The Running Experience is a Human Experience
“Running is just you, the work you put in, and the clock. You can’t cheat yourself. If you don’t put in the miles, you can’t go to the starting line thinking you’re going to pull a miracle out of nowhere. You get out exactly what you put in.”
As I was sitting on my couch writing up next week’s training plans for my running clients, one of my friends emailed me with the subject line: “Thought you’d be interested in this!” When I clicked on the email, it directed me to a Wall Street Journal article from this week titled, “I Decided to Run a Marathon. Then I Did Something Crazier. I Let ChatGPT Be My Coach.”
To be fair, the body of the email from my friend also said “My take: Human coach is MUCH better than AI coach :)”
My first reaction? A smile at my friend for her kind words, and a massive eye roll at the title of this article. To back up a little bit, let me explain my extremely limited knowledge of ChatGPT.
As my wife would describe me, I am someone who is very resistant to technology and change, to put it lightly. I had a flip phone for way longer than was considered cool or even functional; I refused to get AirPods and ran with corded headphones until the last couple years, when I finally upgraded to Shokz; I am only on IG because my job requires me to be and it’s the best way to stay in touch with clients and friends; and I had Tik Tok for all of 17 seconds before I did one scroll and decided it was not for me. I also have no idea how to find the Bills games on our TV with multiple remotes. All that to say, I have never used ChatGPT and never will. The thought of relying on AI to make decisions for me without doing research on my own sounds too easy, and almost like cheating some sort of system. Call me antiquated and old-fashioned, and likely stuck in my ways, but I prefer to use Google as my old reliable.
While I am resistant to the ChatGPT wave, I am also not naive. I know that AI is incredibly efficient and very useful, and the thought crosses my mind fairly often that my job as a run coach could be jeopardized by technology. I am very familiar with running apps that continue to be released, but know that there is at least some human intelligence behind these. While I find them generic and not great for accountability, I also know that they are cheaper and more easily accessible for many runners than hiring a coach could be.
However, using ChatGPT for your entire marathon training? That is something completely new to me. As someone who started their running journey by using Hal Higdon programs downloaded online and then eventually moving to a human coach, this approach seems scary and gives pause. Where is ChatGPT pulling this information from? And if you ask for a plan, does it go week by week? Day by day? I immediately thought of my Garmin, which gives me race predictors, but oftentimes are very inaccurate. To me, using ChatGPT seems very similar.
But my curiosity got the best of me, and I opened the article. The second paragraph had me hooked. The author writes, “it’s been four months since I’ve decided to make ChatGPT my New York City Marathon coach, and I’m wondering if I made a huge mistake.”
The article goes on to list all the pros and cons of using AI to create a running plan for her. She literally just asked it to create a running plan for her, submitted her splits for her runs, asked about fueling, and even asked about music. At first, she thought it was going great (minus the playlist suggestions), and “Chat” as she referred to it, even predicted her marathon finish time would be significantly faster than her last marathon time.
However, toward the end of her training, she started questioning her decision, as she found other runners were running four days a week instead of three, and she was wondering if she had done enough and was prepared enough for the race.
Without using ChatGPT myself, I have many personal opinions about this—and while many of them may seem biased as I am a run coach myself, I do feel that there are many aspects of run coaching that an AI bot cannot capture.
This all ties back to my initial decision to become a running coach in the first place. My first five years of marathon running were all over the place. I used a combination of running plans I had downloaded online, I hired a coach myself, I tried to do a mix of the two. I wanted to be the coach that I wished I had myself - someone who understood that running is none of my client’s full time jobs, my runners have busy lives with work, children, pets, and other commitments, and more than anything, I wanted to be a coach who put more focus on the effort, the feel, the joy of running, as opposed to a ton of numbers and formulas to get an arbitrary predicted finish time. I truly believe that the real purpose of running is to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment about doing a very challenging athletic endeavor over the finish time on the clock.
The WSJ article references a conversation the author had with Steve Mura, the Runner Training and Education Lead at New York Road Runners, in which he said, “Running is the simplest sport we have,” he added. “We make it too complicated. AI, watches, cadence. There’s debate about how high you should step off the ground, how your arms swing. People ask, ‘how do I breathe when I run?’ You just breathe. We need to remember what running is and it’s just running.”
This quote stuck with me for many reasons, and also ties back into why a real life coach is always a better decision than robot. For one, life happens. I totally understand when my clients have prior commitments or an off week. For instance, many of my runners email me that they will be going on vacation for a week during their training, and are panicked about how or when they’ll be able to get their runs in. My answer? Take the week off and enjoy the trip! Running and training will resume when they get back. And I can provide them with real-life examples of other running clients who have taken the week off of running for vacation or work travel, and ended up really appreciating the down week—they were able to resume training feeling well-rested and motivated to hit the mileage hard upon their return.
Another example? A client has a birthday party or social event and woke up too tired or too hungover to do their long run. They email me, and I assure them that taking the day off to rest and hydrate and giggle about memories from the night before is more than okay, and pushing the long run back or adjusting mileage the next week will not derail their training.
What about injury or illness? Life happens, and I can tell clients that they need to rest and hydrate, or refer them to local PTs and doctors, and help them create a strength or rehab plan to keep them moving until they are able to run again. I don’t know what ChatGPT would recommend, but if it is anything like any google search I pull up or any generic, non-running professional would say, I’m guessing it would tell the runner to stop training without trustworthy alternatives, which is exactly what a runner who is on the injured list does not want to hear.
Finally, one of the greatest joys of being a coach is becoming a friend and cheerleader to my runners. I develop a bond with almost all my running clients that, at least for me, goes far beyond miles and training. I become personally invested in them and their journey, and love hearing their long run and race recaps, and I love being on the other side of their big race to hear about the ups, the downs, and everything in between. The beauty of having a coach and being a coach is the ability to pivot, to adapt, to cheer, to motivate, and to hold clients accountable. While I am sure ChatGPT has the scientific formula to get you to a PR, it doesn’t account for any hiccups and road blocks along the way, and won’t be there to celebrate with you at the end.
At the end of the day, there are so many things to analyze and focus on about the sport of running. What shoes to wear? How to negative split? How many 1k repeats should I do at what pace? Should I try a bi-carb system? Do I need to do deficit runs? All of this may help you perform at your best, but once again... are you having fun? Running is truly what you make of it, but let’s not make it so specific and calculated, because no matter how hard you train, the marathon is a test of grit, a test of mental toughness, and a display of how incredible human beings can be when they set a goal for themselves—or show up to spectate and cheer for strangers.
Running can be boiled down to the numbers and the science, or it can be celebrated for what it is. It’s a human experience, and that’s what makes it so beautiful.
Xo
Coach Kelly