Why augo Is the Future of Endurance Sports Coaching
Coaching has always been about the person, the athlete. At the elite level training it was fundamental to me and was never in question. Now that AI can write a periodised, progressive training plan for anyone, it’s finally becoming true for every coach and every athlete: the plan is no longer the most valuable thing a coach brings. The listening, the communication, connecting, the advice, the judgement, and more importantly knowing the person behind the numbers.
Gordon Crawford, elite triathlon coach and advisor to augo
I have been coaching endurance athletes for around 35 years, at national and international level. I was Scottish Athletics National Endurance Coach for 4 years; National Elite and U23 Coach for Swiss Triathlon through the Tokyo Olympic cycle, with championship and individual athlete success; I have led as the Performance Director for Triathlon Ireland, a transformational change process for their pathways, opened the first National Triathlon Centre and developed the staff team and the programme culture; I coach and worked with athletes that have won National Championships and have performed at Olympic, World, European and Commonwealth Games representing Great Britain, Scotland, Germany, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.
Coaching and managing at that level, the plan was never the product. Nobody performs just because their coach built a better block of training. They perform because someone knew them well enough to guide and support their journey in the good times and the more challenging times. The decisions made were based on the development of trust over time and enabling the athlete to be curious to learn, have the courage to try and the resilience to learn from the challenging moments. I am sure all coaches working with high performing athletes resonate with this. In both Switzerland and Ireland, we had smaller squads and the time to work that way, so we could have more impact on the athletes.
What has changed is that this is no longer only true for elite and full-time athletes. With AI, anyone can get a good enough plan now. What we see now is the national programme down to the coach with a squad of elite and age-group athletes, is more similar than different.
Most coaching software was not built for it.
The plan is no longer the product
For twenty years the individualised training plan sat at the centre of the coaching process, and for most athletes it was the plan that gave them structure and context. This plan gave the coaches a connector, something concrete that passed between coach and athlete every day, week, month and year.
The coaching process was time consuming and a labour of love, involving time, patience and lots of hard work to do well. A good build phase for a specific athlete took coach education and development, years of pattern recognition, and hours per athlete per week. The platforms we all used were designed around exactly that job: get the plan out of the coach’s head, into the athlete’s calendar, and check whether it got done.
That value has changed quickly with the advent of technology! An athlete today can get a competent, periodised, progressive plan for free, or for 10 to 20 dollars a month from a decent AI training platform. It will respect their training availability, adjust when they miss a session, and taper them into race day.
At augo we believe the question every coach should be sitting with is simple: If the plan is what I’m selling, what exactly is the athlete paying the difference for?
What athletes actually pay a coach for
They pay for the conversation.
They pay for someone who knows they always feel flat in the first week back from travel.
Someone who hears “the legs were okay” and knows, from three years of hearing this athlete talk, that the legs were not okay.
Someone who tells them to stop, or to push, and is right often enough that they trust it.
They pay for the relationship.
That’s the value. Advice, judgement, and human connection. But the most effective way, for me, to deliver a programme, individualised advice and coaching would be focussing on good communication, a person focussed approach and time.
Most coaching software supports none of them properly. At augo we built the platform around all three. Not as features, but as the key principles the athlete and coach relationship sits on.
1. Communication
“Communication starts with listening.” Tara VanDerveer
Coaching starts with the person, not the programme. Who are they? What do they care about? How do they define success, and how do they define failure? None of that arrives in a data export.
It comes from conversation, and conversation is where the connecting process starts. It also has to be ongoing. Not a weekly email. Not a monthly call. Low friction contact that sits right beside the training itself, because friction is the reason conversations don’t happen. Take the friction out and they can happen.
We designed augo from the conversation outwards, which is unusual. Most platforms treat messaging as a tab.
In augo, training and conversation live in the same place. An athlete finishes a session and reacts to it right there, on the session, with their wearable data already attached. We respond to that specific session, in that specific thread, without scrolling through a separate inbox or a WhatsApp thread that has three races and a holiday in it. Comments, reactions and questions all sit on the work they’re about.
It sounds small. In practice it changes how often the coach and athlete talk, and how specific and meaningful the talking is.
2. The Person
Coaching the person means knowing their context of life, work and training. That’s the holistic approach we take to development at augo, and it only works if the information is there. ‘Should the plan not follow the athlete?’
We need to know how the athlete actually feels. Without subjective input from them, we are guessing. Objective data tells us what the athlete did. It doesn’t tell us what it cost them. Advice built on half the picture is not good advice, and athletes can tell.
Every coach has tried to get this feedback. You ask the athlete to tell you how the session went. You give them a comment box. For two weeks you get good detail, then you get “good”, then you get nothing, and you’re back to guessing from heart rate and power.
