Coaching
Before you commit to a coaching subscription, it is worth understanding what is actually happening behind the scenes each week. The answer might surprise you, especially if you have only ever followed a generic training plan.
The Big Difference
A training plan is a document. It tells you what to run, when, and at what pace. It was written before it knew anything about you, and it will not change based on how you are responding to training, what your week at work looks like, or whether your calf has been feeling tight since Tuesday.
Coaching is a relationship. Your coach writes your training, yes, but the more important part of their job is everything that happens after they hit send. The monitoring, the adjusting, the conversations, the race strategy, the support when things go wrong. That is what you are actually paying for when you sign up with an online running coach.
"The plan is the starting point. Everything that happens after you post that first session is where coaching actually lives."
Week by Week
Each week, your coach reviews your recent training data and feedback before writing the next block of sessions. They take into account your current fitness level, the phase of your training cycle, your upcoming race schedule, and any fatigue or niggles you have reported. The plan is not pulled from a template. It is written for you, for this week specifically.
Sessions are delivered via TrainingPeaks, where structured workouts can sync directly to your GPS watch. You open your watch, start running, and the target paces and intervals are already loaded.
After each session, your coach reviews the data. They look at whether your heart rate was where it should be, whether you hit the target paces, and how your perceived effort compared to the physiological data. Over time, this builds an increasingly detailed picture of how your body responds to training, which makes every subsequent week of coaching more precise.
If something looks off, your coach flags it. If you are responding better than expected, they may bring forward a progression. This is the part of coaching that a training plan simply cannot replicate.
Life happens. Work trips, illness, family commitments, a foot that started hurting on mile eight. When you message your coach to let them know, a real person responds, assesses the situation, and adjusts your training accordingly. That adjustment might be as simple as swapping a hard session for an easy run. It might mean redesigning the next two weeks of your programme. The point is it happens, and it happens with full knowledge of your goals, your history, and where you are in your training cycle.
In the weeks before a goal race, your coach manages your taper, the structured reduction in training volume that allows your body to arrive at the start line fresh and ready to perform. They also work with you on your race day strategy: pacing approach, nutrition plan, warm-up protocol, and how to handle unexpected conditions on the day.
The difference between a well-managed taper and a poorly managed one can be five to ten minutes in a marathon. This alone is frequently worth the cost of coaching for competitive runners.
Staying Connected
The primary communication channel for most online coaching relationships is a combination of TrainingPeaks (for plan delivery and data review) and a direct messaging platform, typically WhatsApp. The key word in online coaching is unlimited. A good coaching package should not limit how often you can contact your coach with questions, concerns, or feedback.
At JM Coaching, every package includes unlimited WhatsApp support. This means if you wake up on Thursday with a question about your Saturday long run, you can ask it. If you ran a session on Tuesday that felt unusual, you can describe it. Your coach will respond with genuine knowledge of your specific situation, not a generic answer.
Higher-tier coaching packages typically add scheduled calls, either at regular intervals or at key moments in your training cycle such as race week or the start of a new training block. These calls allow for a deeper conversation about your progress, your goals, and any adjustments to the longer-term plan.
When your training data arrives in TrainingPeaks after a session, a good coach looks at more than just whether you completed the workout. They review the relationship between your pace and your heart rate, how your effort varied across the session, how your heart rate responded during recovery intervals, and whether the overall training stress is appropriate for where you are in your training cycle. All of this informs what happens next in your programme.
Being Honest
Coaching is not magic. There are limits to what any coach can deliver through a screen, and it is worth being clear about them.
An online coach cannot watch you run in real time and correct your form the way an in-person coach can. They work from data and from your descriptions of how sessions felt, which means the quality of communication from your end matters significantly. The more accurate and detailed your feedback, the better your coach can help you.
An online coach is not a physiotherapist or a sports doctor. They can manage your training load intelligently and refer you to appropriate professionals when needed, but they cannot diagnose or treat injuries.
And an online coach cannot make you run the sessions. Consistency is still the athlete's job. The plan only works if you do.
Common Questions
This depends on your coaching package. At a minimum, expect weekly plan delivery and the ability to message your coach whenever you need to. Higher-tier packages include scheduled calls at key points in your training cycle, such as before and after major races.
Sharing your training data is highly recommended and makes coaching significantly more effective. Platforms like TrainingPeaks allow your coach to see your actual performance data, which informs how they adapt your next week of training.
A coach can adjust your training load in response to injury, help you maintain fitness through cross-training, and refer you to appropriate physiotherapy support. Good load management is one of the most effective injury prevention tools available.
A training plan is fixed. Coaching is adaptive. Your coach changes your training based on real-time feedback, making it far more effective for most runners than a static plan, regardless of how well-designed that plan might be.
TrainingPeaks is the industry standard for online running coaching. It allows coaches to write and deliver structured workouts, monitor athlete performance data, and communicate with athletes. JM Coaching uses TrainingPeaks for all coaching packages, with Premium access included in Silver and Gold tiers.
Summary
An online running coach writes your training, monitors how you are responding to it, adjusts it based on your feedback and your data, manages your taper, builds your race strategy, and supports you through the inevitable challenges that come with a serious training block. They do all of this with full knowledge of your specific goals, history, and lifestyle. A training plan does none of those things.
If you are curious about what coaching with JM actually looks like in practice, the services page walks through each package in detail, including the onboarding process and what to expect in your first few weeks.
Founder of JM Coaching, 2:08:45 marathon runner and Great Britain international. Coaching runners of all abilities since 2013. Read his full profile.
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