By Brian Clarke
The Covid-19 pandemic put me out of business in March 2020. But I now believe it was the best thing that could have happened to me and my BC Endurance training enterprise. I still had a large following in 2020, but I was losing the faster athletes, the program had stagnated, and my revival efforts were being spurned by some of my veteran leaders. Most significantly, I wasn’t enjoying my work.
I’ve always enjoyed teaching, and I had always envisioned the marathon program as a training and education program. Unfortunately, the training program methodology afforded little time for teaching. We showed up at a meeting place, I spoke for a few minutes, we broke into groups, and the workout began. I loved seeing friendly people returning from a workout, with happy faces talking up a storm. I had an effective methodology for training large numbers of recreational athletes, with group leaders in charge of ability groups.
But, except for those few minutes when I spoke after our stretching exercises, we were lacking an educational component. I taught what I could and left a lot of the teaching to our leaders, who did as well as could be expected. But I was interested in a more formal approach to education. And I wanted it to encompass a broader range of topics, including nutrition, strength building, and the mental aspects of racing, training, and life in general. I saw room, for instance, to teach meditation as a complement to our training discipline.
It took me a week of unemployment in March 2020 to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I know that sounds trite, but at age 76 I figured I was entering the last phase of my work-life, with little time to spare. So, I got to work on a new business that would meet my needs and, hopefully, those of my clientele. With proven training methodology in hand, I set about adding a viable educational component.
My first innovation was incorporating Zoom-audio technology into our budding program. Since we couldn’t train in person-to-person groups, I realized we could nonetheless be connected to one another through the hated Zoom technology. Most people at the time spent much of their day on Zoom and wanted nothing to do with it after work hours. It was tough selling the idea that Zoom-audio wasn’t the same as Zoom-audio-visual. With Zoom-audio, listening became the most important skill. And I built a following that liked engaging with one another by listening. It became the foundation of a new educational process—one that lent itself to training alone or in a group. For, as long as we were willing to train and listen, we could learn from one another as a community of scholars. I saw my role as facilitator of our discussions. I modeled good listening and asked questions that challenged the intelligent athletes on the call to tell us something we could incorporate into our training and our lives.
After that revelation, the other facets of our program fell neatly into place. We developed a website to support our community, and we added a growing number of interesting courses and stand-alone educational programs. Now, in the fourth year of my career comeback, I couldn’t be enjoying myself more.
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