Coachcast S2 E5 Jim Miller Blog 1200×675

Cultivating Champions with Jim Miller

BY TrainingPeaks CoachCast Host Dirk Friel

Coach Jim Miller has enough stories to fill a library worth of books. He has coached numerous champions and is once again on the road to Olympic gold.

What do Kristin Armstrong, Kate Courtney, Chris Blevins and Keegan Swenson have in common? Coach Jim Miller.

He comes from a long line of coaches, but never originally planned on getting into the business himself. While racing on the pro circuit as a young cyclist, Jim met his first client, Chris Baldwin at a stoplight. From there he was hooked.

Jim has worked with numerous top-level athletes and undoubtedly has a knack for finding talent in unexpected places. Listen as Dirk and Jim chat about the evolution of sport and the upcoming challenges facing Jim in 2020 and 2021.

Stand-out Quotes

  • “’Hey, who’s chasing up there?’ And Kimberly Bruckner replied in the radio. And she says, ‘That Armstrong girl,’ and I pause for a minute and I’m like, ‘By herself??’ And she’s like, ‘Yes, by herself.’ And it had been single file for 30 minutes and I was like, ‘Good God!’…I didn’t even take a moment to debrief with my own team. I just went straight to her car and I’m like, ‘I don’t know who you are, but I have a contract for you.’”
  • “I don’t think we ever got beat on aerodynamics, but we did have this secondary aero position for the long false flat down…she would reach out over her bar-ends so she was extended like almost to her wrists. But we found in the wind tunnel, then that reduced drag by almost 200 grams.”
  • “And I asked her what she wanted to do, and she didn’t even hesitate. And she’s like, ‘I want to be a 2020 Olympic Gold Medalist.’ She’s only 20 years old. And she’s like, ’Is that possible?’”
  • “I realized that this was going to be a longer haul than maybe it appeared. We pulled the pin really early, like the second week of March, took a break and just basically went back to base training 2.0… I didn’t want any workout or any interval to be mentally challenging. I didn’t want somebody to get broken by the effort and training, because at this moment in time, we’re all mentally, somewhat fragile because we don’t know where training for.”
  • “I think the most invaluable thing for me is to actually just keep learning and keep challenging yourself and assume that you don’t know as much as you think. And pay attention to what other people are doing and listen, but also use your own instincts and gut to determine whether you think that makes sense from now.”
  • “Coach as much as you can. Coach your kid’s sports, coach different sports, coach different levels. The more you can coach, the more you ultimately fail, the more you fail the ultimate, ultimately the more you learn.”

Resources

Jim Miller’s Instagram

Jim Miller’s Facebook

Episode Transcript

Dirk Friel:

This episode I had the pleasure of interviewing Jim Miller, who is not only a close friend and old teammate, but also a past colleague of mine at TrainingPeaks. He has coached some of the biggest names in cycling, including Kate Courtney, Lawson Craddock, TeJay van Garderen and Chris Blevins, just to name a few. Jim has been part of 14 Olympic medals, including coaching Kristin Armstrong through her three Olympic gold medals in the time trial and multiple world championship victories. Jim is the current Head of Elite Athletics at USA cycling. Hope you enjoy the show. 

Okay. Today on the CoachCast, I have a very long, long time friend of mine—shared a lot of great experiences with this guy, Jim Miller. Jim, thank you so much for being on the CoachCast.

Jim Miller:

Thanks for having me. 

Dirk Friel:

So Head of Elite Athletics! New role for you here, but why the hell did you leave your last employer? I mean, they were pretty damn cool.

Jim Miller:

What was I thinking?! That was crazy. 

Dirk Friel:

Well, you know, I mean, you worked for TrainingPeaks for two years, loved having you here.  definitely a loss for us, but I know if I’m going to lose you to anybody, USAC should be the organization you go to. You’re the best man for the job.

Jim Miller:

Yeah, thanks. Yeah, it was one of those things. I actually was, I really enjoyed my time at TrainingPeaks. I learned a lot at TrainingPeaks. Very grateful for the opportunity. It really is a world-class organization with world-class people. It’s a lot of fun to work at. I really couldn’t say enough good things about it.

Dirk Friel:

Well, you’re born to coach. You got a lot of wisdom to share with our listeners, I know. But it all starts with bike racing. If we go back to, I don’t know, a couple of decades here, you know, three decades or so. You raced, we were teammates for a while in the nineties together and I think a lot of your kind of scrappiness in a way came from those roots, would you say?

