What’s the point of sport? In this episode, Jon and I make the case that it’s about education and learning. The culture of coaches used to be educators. They came from a background of using athletics as a means to help student athletes grow and develop. As the top side of the sport professionalized, there’s…

What defines success for a coach? Is it wins and losses?  Championships won? Leading athletes to new personal bests? Having one athlete win an Olympic medal while destroying 20 of them? These are the common notions that we associated with success. But is it the best way? In this episode of the Magness & Marcus…

Humans have a need for explanations. When faced with uncertainty we rely on closure. The world of running is no different. When something goes wrong, as athletes and coaches we go into a panicked search for a reason why we didn’t perform at our best. Often, we perform elaborate gymnastics attempting to find the elusive…

In this episode, we are joined by performance coach extraordinaire Vern Gambetta. Using the performances at the recent Olympic Trials as a backdrop we take on coaches education. Where have we gone right and where have we missed the boat. We start by asking the question of what makes a good coach? Is it coaching…

In this episode, we have a special guest, the director of Track and Field at Georgetown, Mike Smith. In an in-person conversation at the Olympic Trials we discuss innovation within coaching. With the three of us having been in the collegiate and post-collegiate world we discuss the tendency for the NCAA system to lock coaches…

Coming at you in-person from the Olympic Trials, we dish on the high pressure environment that is attempting to make the US Olympic team. Jon and I take a look at the 7/8 of the field that leaves disappointed and how we should pick up the pieces after a hard fought race. The Olympic Trials…

In this episode of the Magness and Marcus Podcast we discuss a quality that all runners aspire to and all coaches try to engender. The ability to dig down, fight your way through adversity, bounce back from failure, and show up consistently when it counts. As runners, we might refer to this as toughness, but…

In this episode of the Magness and Marcus Podcast we discuss False Positive and Inaccurate Negatives. What are they? A false positive is when we have a great race or great series of workouts that doesn’t translate over to sustained performance. On the flip side, an inaccurate negative is when an athlete goes through a…

Running form is one of the hot button topics in the world of distance coaches. We debate, often with speed/power coaches, on where they fit into the program. How important are mechanics for a distance runner? How do we change them? Should we change them? These are the questions that wer tackle in this…

In this episode of the Magness & Marcus Podcast, we talk about building Culture. While we are trained as coaches to emphasize the physiology and doc us on workout design, what separates programs that thrive and last is often the intangible dynamic of culture. In this episode, we go through our experiences in developing culture…