A Note From Freetrail: For The Love of Coaching is a four part series from nonfiction writer Lindsey Gallagher. Just like sports broadly, coaching has long been a male dominated industry, but as the author notes this is changing – and we are here for it. Over the next several months this series will highlight women leading women when it comes to coaching, mentoring, and encouraging athletes to find their place on the trail.

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Over the last few years, we’ve seen a growth in the attention on female sports – female athletes, female coaches, female fans. Trail and ultra running has been no exception. In our sport, some of the biggest names are female. As an avid runner, I’ve taken note of just how many female athletes are finding success with female coaches. I quickly began to wonder about the experiences of these women guiding, mentoring, and encouraging athletes in a sport that remains male-dominated. So I’ve spoken to just a few of these female coaches to answer my questions. Over the next few months, I’ll share a conversation with each one I interviewed to bring their wisdom and energy to others.

This month, I talked to Lindsey Herman, who happens to be my own coach. Lindsey grew up playing soccer and downhill skiing. Her introduction to running came from her father, who raced road marathons. At 16, Lindsey ran her first marathon. Heavily invested in downhill skiing at the time, she vowed to keep running just for fun. But in college at Western Colorado University, she found the trail running team. After blowing out her knee skiing, running quickly became her main focus. Lindsey stayed at WCU to help coach the trail running team while continuing to venture onto the trails herself. In 2021, she got a big win at the Silver Rush 50 mile race. Through racing well and with the help of mentor David Roche, her own coaching business (which she started on a small scale in 2019) began to take off. Now she’s a full-time coach and professional trail and ultra runner for Salomon. 

Lindsey’s personal experiences have greatly influenced her expertise as a coach. When Lindsey first went all in on running, she quickly developed a severe eating disorder. She received treatment in 2020 and is now an advocate for fueling enough always. Unfortunately, her eating disorder led to a series of stress fractures. First, it was a full fracture through her pubic bone and later over 20 fractures in her pelvis. She has since been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that affects bone health, but she believes the years with an eating disorder may have caused this. As a result, Lindsey is exceptionally passionate about working with athletes with a bone injury and eating disorder history. 

Lindsey Gallagher: What led you to want to coach and why did you want to start your own business?

Lindsey Herman: I think with the college [WCU], the base motivation was wanting to learn from that coach. I really respected the coach that I had in college and he is a fantastic athlete. He was a professional road marathoner for a while, coached the NCAA program, and then coached a trail running team. Definitely wanting to learn from him and then wanting to stay involved in the team, maybe a little bit selfishly, led me to coaching. I just loved my experience on the team so much and didn’t want it to end. I also think one big thing for me is that I loved the coaches I had there but they were always male coaches. I remember especially my senior year struggling with an eating disorder, they were the best and they didn’t do anything harmful, but I also think they had no idea about how to approach it, especially with me being a female athlete. I didn’t have a female coach when I was on the team so I know that when I started helping with the team so many female athletes on the team would come to me about different things, whether they were food and body or menstrual cycle or things that they probably wouldn’t go to a male coach about. That was really something that made me want to be that female role model that female athletes could have and what I wish I had when I was on the team. Starting my own business was definitely my way to give back to the sport. I knew no matter what I wanted to build a career in the sport. I am really competitive, I love racing and I love competing and I do love focusing on my running in that way, but I also wanted it to be bigger than me. I think the trail running community is just so cool and wanted to give back in that way.

Gallagher: How did you find your first athlete?

Herman: My first athlete was a David Roche referral. I still coach her, my very first athlete. That’s been one really cool thing about coaching, focusing on building relationships with athletes. A lot of my athletes I’ve had for 3 or 4 years and that’s just been super cool for me. I’ve always had this belief that I want to do something where I get to connect with people and make people know that their story matters. Coaching has been the coolest way to bring together my passion for athletics and also for making people feel loved.

Gallagher: What professional development and training have you done for coaching?