Jim Miller:

Yeah, for sure.  I would say that our upbringing bike racing was not what it is now. We didn’t have near the opportunities or chances to make it for ourselves. And how many nights did we spend sleeping in cars in parking lots at races, so we could race? I don’t know anybody that does that now, but that was standard practice for us.

Dirk Friel:

Well, you also had a wife and your first child was born and you’re still bike racing…had to pay the bills. I think that really did kind of like, instill like this, not always a winner, but that winning mentality.

Jim Miller:

I would agree. And I hadn’t really gone back to that, and thought of it like that, but for sure

it played a role. 

Dirk Friel:

So then why coaching? How do you make a jump from, you know, poor bike racer too, I’m going to be a coach now. And what were the ambitions around that?

Jim Miller:

Yeah, that was super, honestly, though it was super random. I come from a family of coaches. I never assumed I would be in the family business. When we were racing in our early twenties, I was writing my own training, figuring out on my own, figuring out what we needed to do, trying to try and make heads or tails of physiology and sport and application of. I ended up meeting Chris Baldwin in Fort Collins at a stoplight. We both moved to Fort Collins to go to school at CSU on the same day, and met a day later at a stoplight, both riding bikes and training. Ended up riding together and training together. And after a couple of months, he was like, how do you decide what we’re going to do every day? And it was a joke then and I’m like, well, really, I just make it up.

But, I do have a plan I’m trying to follow and create and learn from, and he literally said, “Why don’t you write my training?” And I’m like, “No way, I’m not responsible for somebody else failing.” And he’s like, “No, no!” He’s like, “I won’t hold you accountable. You write it. I’ll follow it. If it works awesome, if it doesn’t, fine. And I’ll pay you!” 

And at that time in life, you’re like, “Oh my God, there’s money. This is going to go a long way here.” So that’s how it started. And then, and then you know, in Fort Collins, I think we were fortunate to have a role model in your dad who basically showed us what was possible and that this was an actual occupation. It’s funny, because really through the nineties, all I want to do is work for your dad. Just try to prove myself as a coach in hopes that he would hire me. He probably had no idea that was the case, but that was, for me, it was like, if you work for Joe Friel, then you were one of the best coaches and that that’s all I tried to do.

Dirk Friel:

So how about other mentors, you know, your education, some of the early influencers on your coaching career?

Jim Miller:

Yeah. You know, sometimes you look back and you don’t realize how true being in the right place at the right time really is in life. When I went to college to study exercise physiology, one of my very first college counselors was Dave Martin who ended up being Dr. Dave Martin, a senior physiologist, AIS. He was just a grad student. But yeah, I mean now it’s completely just random that I had such good guidance early on. Everything I learned in physiology was either related to cross country skiing or mountain bike racing. Yeah, so just really fortunate to know Dave and…

Dirk Friel: 

What about Max Testa?

Jim Miller:

Max Testa was definitely a mentor. When I first went to the USA cycling coaching education program in like 1996, Max was an instructor, and Max at the time had worked for Motorola. He’d worked for 7/11. He was working at [inaudible].  And he was just like a guy that you read about in magazines. And then all of a sudden he’s standing there and you could ask him questions and he’d answer them. Because I would think of questions, I would send them emails and say, What do you think about this? And he always answered the questions and it was amazing to me. Cause you could ask anybody else a question about training was like super-secret, their secret sauce—their own little a bit of information they have, but they weren’t willing to share. And Max would share everything. And I distinctly remember, and I don’t know, like early, two-thousands or late nineties where I’m like, you know, if I ever become a good coach, I’m going to be like Max Testa. And I want to share everything I know. I’m not going to be the guy that holds back.

Dirk Friel:

Okay. So you would then start, and you know, your caller ID still comes up on my cell phone as Peak-to-Peak Coaching to this day. So you have this coaching company how do you, you know, make the jump from your own business to USA cycling and what years did that happen?

Jim Miller:

Yeah, so I coached, I had a company called Peak-to-Peak Training Systems that I started in… I think it was like 1993. After 2000, USA Cycling had a bit of a restructure, reorg, housecleaning—got rid of all their, basically their entire high-performance staff. So then USA Cycling started to look for a US national women’s team coach, interviewed, and ultimately got the job. About that time, I sold Peak-to-Peak Training Systems to a guy named another college buddy from Wyoming, John Hidaman who still to this day runs Peak-to-Peak Training Systems.

