From Team Sports to Trail Running: Escaping the Coach, Embracing the… Well, Ourselves
The whistle blows, the coach barks orders, the pressure mounts. Years spent in the structured world of team sports, the camaraderie, the competition, the… *schedule*. Oh, the schedule. Practices three times a week, games every weekend, tournaments consuming entire months. Life, it seemed, revolved around the team's calendar. Then, something shifts. Family, career, reality intervenes. The rigid structure no longer fits. And so, many seek refuge in the untamed wilderness of trail running.
The allure is undeniable. Freedom! Run when you want, where you want. No set practice times, no weekend games dictating your life. Just you, the trails, and the sweet, sweet liberation from organized sports. It’s glorious. For a while. Blissful, unstructured miles. A newfound appreciation for solitude, for nature, for the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other. It’s all so… unstructured.
And then, the irony. The distances creep up. The whispers of "maybe an ultra?" become shouts. Suddenly, the freedom starts to feel… familiar. Long runs on the weekends (because, hey, gotta train!), early mornings (because, hey, the trails are calling!), meticulously planned nutrition (because, hey, bonking is for amateurs!). The unstructured world begins to… structure itself. Except now, *you're* the coach. You're the one setting the impossible mileage goals. You're the one yelling at yourself (internally, of course) to push harder. You’ve traded the coach for a far more demanding taskmaster: yourself.
It’s a cosmic joke, really. We flee the tyranny of team schedules, only to willingly embrace the tyranny of training plans. We ditch the coach's whistle, only to hear our own inner voice nagging us to get out there and “crush those hills.” We trade team dinners for… well, we probably still have team dinners, but now we’re the ones obsessing over carb loading. The commitment is still there, just pointed inward. It’s a commitment to the ever-increasing mileage, the ever-elusive PR, the ever-present challenge of the next trail, and the next, and the next…
So, maybe trail running isn’t about escaping structure. Maybe it’s about choosing our own form of delightful self-inflicted torture. And maybe, just maybe, that’s exactly what we were looking for all along. We’re not escaping the coach. We’re just becoming our own, slightly more masochistic, version of one.
< Back to Blog
