do it and senior athletes can help set little targets that junior athletes can work towards. How do you structure a training plan so that hard sessions don t compromise each other? In the case of triathletes like the Brownlees, the coaches work together to ensure you don t end up with sessions which work against each other. By the same token you have to learn to understand this yourself as an athlete so you can understand when you are not achieving the quality you need to in sessions.
How often should athletes be physiologically tested? There are limitations to what sports science can tell you and regular testing doesn t necessarily tell me more than I am able to see through regularfeedback in training, so while I think it s important to regularly check an athletes progress this doesn t necessarily have to be in a sports science environment. What is your view regarding how much on-road running you should do versus offroad running? If you are looking at an athlete over a ten year career then they need to run on forgiving surfaces. I m not totally convinced that running on roads all the time is good, so I would encourage running on forgiving surfaces such as grass, trails etc. Are you a risk taker with your athletes in order to gain an extra few percentages of performance? No, I have tended not to be a risk taker. I believe in year on year incremental developments, not session to session. If you take that view, it takes the pressure off (although athletes don t always have that view). In this case a coach s role is to remind athletes what the goal is and that you are in this for the long term. I don t think you can take chances in endurance. Is there a point during an athlete s career where their relationship with you changes from you being the guide to them having control? That is my ambition with all athletes. I want to impart to them the knowledge that I ve got and ultimately for them to be responsible for their own performance and want to be! I want us to reach a point where we are having conversations about training rather than setting the direction in training for them. Coaches don t do themselves any favours by thinking they can direct athletes all the time. In triathlon and in running, decisions have to be taken by the athlete during races. Athletes have to learn how to take decisions, a great example is what Jonny Brownlee did when he was penalised during the Olympic final, he received a time penalty early on and had the whole race to think about when he was going to stop, and he had to take that decision for himself. Teaching young people to be honest about their success and failure and to take responsibility for themselves is important. I sometimes do this by asking them questions I know the answer to but get them to think about it, it discourages athletes from being too dependent on their coach. What is your view about athletes dropping out of sessions if they are struggling or it s just not working for them? Should athletes complete a session no matter what? You have to be realistic, sometimes despite an athletes best intensions they are struggling as you have to help them make a decision about whether to stop, other times it might be that they just don t want to train in which case you need to act differently. If you are a good coach you will know the zone they should be training in and you should know what the best course of action is. As a triathlete, should I have a triathlon coach, or three coaches for running, swimming and cycling? I ve spent 30 years trying to understand distance running, so I think trying to be an authority on three different disciplines is hard. The role of a triathlon coach might, for example, be to co-ordinate the activities of coaches who are specialists in those
areas so that the athlete gets the most benefit from them, and to oversee how that all fits together.