Dirk Friel:

All right. So let’s dig into some of those success stories. One of the first was Kristin Armstrong and Kristin won three Olympic time trials in a row. Never been done before she was old…she ended up being the oldest athlete to win a cycling gold medal. What did you see in Kristen that you knew more about her future than maybe she did herself?

Jim Miller:

So T-Mobile was an interesting time. When we started that team, I walked in the office after being hired. I was handed six emails that were printed and it said, these riders have said they would ride for you. And I was like, okay, do we have, are they under contract? Do we have contracts with them? And they were like, no, we had nothing other than these six emails.

At the time, Saturn was the number one women’s team in the world. So they were very, very hard to compete with. I had six riders and had to make contracts with them and then had to go out and find more. So I just started scouting and paying attention to every single race that existed. Even within race debriefs, I would ask questions like who was doing the pulling, who was working, who is strong on the climb, who made the, who was in the group and looked good that maybe didn’t make it to the finish, who led the sprint out?

I wanted to know everything that everybody was doing. And I ran across Kristin’s name in San Demas stage race used to be called Pomona. And she was second in the time trial, which is a Hill climb. I looked her up and at the time she was a resident athlete at the Olympic Training Center for triathlon. And then I distinctly remember where this race in Connecticut, Housatonic Valley. And we put Amber Neben in the break with Anna Millward. Anna Millward at the time was the number one ranked women’s cyclist in the world. And it happened right away, like first 15 minutes of the race. And then for it felt like ever, the gap state of 45 seconds. 

Finally, I said the radio, I was like, “Hey, who’s chasing up there?” And Kimberly Bruckner replied in the radio. And she says, “That Armstrong girl,” and I pause for a minute and I’m like, “By herself??”  And she’s like, “Yes, by herself.” And it had been single file for 30 minutes and I was like, “Good God!” Finally she cracks, cause she’s going to crack. We ended up getting second. I didn’t even, I didn’t even take a moment to debrief with my own team. I just went straight to her car and I’m like, “I don’t know who you are, but I have a contract for you.”

Dirk Friel:

Nice. Very cool. So she was obviously a T tier from the beginning, triathlete, you know, she could sit on the front all day long, won uphill time trials. So she goes into these Olympic years, but a time trial is not always a time trial. It’s not just sit at one wattage for 60 minutes. You know, these three time trials and the three different Olympics were unique and different. Can you walk us through maybe just the highlights of each year and what the focus was for each time trial and what you had to work on those four years to prepare? 

Jim Miller:

Yeah, they were entirely different as was her life situation for each of those time trials or each of those Olympic cycles. Beijing was a really interesting time trial and that it was straight up and straight down. So the onset of that we had two problems to solve one is, is how do you time, how do you climb on your time trial bike as well as you climb on your road bikes? 

So we started off with replicating that climbing position on her time trial bike that she would have on the hoods of her road bike. And that was comparable to the bullhorns on time trial bike. So we were really confident in her position, in her ability to climb on that time trial bike, but then you’re going to turn around and go downhill for, it was like 12 minutes.

It’s literally, it’s 65k an hour, so aerodynamics is massive. So then the second question was how do we climb in a good, powerful, comfortable position, but then maintain some aerodynamics on the way back so we don’t lose everything we gained? 

So those were two really interesting challenges to overcome. On this entire course, what was really cool was you only had a break one time, you’ll need to touch the brakes one time. So we ended up finding an aerobar with a bullhorn with an integrated brake lever. That was massively aerodynamic and she only had to use it one time. And it didn’t have to be stiff and it didn’t have to be a good break, it just had to be enough to slow down for one turn. 

And at that point, she was a professional athlete in every sense of the term. She was making a good living, spending most of her time in Europe, racing bikes. [her] husband was an engineer at HP. So she lived and breathed cycling 24/7. Then, that was fairly easy to just do a straight-up preparation for her. 

After Beijing, she was World Champion in 2009. And then after that world title, she became pregnant with her son Lucas. I wasn’t sure she was going to come back. Around 2011, she’s like, “What would it take?” It was actually, it wasn’t even 2011. It was right after Lucas was born. So we set a plan out to at least have her ready, give her a chance to qualify and race, and totally different demands. 

Now she has a family, she has a child. She has responsibilities. She’s trying to get fit. She’s trying to in some cases, feed. So it wasn’t just like, you can go out, you can train, you can recover, you can rest. There were, there were a whole host of other demands. The course in London wasn’t, there was nothing super spectacular about it. I think we, we did tactically, we did have a good tactic for it, and we didn’t think about the aerodynamics. We always thought about aerodynamics.

