After a one week hiatus, Jon and I are back for our longest episode of the Magness & Marcus podcast yet. In this one, we meander through a wide range of topics with the central theme of looking at how we have evolved as coaches and to try to take away lessons from what that evolution means. Perhaps most interesting to me was tracking what we focused on in educating ourselves. What we found is that we have followed similar paths of first diving head first into the fundamentals of coaching with classic training texts like Lydiard, Daniels, and Cerutty before adding in a touch of science to understand why those methods worked. Then once the foundation was there, we've both branched out to focusing on concepts that on the surface are only vaguely related to coaching. In the podcast we try to go through why this progression tends to occur and what it means. After laying out our progression as coaches from a learning standpoint, we discuss how our coaching practices have changed over the years. Jon tells a great story of one of his coaching mentors, Rob Conner of Portland, and how he came to see that having less control is often the way to go. Instead of trying to micromanage every single factor of training, giving the athletes autonomy to make some of those decisions can lead to better engagement and in the end better performance. While there are a number of other topics covered, I'd highly recommend this episode for any young coach. Hopefully you can learn from our mistakes along the way! Thanks for listening, Steve & Jon Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe through RSS Books mentioned in the podcast: Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek Daniels Running Formula by Jack Daniels Better Training For Distance Runners by Peter Coe Run, Run, Run by Fred Wilt The Mechanics of Athletics by Geoff Dyson