Coaching the Brownlees with Malcolm Brown MBE

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Tribathlon podcast, finding out how ordinary people do extraordinary things.

Because what he wanted to do was to destroy people psychologically. So he got off the bike and he ran a 245 kilometer and then he ran a 250 kilometer and he'd be 50, 60 yards ahead of them and then he'd hang on for grim death.

That was Malcolm Brown, and this episode is coaching the Brownlees. In this episode, I got the opportunity to chat, chat to the triathlon legend that is Malcolm Brown MBE. So Malcolm is renowned for coaching Alistair and Johnny Brownlee in particular in London 2012, where he took them to win gold and bronze, respectively. And then in the summer of 2016 in Rio, Alistair and Johnny won first and second in their triathlons and Vicky Hollands and Non Stamford won third and fourth places.

So.

So he's got an incredible track record in the world of triathlon. What he doesn't know about the sport isn't worth knowing. So I wanted to chat to him about what it takes to make a great coach, what it takes to make a great athlete, and also how are youngsters getting into the world of triathlon and are they encouraged sufficiently, are they getting into the sport early enough? And Malcolm is just a font of knowledge when it comes to the world triathlon, so I know you're going to get loads from listening to this conversation, so I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Brits Superfoods. Now, I've mentioned a few times in these podcasts that I regularly take wheatgrass. I did so for about 7 or 8 years. Didn't pick up one ailment or bug during that time. Then I stopped taking it. And guess what? In the following couple of years I did pick up bugs and colds and things like that. So I reintroduced taking wheatgrass and haven't had a ailment since. But what I love about Brit superfoods is that this is fresh wheatgrass. So it's, it's organic, it's grown outdoors and then it's frozen. So instead of using the powders, which can be tasteless often and lack some of the nutrients because you're having frozen wheatgrass, it's much better quality. So I love the British superfood wheatgrass. I have it regularly in my smoothies and also I really like some of their superfood juices as well, particularly the beetroot one, great for boosting my nitrates before or after a long endurance event. So you can find out more about Brits superfoods If you go to the Show Notes, there's a link in there and if you order through that link, you'll get a free gift from Brits Superfoods. You can also find out more about them@britsuperfoods.co.uk this podcast is also brought to you by the Tribe Athlon app. Now, have you ever thought, well, you know, wouldn't it be really cool if you. If I could find other people that wanted to train at the same time that I could train? For example, I've got a great group of guys I cycle with on a Saturday, but I'd really love to do more of my cycling on Friday afternoon. It just works better for my work and my family life. So what I would love is to find a group of people that can cycle with me at the same pace as me, but on a Friday afternoon. Well, the tribeathon app helps you find like minded people to train with. Whether it's running, cycling, swimming or triathlon based events, you can find other people to train with at your pace and at your suitable time. So go to tribathlon.com download the app and you can find people to train with to build your tribe. So welcome to the tribeathlon podcast. Malcolm, I'm really excited to chat to you. You've had such an amazing career coaching some incredible people. So I'm really looking forward to finding out a little bit about the secrets, you know, the secrets to your success and the secrets to the success of the people that you work with. But for those people that don't know that much about you, can you tell us? Let's start off by telling your story. You know, how did you get into coaching triathlon and what happened after that?

Yeah, sure. Well, you know, because I'm getting on a bit, this could take too much time so I will truncate it substantially effectively. I was born into a sporty household. My father was a run up for Great Britain middle and long distance runner. Ran alongside Roger Bannister for Great Britain in the mile and I was always interested in sport, eventually got interested, I avoided it by the plague but eventually got interested in being a runner. Went to college to study a degree but also studied physical education. Came out as a qualified teacher in physical education and English and taught in London schools whilst training. So I was trying to be as good a runner as I could be, good an athlete as I could be. At college. I'd done a number of coaching awards in football and volleyball and rugby, in athletics and so on and so forth. Always interested in Coaching, teaching. And to cut a long story short, a frustrated running career, lots of injuries, lots of setbacks, lack of consistency, six months training, three months injury for about seven or eight years led me into coaching at a relatively early age, before I was 30 and coaching of runners. And I had some success at that. I'd moved into university work so this was all voluntary coaching I was doing. I moved to Edinburgh University and coached the university athletic team and then some of the runners became GB internationals and went to Commonwealth Games and won medals and I was appointed a national coach pre lottery. This is all voluntary work basically. So you had your own coaching group in Edinburgh, then you organize national squads over the weekends or every other weekend on a small budget. And I went to the Sydney Olympics as a national event coach. I was a national coach for endurance running for the UK for about 10 years on a voluntary basis. So that was 2000. And prior to going I had done a couple of triathlons at the end of my running career. The Edinburgh Triathlon based out of the Westerhales Leisure Centre, I remember and thought this is an interesting new sport. I was sort of at the top of my athletics coaching at the time, you know. And so I came away from the Sydney Olympics and I got a new job in Leeds at Leeds Metropolitan University. And I thought I'm just going to have a little break from this sort of high level coaching. And our coach at the local track, which was at the university, that partly took the job because I could see a running track from my office window and knew that would keep me happy. And then two little boys came walking across the track with their dad and that was Mr. Keith Brownlee. And the taller one was Alistair and the shorter one was Johnny. And unbeknownst to me, it wasn't totally coincidental, they decided to come and talk to this new guy who had arrived in Leeds as a coach. And it started really from there. I started coaching obviously, and I was director of sport and I appointed Jack Maitland to be the director of triathlon and so on and so forth. So. So that's a sort of potted history of two careers really. One in education and universities in sport and physical education and the other in the main on a voluntary basis as a coach, but at a high level.