Herman: As a coach having my own business I don’t have built in colleagues so a lot of my professional development has been stuff that I’ve sought out on my own. The Coaches Collective has been huge. I’m also part of the Women’s Running Coaches Collective and they put on all sorts of different seminars and they bring in different experts on various topics whether it’s bone health or blood biomarkers or things like that. It’s all focused on female athletes. I try and build professional development into everything I’m doing. I’m a nerd so I enjoy reading scientific studies. I really don’t watch Netflix; I’d rather go on Google Scholar and see what I can find. I make sure I’m doing that regularly and trying to stay up to date on research, reading articles and studies and thinking critically about how I would apply this in the real world to the athletes that I’m coaching. Then just following different people like David and Megan Roche and other experts in the field. I love podcasts and am always listening to different podcasts with different experts and coaches. 

In trail and ultra running, I don’t think there’s a great overarching certification for coaching. I know that there’s one that exists but I haven’t gotten it. Another thing I’ve thought about because of that is why don’t I create a certification, even a female athlete one? If there’s this thing that’s lacking how could I collaborate with other coaches and make one that is beneficial for our sport. Knowing the science and all that is good but the most learning I’ve done is through coaching. You learn so much more when you’re there in the weeds out there doing it, learning from athletes that you’re actually working with. I feel like I’ve learned so much by being a coach and trying to be open to constantly learning through that.

Gallagher: What are your guiding philosophies as a coach?

Herman: I definitely tend to work with athletes on longer-term time scales. I will sometimes get an athlete who wants an eight week plan for a specific race and I try to be up front that I’m usually looking for long-term relationships with athletes. But I believe – especially with endurance sports like trail running, marathoning, and even like road running—that stacking the adaptations year over year, the athletes can do so much more than they think they can. I definitely try and ground things in how we can make this process sustainable and something that athletes want to keep committing to long term. A big part of that is making sure that we keep finding joy in what we are doing – so really keeping athletes’ joy and happiness at the forefront. If we want to get an athlete as fast as we can get them in eight weeks that’s one thing and they might be able to put their head down and grind and be miserable and then run a fast race, but I think athletes can do so much more if they can find a way to make it sustainable and joyful for multi-year timelines. 

I also try to ground myself in building authentic relationships with athletes. That’s the biggest thing that has driven me as a coach. It’s interesting when I start working with athletes they’ll start putting something in their log or tell me about something and say ‘this really doesn’t have to do with running.’ I always say, ‘I kind of think it all does.’ Running is so intertwined with the rest of life. I want my athletes to know that I’m invested in them in all of life. For coaching that’s key: being invested in the athlete as a whole person and truly being interested in who they are as a person and how running fits into that. I think that helps athletes stay in it longer and give their best performances. And there’s no reason for athletes to be doing it if they’re not having fun.

Gallagher: What are some specific challenges that you face that you think are unique to being a female coach?

Herman: Being a female coach coaching male athletes has been interesting, especially coaching male athletes who are older than I am, which several of them are since I’m 26. It’s been a big journey for me finding my confidence as a coach. I remember a few male athletes I started working with actually inserted a few columns into their training log with their suggestion of what they thought the plan should be. They added a column for their recommendations and at first I didn’t have the confidence as a coach to be like, ‘wait you’re paying me to coach you.’ I always want to work with athletes but I should own that I’m the expert on this. It’s been interesting for me, of finding that confidence as a coach. I’ve noticed that especially coaching male athletes it’s easy for there to be a mismatch of the power dynamic. 

I also think with being a female coach you have to work harder to establish yourself as the expert. I think it’s a cool time to be a female coach because we’re changing that and female coaches are starting to lift one another up more. The tides are shifting so that makes me really excited to be a female coach right now. But overall, finding that confidence in a space where female coaches haven’t been very confident and at the forefront in the past has probably been one of the biggest challenges for me.

Gallagher: What are some of the challenges that female athletes face that you need to be equipped to handle as a coach?

Herman: Female athletes definitely are not accounted for in a lot of research and that’s another thing that’s finally shifting. Also, female physiology is so different from male physiology particularly with hormones and the menstrual cycle. I have a male coach and I think there’s so many great male coaches out there, but I think female athletes need someone who truly understands that the way the female body responds to training and stress is so different than male athletes. Training and the way a coach relates to an athlete needs to reflect that. So that’s been big for me is understanding the hormonal context particularly for female athletes and how the body responds to different stressors. I think another reason that female athletes can benefit from having a female presence as a coach is realizing that it isn’t a weakness that our physiology is different. When we have coaches that can start to understand that, as we’re starting to see now, female athletes can thrive and really succeed when things are actually tailored to them.