I don’t think we ever got beat on aerodynamics, but we did have this secondary aero position for the long false flat down. It was just this kind of extended, she would reach out over her bar-ends. So she was extended like almost to her wrists, but we found in the wind tunnel, then that reduced drag by almost 200 grams. Which is a huge amount. And when we got to the second time-check, which was just down through a false blind downhill, I think she’d taken 20 some seconds out of everybody. And I don’t think it was power. I just think it was aerodynamics. That was a great win. And it was a great win because it was under some different circumstances.

Dirk Friel:

And she had retired prior to that too, right?

Jim Miller:

She had taken a year off. She had retired, had taken a year off, had a child, all that.

Dirk Friel:

Okay. So Kristin Armstrong just kind of sweeps three Olympics in a row, but you don’t just coach roadies. You have this Kate Courtney on the mountain bike scene. That’s really just lighting things up. Amazing, amazing talent, obviously. How did you discover her? And what did you see special in her that’s now kind of come to fruition?

Jim Miller:

Yeah. Kate had been racing NICA as a high school student. She came on a few trips with our mountain bike program to Europe. I’d watched her results somewhere around 20, I guess it was probably the fall of 2015. She asked if I would take a look at her training and I was like, “Yeah, absolutely, send me your TrainingPeaks. I took a look at it and was blown away at the results she was getting with the training she was doing. Prior to meeting with her, her dad sent me an Excel file and I opened it up and he literally had done the work that I would have done, which you know, is going to take a day. It’s going to be five, six, seven hours of pulling data and putting together a picture. And I literally was like, “Who are you?”

As it turns out, he was an analyst for some financial firm in San Francisco and things like that as well. So we had this conversation. I always start off with, what’s your goal? What do you want to do? What do you wanna accomplish in cycling? And I’ll generally press athletes until they really get honest with it. 

And I asked her what she wanted to do, and she didn’t even hesitate. And she’s like, I want to be a 2020 Olympic Gold Medalist. She’s only 20 years old. And she’s like, “Is that possible?” And so with just the knowledge I had, I worked on a year-over-year progression in terms of power and power to weight. And I said, “Yeah, you know, look, if you progress for the next five years at this level, then yeah, you’ll be capable of doing it. There’s a lot else that goes into winning Olympic gold medals than power. But in terms of just the raw ingredient, yes, it’s entirely possible.”

And she was like, “Great. That’s what I want to do.”

I’m always super protective with Olympic years because they take so much effort and time and bandwidth. I said, “No, I can’t do it. I can’t do it right now. I would be happy to consult on training, but I can’t be responsible.” And I think the second I got back from Rio, I had an email, I’m talking to like the day I got home, “Rio’s over, will you coach me now?” And I’m like, “Well, look, I’d be a fool to say, no, I think, I think you’re that talented. So yeah, let’s, let’s do it.”

Dirk Friel:

So what area did she need to work on the most? What was maybe the weakness that you had to hone in on?

Jim Miller:

For her, at that time, she had primarily been earning all of her results anaerobically so she could anaerobically survive these first two, three laps, four laps, but then she would have big fall-offs. So I’m like, we essentially just need to build your aerobic system and get you on par aerobically. And then anaerobically you’re fine. So then we can start making improvements there. Technically, world cup, mountain bike courses are very technical. So we had a, I thought we had a lot of technical aspects we had to improve. She was already a good bike rider—or anyways, a good bike handler, so we spent a lot of time focusing on technique and then sort of this three-year plan of building the engine.

Dirk Friel:

So she goes on and wins the becomes world champion in 2018. Is that right? 

Jim Miller:

Yeah.

Dirk Friel:

Her first year in the big leagues, incredible. And then follows it up last year, 2019 season, being the overall world cup winner.

Jim Miller:

Yep.

Dirk Friel:

You know, I’ve kind of seen her, obviously, she posts a lot and there’s these big training camps that you have her do. Tell us about the reasoning behind those. What do those look like? What time of the season do they happen and just kind of give us a little more insight into these big training blocks that she does.

Jim Miller:

It’s really just to have fun, to be honest. You can do a lot of solo training and a lot of intervals on your own. You can do a lot of suffering by yourself. But there’s something to be said with that group effort in those times, within your training cycles, that a good block of group training is awesome because it challenges you, it pushes you, generally, harder than you would have gone on your own. But there’s an end to it. So you can, you can dig in.

