Coaching High Performing Female High School Runners with Exercise Physiologist Kate Shult

Kate Shult is an exercise physiologist who has her own practice called Training Edge. She's also a yoga instructor who has worked with Oak Ridge High School track and cross country runners since 2004. I first met Kate when her son Brennan ran for us, and she offered to do yoga classes for our cross country team. At the time I had no experience with yoga and no idea how on Earth that could help us. Over the years she's become a fourth coach for us, addressing the critical area of nutrition for performance and helping us to train our girls as well as possible, in addition to doing  a weekly yoga class with our kids.

In this short conversation I ask Kate to begin by explaining what she does with our team, and we segue into a discussion of the ins and outs of helping female athletes to address the many questions and concerns that they and their parents may have about training hard while maintaining good health--especially for the long term. She defines the Female Athlete Triad and explains how she works with our girls and their families. Additionally, she answers the question that many male coaches may ask: how does an adult male coach help female athletes when both the coach and the athlete may have difficultly talking about what they need to talk about?

The answer? Often it's to find someone who is comfortable: a pediatrician, a trainer, a consultant (like Kate). Communication makes issues of eating and body function less daunting than they may seem. As a coach who wants to help all athletes get the best out of themselves, I'm convinced: if we want hardcore athletes we have to help them to take hardcore care of their bodies.

*At the 16:50 mark I had to take a phone call from my son, whose car had just died. That makes for a glitch in the recording. Sorry about that. We got the car towed, and he got a ride home after waiting in the rain for a half hour.*

If you'd like to contact me or Kate, please reach me at my Gmail, and I'll put you in touch with Kate. Or @ORHSXC on Twitter.

Sam Roberts on Winning

In the first installment of this podcast I talk with old friend Sam Roberts, longtime Knoxville-area track and cross country coach who is now sprint coach at Tennessee Wesleyan. As he discusses, beginning in 1988 at Knox West he always sought out winning--at every level he coached. During that time it was in the TSSAA A-AA division, where he won state cross country titles, and later it was in AAA, where he won state track team titles. He coached more than 40 individual champions and a Footlocker Nationals finalist at West, and then he brought that winning temperament to Oak Ridge in 2007, where he helped coach an NXN team and four state champion cross country teams before coaching several sprint greats at Oak Ridge. This past year at TWC he had the indoor national titlist at 60 meters.

We sat down to discuss how he became associated with all this winning. What does the average coach do in order to promote a competitive but healthy atmosphere at the high school level? How does a hard-working coach also become a winning coach? What kinds of things make a "program?" If I'm an ambitious new coach, what can I do to create a winning program?

What did I learn? If you want to win--long-term--this has to be your thing. Not golf, not your own training. This has to be your thing. And you have to set clear expectations for yourself and for the athletes and families of athletes that you coach. Oh--and keep learning. Your stuff may have worked twenty-five years ago, but if you haven't learned and changed your practice during those twenty-five years, you haven't gotten any better.

If you like this podcast or have comments, please do leave them below. Thanks for listening.