Gallagher: Why is it so important to have female representation, not just from coaches but also from athletes, in sport and outside of sport?

Herman: I definitely think in general whatever minority it is, it’s really tough for people to pursue their potential in any field if they don’t see other people like them also doing it. Seeing other women or other female athletes really go after their dreams or be successful is just so powerful. It elevates everyone. That’s something that’s been interesting for me as a female athlete. I am very competitive. I am competitive to a fault. It’s just part of who I am. I used to get caught up in that, thinking that meant I had to be against other female athletes but I actually think that’s the opposite. Encouraging competitors, other female coaches, and other strong females to pursue their potential elevates every one of us. It’s so powerful to just have that representation. As a coach, I totally see in coaching female athletes a lot of athletes just want someone who has been there and who gets it. I think male athletes can understand if they really work hard at it, or male coaches can really understand and relate to female athletes, but I think there’s a lot of power in being a female coach and athlete and working with other female athletes. It’s really powerful when you can help someone see that they’re not alone. That helps give them the empowerment to then also pursue their potential. 

Gallagher: You mentioned we’ve been seeing more attention on female sports, including trail running. Where do you think trail running might go as this attention stays on female athletes? 

Herman: One thing that’s cool about trail and ultra running as a sport is there is so much to it. There’s so many different events, so many different distances, different disciplines, different things that can define success in the sport. It’s a unique sport in that there’s so many directions it can go and that’s really cool because there’s this whole frontier that hasn’t been explored. As we’re starting to understand female athletes better and really help female athletes pursue their potential, I think it’s just going to ride this wave with trail running growing and with female athletes being more empowered. There’s this great opportunity in a growing sport for female athletes to define the trajectory of the sport. I think that’s so cool. There isn’t a super firmly established sport yet. There’s just so much room for growth in trail running and I think that’s cool because female athletes are going to help define what that sport looks like and what it looks like to be a female athlete in the sport.

Gallagher: What is your favorite part of coaching? What brings you the most joy?

Herman: The perspective you get on people’s journeys. The most fulfilling thing is when I’ve coached an athlete for a couple of years and I’ve seen them through all of these highs and lows. You just get such a unique perspective as a coach. And then they get that day that is their day and it comes together for them. I had this one athlete in particular who has had some good race results but just a lot of normal human ups and downs and times when work was so busy that 15 minute runs was all we could do. And she just placed 3rd at the Vermont 100 Endurance Race this year. It was amazing, looking back on everything it took to get to that point and getting to have a front row seat to that. 

Gallagher: What has being a coach taught you?

Herman: I’ve really seen how much it can impact an athlete when they have some of their lowest lows or they are going through something really tough as an athlete or just have a really bad day and you can tell as a coach that that they’re unsure of themselves and also unsure how you’re going to respond as a coach. As a coach, you can then respond by truly showing them that you believe in them even if they’ve missed two weeks of running because of this crazy life stuff they’re going through. Or, if they have the worst race day of their life, being that person who can let them know even if it feels hard for them to believe in themselves, you believe in them and that’s not gonna change. Seeing the power of that and the shit that people can come back from is amazing, like incredible. That has taught me so much as a coach and so much about the power of belief. Believing in other people also has helped me so much to believe in myself. What we can do when we truly commit to believing in other people and letting other people believe in us is incredible. Coaching shows me that over and over again.

Gallagher: What words of advice do you have for females who want to be coaches?

Herman: Go for it! I think sometimes, especially females, we can feel like we have to have everything figured out before we try something. This is true with a lot of things in life, we think we have to have it all figured out, but the truth is we’re never gonna have it all figured out. If we’re always waiting to feel that way or waiting to feel fully ready, we’re not ever gonna do it. So: go for it! I’ve found that other female coaches really want to lift other women up and lift other female coaches up. Really go for it and reach out to people, find good mentors. In the same way as being a coach and getting to see the power of believing in other athletes, finding other coaches who also believe in me as a coach has been huge. Find mentors that you trust who believe in you. Jump in and know that you’re gonna make mistakes but go for it and give yourself a chance. Those are the things that I think usually end up giving us the coolest story even if they don’t work out and it ends up being a big failure. Life is too short to not go for those things. 

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To learn more about Lindsey and her coaching visit her website: www.runningwildtrail.com.