Let’s be honest, we’re living in a pretty incredible time for athletes.

Want a training plan? Ask AI.

Need a strength session to complement your running? Ask AI.

Not sure what a particular workout is supposed to achieve? Ask AI.

Want someone to turn your slightly chaotic list of goals, available training days and favourite exercises into something that resembles an organised programme? Yep, AI can do that too.

And actually, some of the things it produces can be pretty good.

So why, in a world where we can have a training plan created in seconds, would you still need a human coach?

Because there’s a rather important difference between having a training plan and being coached.

And when you’re training for something like a marathon, ultra, triathlon or another endurance event, that difference matters.

Your plan doesn’t know you

An AI can look at the information you give it.

It can know your goal.

It can know how many days you can train.

It can know your previous race times, mileage and perhaps even your heart-rate zones.

But it doesn’t know you.

It doesn’t know that you had three hours of broken sleep last night because your child was awake.

It doesn’t know that work has been horrendous this week.

It doesn’t know that your “easy” run felt awful because you’ve been carrying fatigue for several days.

And it certainly doesn’t know that when you say, “I’m fine,” you actually mean, “I’m absolutely knackered, but I don’t want to admit it.”

Your coach might.

That’s one of the biggest differences.

A good coach isn’t just looking at the workout you completed. They’re looking at the person who completed it.

Because life doesn’t follow the training plan

Wouldn’t it be lovely if training went exactly as planned?

Monday: easy run.

Tuesday: intervals.

Wednesday: strength.

Thursday: tempo.

Friday: rest.

Saturday: long run.

Sunday: recovery.

Perfect.

Except… life.

Kids get ill.

You get ill.

Work gets busy.

You don’t sleep.

The weather is awful.

You pick up a niggle.

You have a terrible day.

You have a fantastic day and accidentally turn your easy run into something resembling a race.

And suddenly that beautifully constructed training week is looking rather less beautiful.

A human coach can look at that and say, “Right, let’s change things.”

Maybe Tuesday’s session moves to Thursday.

Maybe the long run gets shortened.

Maybe we ditch the intervals altogether.

Maybe the best training session today is actually a rest day.

That’s not failure.

That’s coaching.

The aim isn’t to tick every box on a spreadsheet. The aim is to get you to the start line healthy, prepared and confident.

Sometimes that means doing exactly what the plan says.

Sometimes it means doing something completely different.

Accountability is a funny thing

We all know what we’re supposed to do.

That doesn’t necessarily mean we do it.

It’s remarkably easy to look at a training session on an app and think:

“I’ll do that later.”

Then later becomes tomorrow.

Tomorrow becomes next week.

And suddenly we’re wondering where our fitness went.

Having a coach adds another human being to the equation.

Someone is expecting you to turn up.

Someone will notice if you haven’t.

Someone will ask how the session went.

And, importantly, someone can help you understand why you didn’t do it.

Because there’s a big difference between being lazy and being exhausted.

There’s a difference between needing a little push and genuinely needing to back off.

A coach can also see when your daily life may be getting a bit hectic, and adjust your program according.  As an example, I had an athlete who was a mum and also worked long hours on a farm, well, the kids got sick and everything started to get a bit more chaotic, I could tell she was stressing about it all and getting anxious about having missed a couple of sessions while we were in a build phase, so I adjusted her workouts for a week and made it into a deload week instead so she could concentrate on the important things without adding to her stress about training as well. 

A good coach learns those differences.

Sometimes you don’t need another workout. You need perspective.

This is probably one of my favourite parts of coaching.

Endurance athletes can be spectacularly good at convincing themselves that one bad session means everything is falling apart.

You miss a pace.

Your heart rate is higher than expected.

Your long run doesn’t go well.

You struggle on a hill you’ve run comfortably a dozen times before.

And suddenly your brain is writing the obituary for your race.

“I’m not fit enough.”

“I’m never going to manage the distance.”

“I’ve lost all my fitness.”

“What if I can’t do it?”

A coach can step in and say:

“Hang on. Let’s look at the bigger picture.”

One bad run doesn’t erase months of training.

One missed session doesn’t destroy your fitness.

One horrible Tuesday morning isn’t a prediction of what will happen on race day.

Sometimes the most useful thing your coach can give you isn’t another training session.

It’s perspective.

AI can give you information. A coach gives you context.

And this is where I think AI is genuinely useful, but also where we need to understand its limitations.

AI has access to an enormous amount of information.

That’s fantastic.

It can explain training principles. It can suggest sessions. It can help you understand why you’re doing certain types of training.

But information isn’t the same as experience.

Your coach has watched you train.

They’ve seen how you respond to hard sessions.

They know what your normal looks like.

They’ve seen your good days and your awful ones.

They’ve probably heard you say, “I think I could have done more,” when you very obviously couldn’t.

That history matters.

Because training isn’t simply about asking, “What should this athlete do?”

It’s asking:

“What should this athlete do, right now, based on everything I know about them?”

That’s a very different question.

And then there’s the human bit

This is probably the hardest thing to quantify.

When you achieve something you’ve been working towards for months, you want someone to understand what it means.

When you finish your first ultra, hit a new PB, finally conquer a distance you’ve been struggling with or simply get through a period of training when life has been throwing everything at you, there’s something special about being able to tell your coach:

“I did it.”

And having them genuinely understand the journey behind those three words.

Equally, when things go wrong, having someone there who knows the work you’ve put in can be incredibly important.

Because endurance sport is emotional.

There are highs.

There are lows.

There are moments when you feel unstoppable and moments when you wonder why on earth you voluntarily signed up to run for several hours at a time.

Your coach is there for all of it.

And often, its not just your coach who is there cheering you on, but also the community which your coach has built – there will be other athletes there to share your accomplishments, and to help build you through your down days.

So should we stop using AI?

No.

Not at all.

I’d actually argue that AI can be a brilliant tool for athletes and coaches.

Use it to ask questions.

Use it to learn.

Use it to explore ideas.

Use it to help you understand something your coach has asked you to do.

Use it to organise your thoughts.

Just don’t confuse the tool with the coach.

Because ultimately, I don’t think athletes need another source of information.

There is already plenty of information out there.

What they need is someone who can help them make sense of it.

Someone who knows when to push.

Someone who knows when to hold back.

Someone who understands that sometimes the training plan needs to bend because life happened.

Someone who will celebrate the wins with you, pick you up after the bad days and occasionally tell you that, no, running that extra ten miles because you “felt good” probably wasn’t the cleverest idea you’ve ever had.

AI can write a training plan.

But a human coach can help you become the athlete capable of completing it.

And sometimes, perhaps, capable of knowing when you shouldn’t.

Kathryn Hillier is a coach with Team RunRun, to learn more about her or to work with her, check out her coach profile.