The first one we did with her was, is what we ended up calling the Kate Epic, which has a little bit of cachet now. In 2018, she was going to ride the Cape Epic with Annika Langvad, who is multiple mountain bike world champion, multiple Cape Epic winter, everybody that knows the Cape, knows that that’s the hardest stage race in the world for mountain bike racing.

And for years I tried to convince Marc Gullickson, our national mountain bike coach to send a team there because, to me, in March, prior to world cup season was just a great time to get this big block of racing. So she has this chance and I’m kind of like, well, I gotta put my money where my mouth is now. I told her to do it, say yes, and we’ll make sure she’s prepared. She says, yes. And then she’s like, “I’ve never done a stage race.” I like “Maybe, maybe we should have thought about that then. A three days stage race before trying the Cape Epic might be a better idea, but we committed.” So I said, “Look, let’s just replicate the Cape Epic and into a training block. And when you’re done with the Kate, (and then she ended up terming it the Kate Epic) and like, and when you’re done with the Kate, then you’ll be ready for the Cape.” So that became the first big block of that kind of training and the whole purpose for it was just so that she would mentally feel like she was prepared to race the Cape Epic. 

Dirk Friel: 

Okay, so with this COVID-19 crisis happening, obviously she’s been focused on the Olympics for the last four years. That’s now going to be a five-year preparation cycle. How have you adjusted to that in terms of her training and what kind of initial steps do you take and where is she now? You know, how does that affect the planning

Jim Miller:

Really quickly early on, I realized that this was going to be a longer haul than maybe it appeared. We pulled the pin really early, like the second week of March, took a break and just basically went back to base training 2.0. We didn’t take so much of a break that it was like an offseason coming from a, you know, 20, 19 to 2020, but it’s more like a, you had the flu or you were injured and you had 10, 12 days off the bike. But then you start training again. And then we just, we just sort of relaunched into, a training program that we would have done from November through January. And I had a couple of goals upfront. One is, I didn’t want any workout or any interval to be mentally challenging. I didn’t want somebody to get broken by the effort and training, because at this moment in time, it’s, we’re all mentally, somewhat fragile because we don’t know where training for. We don’t know what races are going to exist. And mental energy ism some days the motivation is high and some days it’s not. So it’s really been a pause, try to, just to maintain some fitness. And then as we start to understand when things are going to open up and calendars will begin again. Yeah. We won’t be so far down on the fitness scale that we can’t step on the gas in and be ready to go.

Dirk Friel:

Cool. So she’s taking it well. How does the race season play out from here? What are you guys planning or what do you suspect might happen? And when?

Jim Miller:

I’m expecting racing right now to return August 1st. I hope we see some events trickle into Europe in July, which would give us some hope that that’s going to happen. We have the road calendars, those have been released that say racing is going to start August 1st. So that’s our goal. And that’s where we’re shooting for. The mountain biking calendar anyways had been world cup heavy, post-Olympics in 2020. So to date, they’ve only missed one world cup. So we’re still looking at the opportunity of a prefill world cup season.

Dirk Friel:

Okay. So how about a little more in terms of your philosophy of coaching, do you try and educate the athlete to almost self-manage in a way? Like, get them more educated on, are you allowing them per se to even make decisions in the moment and say, I really need to not do these intervals, or I need to cut this short or Holy cow, I feel great today, I’ve been given the green light to do even more. What do you, what are some of your thoughts around that?

Jim Miller:

Yep. All the time. I’ll tell my athletes all the time that they’re the CEO of their company. I worked for them. They make decisions. They make choices. If they want to override one of my decisions, they can because it’s their company. I challenged my athletes a lot. But in return, I accept challenge. And if they want to know why we’re doing a workout and I can’t explain it, then I take the responsibility for not being able to explain it clear enough or understanding it well enough so that they’re comfortable with it. Vice versa, I don’t give them any workouts that I can’t explain why we’re doing them.

Fairly famously, people know that on hard interval sessions or hard days of training where I know it’s going to be nasty, if they call, I don’t answer. I just want to know in the end, what they decided to do, and more times than not, they end up working through it. They figure out that they can go deeper than they thought they could, and they get themselves through it. And what it does is, it doesn’t give them an out if they want out, they can take the out, but they have to choose the out themselves, not me.

Dirk Friel:

Right? So this is a test in a way.

