 Alright, so about a month ago I attended a running coaching course in Povis, Wales. It was the Lideard Coaching Certification Course and I'm officially a Lideard Certified Coach. Check it out. I'm proud to show it to you guys and I want to talk a little bit about the course today, how it was, how it went, give a little bit of a review of it I guess, talk about what I learned and show you guys some footage from the three days that I was there. So first of all some background. The Lideard Foundation is a foundation intended to preserve and promote the principles of Arthur Lideard. He was a famous running coach from New Zealand and he's known for almost revolutionizing the way people train for endurance sports, particularly running. So he heavily promoted the idea of paradiseation which is dividing your training year into different phases and he was also a big proponent of creating a large aerobic base with a lot of fairly easy running but at high volumes. He was the one who sort of popularized the 100 mile week initially. He coached some of New Zealand's athletes to Olympic gold medals etc. back in the 60s. So in a sense he's kind of the father of modern training philosophy and coaches like Jack Daniels, I made a review of his book, you can check it out here, Pete Fitzsinger and a lot of other people really draw upon the teachings of Lideard a lot in their coaching philosophies. So when I found out that there was such a thing as a Lideard Foundation and that they teach courses, I thought what a good idea, you know. I'll educate myself a little bit more on the coaching side of things and so I booked my place for a weekend coaching course in Povis, Wales and that's a very beautiful location just like rolling hills and green and just really amazing. So the course started on Friday, had a full day on Saturday and a full day on Sunday. So pretty much a weekend of just immersing myself into running, a little bit more than usual, I'm always immersed in running but learning, I like the process of learning and I love attending courses and stuff like that. So this was a really great experience for me, I'm really really happy about the outcome. I feel like I've learned a lot, I'm inspired to coach, I'm inspired to run, it's helped me understand some of the core principles of paradisation and building an aerobic base which is so essential for any athlete running distances longer than a minute really. I stayed at a bed and breakfast pretty close to the course venue, together with one of the other attendees, Ian. He stayed there with me, you can check out some footage here of us having breakfast, it's really nice, we had breakfast in the morning and then after breakfast we walked to the course venue, took I don't know 10 minutes, 15 minutes, something like that. Here's some footage of us walking together with another guy, Pete, who also stayed at that bed and breakfast for one night. The course venue was like an old hall, like a manor, typically, you know, countryside United Kingdom style. So it was really beautiful and interesting and lots of people, how many people were we, maybe 20 or even 30, I don't know, something like that. And so before and after and in the breaks we hang out in the lobby outside of the classroom, that was really nice, really social, a lot of cool people, nice to talk about running all day long. The course was classroom style, very great. Lorraine Muller, our teacher, she was awesome. She's an Olympian, she's won the bronze medal in the Barcelona Olympics back in 1992 and she also won the Boston Marathon in 84, as well as a bunch of other titles and she was she was teaching the course and she's also the president of the Lutjord Foundation based in Boulder, Colorado, USA. So what she brought to the table was experience and knowledge of being an athlete, most of all, but also coaching people. And then she had two like wingmen, both named Colin, one from New Zealand, one from the UK, Colin Livingstone and Colin Lancaster. And so they were great sort of adding in some knowledge here and there, sharing their opinions, they're both coaches obviously and runners as well, very interactive course as well, we were all contributing, asking questions, discussing things with each other out loud, so that was really cool. Good vibes, most of the course was theoretical, so we were watching PowerPoint slides, Lorraine was explaining things, we were taking notes and we also had some course materials with information about what we were learning and we also got a free book that I'm definitely gonna make a review of where the Lutjord principles are explained in detail. On the Saturday and Sunday we also had a practical session, sort of to break things up a little bit, get outside, move a little bit and most of all learn the practical aspects of some of the workout types that are very particular to the Lutjord program, namely the hill training. So on Saturday we learned about the hill training, we went outside, Colin demonstrated some of the hill training techniques for us and we were you know all trying them etc. And on Sunday we did a also a practical session focused on what's known as fifties-fifties, which is 50 meters hard, 50 meters easy, 50 meters hard, 50 meters easy. Anyway I can make another video one day where I go into some of the core principles of Lutjord training and explain it to you a little bit more in detail. Of course we also had lunch every day that was included in the course, so the kitchen at Melington Hall provided us with a sort of almost like a little buffet where we could help ourselves to lunch and they had a vegan option there as well, so that was great. They knew I was vegan, there was a few other vegans, there was also a gluten-free option. If you're considering the course for the future you should know that if you're a total beginner it's appropriate, you will be able to understand things, it's really explained from the bottom up, so you're not going to be totally confused with like crazy concepts or anything like that, but even if you are an experienced runner, experienced coach even, I think you can still get a lot out of this course. You know Arthur Lutjord, he did so much for the way people train and he introduced a lot of new concepts that I feel like learning it from the people who knew him, learning it from the source almost is the best way to really understand those concepts at the core. And now that I've done the exam that we did online after the course where essentially there's a multiple choice and there's also two case studies that you have to do where you're sort of creating a training plan for a fictive person, so I spent quite a few hours on that exam and it helped me consolidate what I've learned and sort of here it is, you know, really, really great course highly recommended. I'll put a link to their website, the Lydjord Foundation in the description, so if you're interested in you know doing the course yourself you could do that by signing up on their website. I'm not affiliated with them in any way except for the fact that I am now an official Lydjord certified coach of course and you can actually look at my profile, my coach profile on their website, I'll put a link to that as well in the description where you can read about me as a coach and although I haven't yet launched my official coaching business which I am going to do sometime this winter or next spring, if you are interested in running coaching at this point you can go to my Facebook page the loan trail there's a link in the description and just send me a message there and we can discuss creating a training plan for you doing some coaching sessions over Skype or anything like that. So please contact me if you're interested in coaching. Thanks for watching and if you're one of the attendees at the course or if you're Lorraine or Colin or Colin please know that I had an awesome time and you all made it a great experience for me. Thanks. Bye bye.