Does being fast make you a good speed coach?

The PB as a credential

Walk into almost any club in the country and look at who has been handed the sprint group. More often than not it is the person who was quickest there fifteen years ago. Nobody decided this. It happens because a personal best is the only credential in our sport that everyone can read instantly. A coaching qualification takes a conversation to explain. A time does not.

I benefit from this constantly and I want to be honest about it. My times open doors. Athletes take me more seriously in the first session because of them. Parents relax. And none of that is evidence that I can help their child run faster, because the thing being measured — that I could produce speed — is a different capability from the thing being bought, which is that I can produce it in someone else.

Having done it and being able to teach it are not the same skill, and the sport keeps confusing them because one is easy to verify.

You cannot teach what you never had to learn

The deeper problem is not arrogance. It is that a lot of athletic skill is acquired without ever passing through language.

Think about the sprinter who was simply the quickest kid at school. They were never coached through their first steps out of the blocks; they just went, and it worked, and it kept working. By the time anyone was analysing them, the movement had been automatic for a decade. Ask them why their shin angle is what it is and they will tell you it is what feels right, because that is genuinely the whole of their access to it. The knowledge lives in the body and was never encoded anywhere it can be retrieved from.

Now put that person in charge of a seventeen-year-old who does none of it naturally. What can they actually offer? They can show them. They can tell them to be more aggressive, to stay down longer, to relax at the top. All of that is a description of the outcome rather than instructions for producing it. The athlete hears it, tries harder, and does the same thing slightly more tensely.

Psychologists call this the curse of knowledge — once something is automatic, you lose the ability to model what it is like not to know it. It is why brilliant mathematicians are often terrible at teaching arithmetic. In sprinting, it means the coach's own excellence can be the exact thing standing between them and the athlete.

The accidental advantage of arriving late

Here is where my own history matters, and not in the way people assume.

I did not come up through athletics. I was a semi-professional footballer and a boxer first. I arrived at sprinting as an adult, in a body that had been trained for other things, and I was not immediately good at it. I had to be taught how to set blocks. I had to be taught what to do with my arms. I had to be told, repeatedly, that the thing I thought was driving out was in fact standing up in the first three steps and giving away the whole race.

At the time that felt like a disadvantage. I was thirty-something and being corrected on things that fourteen-year-olds around me had never needed correcting on. In hindsight it is the single most valuable thing in my coaching toolkit, because every part of sprinting that a natural does unconsciously, I had to install deliberately, in words, in a body that resisted. I know what the cues feel like from the inside and I know which ones actually change anything, because I was the experiment.

So when I say my 10.60 is not what makes me useful, I mean it precisely. What makes me useful is that I was slow first, and had to be taught. The PB is the receipt for that process, not the qualification.

The demonstration trap

The failure mode this produces in coaches who never had to learn consciously is showing instead of decomposing.

Demonstration feels like coaching. You do the drill, it looks right, the athlete copies it, everyone leaves satisfied. But copying only transfers when the athlete already possesses the underlying capability and simply needs the pattern. If they cannot hold the position, or cannot produce force in that direction, or do not yet have the ankle stiffness the shape requires, then watching a good version of it teaches them nothing except what they are failing to achieve.

Decomposition is the alternative and it is much slower work. It means asking what this movement is actually made of, which of those parts this athlete has and which they do not, and what the smallest thing is that would change one of them this week. It is unglamorous. It looks less like coaching than a beautiful demonstration does. It is coaching.

The clearest test I know: if your correction is a description of what you want to see rather than an instruction for how to produce it, you are demonstrating. "Stay down" is a description. Something that changes where the athlete's eyes go, or what the first contact has to do, or how far away the cone is, is an instruction.

What speed genuinely gives a coach

I am not arguing that having been an athlete is worthless. It gives you three things that are hard to get any other way.

It calibrates your standards. If you have never been near it, you can mistake fast for very fast, and you will accept work that is nowhere near the intensity it needs to be. Second, it gives you an honest feel for the cost of a session. I am still competing, so I know what my Tuesday does to my Thursday, and that makes me far more sceptical of programmes that look immaculate on a spreadsheet. Third, it buys you patience about the ugly middle of a technical change, because you remember being worse before you got better and not enjoying it.

None of those, though, is the ability to teach. They are context. They make a good coach better and they do not make a non-coach into one.

Questions worth asking

If you are choosing a coach, the PB on the website tells you they were once talented. Ask instead what they changed about an athlete last season and how they knew it worked. Ask what they would do with someone built nothing like them. Ask them to explain a cue rather than show you a drill.

And if you are a fast athlete who has just started coaching, the most useful question is the uncomfortable one: which parts of this did I never have to be taught? Whatever is on that list is where you are about to be least helpful, and it is where your athletes need you most.