The Consummate Coach

The latest issue of Track Coach Magazine has a tremendous interview with Dr. Joe Vigil PhD. Joe is one of the greatest coaches I have known. He has been a friend, a role model and a mentor to me over the years. Here are a few gems form the interview.

On benchmarks to gauge progress “The amazing thing is that if you understand science, as you have an increase in the parameters we test for, you can train and implement those variables in training protocols and you can actually chart progress. I will give you an example. We were able to tell Meb (Keflezighi) and Deena (Kastor) what they would run at Stanford and they had never achieved those goals, but they achieved them within a second. And so it really works well.”

On running in the morning: “Everybody’s distance running should be done in the morning. The philosophy behind that is that when you go to bed at night and you are lying flat, your intervertebral discs are able engorge themselves with water. And in the morning when you get up and your full bodyweight is on those discs and gravity is pulling on you and the more active you become the more water you lose and they become compressed. And consequently you have a chance to irritate those horse tail nerves that come out of the vertebrae and that is when you can develop some injury and also some postural deviation.”

On strength training: “Well we work out three times a day and one of our workouts is in the gym and we a combo of plyometric bounding, ladder drills, weight lifting and core development. They work at very religiously. They don’t let it slide by. And that is just as important as running.”

On using a treadmill: “We use the treadmill for testing. For training, no. Leberace did not get good at playing the piano by chopping wood. If you want to be a good runner you have to run.”

On continuing to learn: But it seems my ambition to learn has increased over the years. I am still excited about getting up in the morning. I get up at four every morning. Literally excited. I’m exciting about meeting, just to study and read. I plug into Medline, the information retrieval center at the Olympic Center.”

On how he wants to be remembered: “But I want to be remembered as a good person, as a good friend. Not a developer of champions or the championships we’ve won. Those things are not important. But I would probably like to be remembered as a person who put some worth in other peoples lives cause I believed in them. Very simple.”

I feel very privileged to have known and had the opportunity to work with Joe Vigil. I hope all of you get to meet someone like this in your lives. He is truly a treasure. He is what coaching is all about.