Introducing Your Coach
(great title, eh?)
New year, new idea. This first post is going to be about how I came to be a coach, and just give you an idea of who I am and why what I have to say might be interesting or useful to a runner trying to get the best out of themselves. I’ve been coaching for over 20 years and running for over 30. Hopefully some of that experience is sharable!
I started out running in grade 5 or 6. My first coach was Joy Moon, first at my elementary school, École Publique Gabrielle Roy, in Toronto. She was the recess supervisor and took us to Moss Park to run laps and then eat our lunch and stretch. In grade 7 I was the best runner in the school. In grade 8, some kid in grade 7 was faster than me!
I went to high school at St. Mike’s, a school with a long history of running success. For sure this was because of the coaches. Paul Barry, Frank Bergin, Patrick Monahan, Greg McKernan and Erin Hogan were the team of coaches there. They ran with us, they kept us accountable, and they taught us how to win!
In university, I had several coaches. John Swarbrick coached the men’s team at Waterloo, then passed the torch to Terry Goodenough. Terry was a kind and generous man, and even though he’s passed away, I’m still benefiting from his wisdom, via a couple boxes of books and notes given to me by teammate Stephen Drew, who had received them from Terry’s family. At Waterloo, I also got to know, though he was not my direct personal coach, Brent McFarlane, who was head coach for the Canadian team at the 1996 Olympic Games. I spent some time in Toronto again before moving out east, and Ross Ristucia of UTTC gave me his time. I also worked with John Castellano, not a coach, exactly, but a man with much experience (he was the Canadian 5000m champ in 1989, and has a bronze medal from the World Cross Country Championships junior race in 1984).
At the University of New Brunswick, Tim Randall’s kindness echoed Terry’s, and I think it was because of Tim that I was encouraged to keep trying to run fast after school was done. A brief period in Mel Keeling’s training group showed me what it was like to train in the 1970s and 80s, even if we couldn’t go back there completely.
When I arrived in Montreal, I joined Montreal Olympique, and the first coach I met there was Sylvain Lavallée. He was never my coach personally, but he delivered several messages that kept me on the right track. My coach at MTLO was François Pap. He had the misfortune of working with me as I made the transition from athlete to coach, and so I was probably a very annoying athlete who questioned far too much. But he recognised the stage I was in, and was more of an advisor to my athlete-self, and a mentor to my coach-self. He let me make mistakes. Probably some of those mistakes will form future posts!
I coached at Concordia University from 2003 to 2023, with a break to coach in the McGill club program from 2012-2017. I also coached a road running club called Boreal, and had various iterations of my own club culminating in a return to MTLO (now called Vainqueurs Plus). In those years I worked with coaches Jim McDannald, Justin Pfefferle, Jo Wedlock, Kyla Rollinson, and others. And I coached a lot of athletes! Some competed at the international level (Melanie Myrand, Laura Batterink and Shelley Doucet) and others, too many to name, qualified for Boston, for nationals, and ran dozens and dozens of PBs.
So it’s from this history that I hope to mine helpful stories and lessons. Each athlete I coach now benefits from the process I’ve gone through with all the previous athletes. And yet each athlete is new, “an experiment of one” as Peter Coe or maybe David Martin, once said. I hope you’ll enjoy my thoughts.