I'll wait till winter to get a coach. DONT DO THIS MISTAKE

"I'll wait until winter to get a coach."

I hear this a lot, and I get why. But if your big goal is somewhere in the second half of 2027, starting now puts you in a much better spot than waiting for January.

Here's the thing most people don't think about. When I start working with someone, I need time to learn them. How they like to communicate, how much training they can actually handle around work and life, how their body responds when I throw a certain type of session at them. None of that happens in week one.

If we start now, that whole getting-to-know-you phase is done by the time the new year rolls round. So when the real work starts, we're already rolling, instead of me still figuring you out during an important training phase.

And it's not like nothing happens in the meantime. If you came to me now with no real goal for the rest of the year, I wouldn't just have you ticking over. I'd set a few things to aim at, then put you through a focused 8–10 week block on whatever's holding you back most, your threshold, your LT1, your VO2, whatever it is. We'd target it and move it.

That gives you a proper focus for a quiet part of the year, improves your limiter, and lets me see how you respond to training before it really counts.

I've just started doing exactly this with a rider aiming at Unbound in 2027. His goal's a long way off, so we're not touching it yet, right now we're fixing one limiter and learning how he ticks. By the time we get into the Unbound-specific work, he'll be fitter than if he'd waited, and I'll already know how to get the best out of him.