About the coach
UKA qualified endurance coach, Foyle Valley AC
I am Declan Doherty, a UKA qualified endurance coach. I have been running with Foyle Valley AC for 20 years, and coaching club runners for a good part of that.
Most of my own running has been in the middle of the pack. That turns out to be the useful experience, because most of the people who want coaching are not chasing a place either. They are trying to arrive at a start line fit and uninjured, having fitted the training around a full life. Coaching that runner well is a different job from coaching someone with nothing else on.
How I coach
Most of your running is easy. Around eighty per cent of your weekly volume, run at a pace you could hold a conversation at. Most runners in the middle of the pack are training too hard on their easy days and not hard enough on their sessions.
Volume rises slowly. Week to week increases are held inside sensible bounds, and the plan will refuse to jump you forward because you feel good on a Tuesday. Most running injuries are a load problem, and load problems are avoidable.
The week responds to you. A plan that ignores the fact you were ill on Wednesday is not a plan, it is a document. What you actually ran is the input to what comes next.
You get told why. Every week comes with a note explaining what it is for and what changed. If you do not understand a session, ask, and you will get a straight answer.
Who this suits
- Club and recreational runners training for a marathon or half marathon
- Anyone who has followed a downloaded plan and wants it to respond to their actual week
- Runners fitting training around a job, a family, or shift work
- People coming back from a lay-off who want the return paced by someone else
- Anyone who wants a coach they can ask a question and get an answer from
Who it does not
- Anyone chasing a national qualifying standard, who needs a coach at the track with them
- Track and middle-distance specialists; this is endurance road and trail coaching
- Anyone who wants a plan they can download once and never talk to anybody about
- Anyone who wants training prescribed around an injury or medical condition. See a physiotherapist or your GP first
Coaching is £20 a month per athlete. If that sounds like what you are after, tell me about your running.