Two coaches. Both deliver every program.

Daniel Mercer

Strength and conditioning coach, working one-to-one over video since 2021. Austin, TX.

I coach people who have a job, a family and about four hours a week for training. Most of them have done a program before. Most of them stopped because the program was written for someone with more time, more equipment or fewer things going wrong on a Tuesday.

The work is not complicated. We build a plan around the weeks you actually have, you log what happens, and I read every entry and adjust the plan before the next week starts. When something breaks, a trip, an injury, a month where everything slips, we change the plan instead of pretending you'll catch up.

I trained as a personal trainer in 2018 and moved to coaching online in 2021 when the gym I worked at closed. I've kept the same weekly structure since: a written program in the app, one call a week for the first six weeks, and a Monday review of the log for as long as we work together.

You'll hear me say no. No to adding a fifth session when the fourth isn't happening, no to cutting calories the week of a race, no to a program that looks impressive on paper. What you'll get instead is a plan you can follow on a bad week, and someone who notices when you don't.

Claire Whitfield

Endurance and daily-habits coach for first-time racers and people coming back. Austin, TX.

Most of my clients are training for a first half marathon, or coming back to running after an injury a physio has cleared. Almost none of them have a problem with motivation. They have a problem with a plan that assumes eight hours of sleep, a free Saturday morning and a body that never complains.

So I start with the week, not the race. What time do you actually get up, which evenings are gone, how many days can you run without something else giving way. The plan gets written around that, and the long run goes where your life has room for it.

Alongside the running I set a baseline for protein and sleep, and we pick two habits at a time. Two, not ten. When they hold for three weeks we pick the next two. Every Monday I read your log and write back what I saw, and the coming week changes if it needs to.

I coached at a running club in Austin from 2017 and went fully online in 2020. I don't publish before-and-after photos or finish times. They belong to the client, and they rarely tell you what the work was like.