We replaced the empty box with a set of questions the coach chooses:
- How did you feel?
- Any niggles?
- What was your RPE?
- How did it match your expectations?
- What did you eat before, and during? How many carbs per hour?
- Any digestive issues?
- Is anything outside training affecting you right now? Family, work?
The coach picks up to five, deliberately, so the athlete is answering the things that matter for this athlete right now rather than filling in a form. If they want to add something the questions don’t cover, the box is still there, and they can use voice instead of typing.
How successful is this approach? The numbers tell the story: >75% of athletes on augo submit session feedback every week.
If you coach, sit with that for a second. Consistent, structured, comparable subjective data on three quarters of your athletes, every week, without chasing anyone. That’s a different job from the one most of us are doing.
3. Time
Collecting all of this creates a new problem. More information is only useful if you can work through it, and the workflow is manual, as it usually is. The hours go into reading, cross-referencing, copying and admin. What’s left for the conversation is whatever I can find at 10pm. That’s not a business model. It’s a burnout model.
This is where augo’s assistant comes in, along with the connector that lets coaches work inside Claude or ChatGPT. Both have access to everything in augo:
- the conversations between coach and athlete
- the athlete’s subjective feedback
- their objective training data, performance anchors and zones
- the coach’s own private notes
We can ask any questions and get answers grounded in that athlete’s history:
- Build me a race report.
- Build a session report for Sunday’s long ride.
- Pull the season together.
- Show me where this athlete’s reported feeling stopped matching their numbers, and when it started.
Comparing how an athlete is performing against how they’re feeling, across months, used to be something I did from memory and instinct, for my two or three most important athletes, in a quiet week. Now it takes minutes, for everyone I coach, and it goes deeper than anything I could hold in my head.
The time that gives back is the point of the software. More opportunity to talk, listen and coach.
And yes, we build the sessions too
The plan may no longer be the most valuable thing I deliver, but it’s still an essential part of the job. Someone has to write it.
In augo, coaches build training sessions the traditional way through drag and drop, or through the in-app assistant and the Claude and ChatGPT connectors. What that means in practice is that I can talk it through: review the last three weeks, brainstorm options for the key session, weigh two approaches, then create one session or a full block at once.
The coach stays in charge throughout the coaching process. The AI does the assembling, the drafting, the cross-referencing and the labour intensive work. The decisions, the reasoning and the responsibility stay with the coach, which is exactly where the value sits.
Where this leaves us
The coaches who do well over the next few years won’t be the ones who write the best training plans. Plans are close to free now, and that isn’t going backwards.
They’ll be the ones who know their athletes best, talk to them most, and can back their judgement with real information about how those athletes are actually living through the training. Doing that across a full squad of athletes, without working every evening, needs software built for it.
That’s what we’re building at augo, and it’s why I’m involved. I’m excited for the journey ahead.
Frequently asked questions
Is the training plan still what athletes pay an endurance coach for?
No. For twenty years the individualised training plan sat at the centre of the coaching process, but athletes pay for the conversation and the relationship: someone who knows they always feel flat in the first week back from travel, who hears “the legs were okay” and knows the legs were not okay, and who tells them to stop or to push and is right often enough that they trust it. The value is advice, judgement and human connection.
Can AI write a good endurance training plan?
Yes. An athlete today can get a competent, periodised, progressive plan for free, or for 10 to 20 dollars a month from a decent AI training platform. It will respect their training availability, adjust when they miss a session, and taper them into race day. That is why the plan is no longer the most valuable thing a coach brings.
What should endurance coaching software do beyond delivering training plans?
It should support communication, the person and time. augo puts training and conversation in the same place, so an athlete reacts to a session right there with their wearable data already attached; it collects structured subjective feedback through questions the coach chooses; and its assistant, along with the connectors for Claude and ChatGPT, does the reading, cross-referencing and admin so the coach has more opportunity to talk, listen and coach.
How do you get athletes to give consistent subjective feedback?
Replace the empty comment box with a set of questions the coach chooses — how did you feel, any niggles, what was your RPE, how did it match your expectations, what did you eat, any digestive issues, and is anything outside training affecting you. The coach picks up to five, deliberately, so the athlete answers what matters for them right now rather than filling in a form. On augo, more than 75% of athletes submit session feedback every week.
Will AI replace endurance coaches?
No. The coach stays in charge throughout the coaching process. The AI does the assembling, the drafting, the cross-referencing and the labour intensive work, while the decisions, the reasoning and the responsibility stay with the coach. The coaches who do well over the next few years won’t be the ones who write the best training plans, but the ones who know their athletes best and talk to them most.