Jim Miller:

Yeah. It gives them, it empowers them over their decision making. And if they do like, for me, I think a cornerstone workout is 5×5 VO2, but anybody who’s done that knows that that’s a horrendous workout. And if they do 1×5 and they quit, then I just want to know why they quit. But with no ramifications, I never bagged on him for it. I never criticize. But then other times they can just knock out 5×5 and devour it and crush it and, and move on. So in those kinds of cornerstone workouts, I really leave it up to them to decide how much they can handle and how much they want to push. And I’m not their out.

Dirk Friel:

Yeah. And some athletes are definitely just as much into the data as you are. Others aren’t. Is that true? In the case, have you coached athletes that love the data, others, that it was intimidating to them?

Jim Miller:

Yeah. Full-spectrum. You know, you always get those, the guys who just say, tell me what to do. I don’t care. I’ll do it. And if I can’t do it, then I can’t do it. And then you get the people that want to sit down and break down the file with you and go through it.

Dirk Friel:

So going almost full-circle back to the beginning, you had a lot of great mentors that you were able to learn a lot from, maybe in your experience of coaching over 25 years now. What has been some of the big changes in the profession of coaching, in terms of the philosophy of training, etc. What are some takeaways for you over this last quarter of a century of coaching?

Jim Miller:

Wow, man. That’s a big one. I always think we’re like on the, what we know right now is the tip of the spear, cutting edge where we’re ultra-smart. And then you look back three years, you’re like, I can’t believe I was writing the training I was writing then. So I think it’s just this continual evolution of information and knowledge.

You know, for sure the power meter was a big piece, understanding how to analyze power was a big piece. Having metrics that helped you make decisions was, it was a big piece. If you, if you think about philosophies, I mean, in the nineties, we were all [inaudible]. It was, it was all heavy blocks, right? Three weeks on, one week off. You lived and died by that. You built blocks based off of the energy systems only, and that’s all you did. And you progressed through this whole spectrum of energy systems and our durations, and assume that when you completed that you’d be race-ready. And we all know that now that that probably didn’t work that great. 

I think the most invaluable thing for me is to actually just keep learning and keep challenging yourself and assume that you don’t know as much as you think. And pay attention to what other people are doing and listen, but also use your own instincts and gut to determine whether you think that makes sense from now.

Dirk Friel:

Yeah. So any kind of help on resources or any tips for young coaches on their evolution?

Jim Miller:

Yeah. I mean, read, read, read, read, read, read. When I started this coaching career, I never considered myself a reader. But when I look back on it and people talk about books, I’m like, Yep. I read that book. Yeah. I read that book. Yep. I read that book. I just don’t think you can read enough. Aand maybe it doesn’t have to be reading. Maybe it’s audible, maybe it’s books on Amazon, whatever. But I say read nonstop. 

Dirk Friel:

Well, I know a lot of influencers out there are so accessible, through social media, Instagram, Twitter, you can almost ask them anything they want and they’ll get back to you, you know? And so that’s a great resource. You didn’t have 20 years ago.

Jim Miller:

It is. It’s interesting too, with TrainingPeaks articles, you would think a guy like, when I get those emails with the different articles from coaches, I don’t even know some of these coaches, but I read their articles. And sometimes I agree sometimes I disagree, but it’s just, there’s so much content that comes at us now, that you can consume as much as you can consume, but I think for learning to be a good coach, that’s it. 

The other thing I would say is to actually coach. Coach a lot. Coach as much as you can. Coach your kid’s sports, coach different sports, coach different levels. The more you can coach, the more you ultimately fail, the more you fail the ultimate, ultimately the more you learn.

Dirk Friel:

Yeah. That’s a great way to wrap up. I think learning from other sports is a, another key one. We don’t, in the world of cycling or triathlon or whatever you coach, we can always learn from other sports. So that’s a great takeaway. Any, any last words of wisdom here, Coach Miller?

Jim Miller:

No, hang in there. This can’t last forever. This too will pass.

Dirk Friel:

Yeah. Well, I hope everybody’s healthy out there and thank you so much, Jim. I have like 50 more questions, so maybe we’ll have you on again in the future, but yeah. Thank you so much, Jim, for your time.

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Coachcast Host Dirk Friel
About TrainingPeaks CoachCast Host Dirk Friel

Dirk Friel is the host of the TrainingPeaks CoachCast and Co-Founder of TrainingPeaks. He is a lifelong athlete with a passion for cycling and ski mountaineering and firmly believes in goal setting, dedicated deliberate training and coaching for all. Learn more about his work at TrainingPeaks and follow his adventures on Instagram @dirkfriel.

Visit TrainingPeaks CoachCast Host Dirk Friel's Coach Profile