And so where did that. So when you, after you started coaching the Brownlee brothers, kind of how did it evolve after that? Where did you end up going? And you know, what did that look like?

Well, what we did, we. I knew that I wanted to improve the quality of the Sports experience for those students who came into Leeds Metropolitan University. And the best way of doing that was to instead of, instead of, as most universities tend to do, allow the students to pick a friend of theirs to be the coach to the team and change it every year. I decided to point in partnership with a number of organisations, coaches to different sports. So in netball we've got Anna Carter and Tracy Neville who went on to. That was Tracey's first coaching job. She went on to coach the England netball team. In our football we got John hall and Graham Potter who now coaches in the Premier League at Brighton. Stuart Lancaster came in and helped me with the Rugby Union. He was at Leeds Rhinos at the time, sorry, Leeds Rugby at the time and so on and so forth. So in about 10 or 15 sports and Jack Maitland was coaching and making his way as a Northern regional British triathlon talent coach, I think paid for 10 weekends and I offered him, I went to British Triathlon. I said if I put in 50% salary. Will you put in a 50% salary? You create a full time job for Jack and he can become director of triathlon at the university and look after talent. Jack did that and he appointed me the coach, the running coach to the Brownlee brothers, if that was the way it was done, something like that. And so I then started looking after those athletes that Jack thought would be appropriate for me and learning from Jack about the other elements of the sport, the cycling, the swimming and so on and so forth. And then gradually build up from four students to. When we left in 2018, I think it was 17, a hundred triathletes in Leeds, male and female in three or four different squads. You know, a university squad of 20 or 30, a British triathlon squad of 20 or so funded by the world class plan, and then a development squad of mixed and then a recreation squad of guys. So there's about a hundred across the piece that took about 10, 12 years of development. But that's, that's how, that's how Jack and I left it.

Fantastic. And, and so how, what, what were the Brownlees like growing up and how were they to. Were they very.

I would say they are coachable but you had to know what you were doing in terms of coaching. So there is a belief that the coach should have a peak cap, a whistle around the neck, a stopwatch, training peaks on his phone, Strava da da da da da da and be the guiding light for the athletes. Now it may well be that there are some athletes who want that from their coach, but the athletes who are going to be superstars tend to be quite thoughtful individuals and whilst they want to know the fine detail at times, they also want to experiment themselves and find out things for themselves. And Brownlees were very much in that camp. So in some ways I found the Brownlees the easiest athletes I've ever had. Of the hundred or so athletes I've coached over the years as a personal coach, found them the easiest to coach because they did what I said and what I suggested. But on the other hand, you know, I could see in them that they didn't suffer falls lightly, that whilst not being rude to other people, they went their own way. And so I would have thought some coaches would have found them very, very difficult to coach.

What was it, you know, how early on did you think, there's something special here? You know, how early on could you spot that potential or didn't you spot it? And did it just happen kind of in front of your eyes as they evolved?

Well, talent id, as you know, is a whole, whole set of sporting bureaucracy now, for better or for worse. And what I would say about the Brownlees, which is probably what surprised most people, is at the age of 14, 15, 16, their physical achievements at those ages were not very, very special. They weren't the best in the country in the uk, let alone the best in the world, as much as you could tell at that stage. But what they did have were two things that were unusual, which were. One is a complete commitment to consistent hard work on a daily basis and training, irrespective of whatever they were studying, whatever was going on in the rest of their lives. You know, 15, 16, 17, they would be swimming in the morning, cycling to work, to school, going for a run at lunchtime, cycling home and thinking about doing another session as well as their homework. You know, they had a love and a, a love of endurance, which was quite unusual for its own sake. Not, not because they wanted, well, they did want to be champions, but it was. And so in terms of talent id, that was, I thought, unusual. Bear in mind, I usually coach 18, 19, 20 year olds when they came to university environments to have these youngsters, 16 and 14 as they were when they came to me, I wasn't used to that, but I. So that was the first thing that they had. And the second is they had an ability to recover from those training loads and activities, physically recover from. So if they did have a very big day like I just described, plus school on top of all that, plus homework the next day, they were Able to bounce back, you know, early in the morning for the swim session and then go for their run at lunchtime and cycle home or to and from school. And I think all that came from, you know, the active life that their mum and dad gave them in the Dales when they were young. You know, they would just go open the door of the. I think it was their granny's cottage they had up there at the weekend and they've just disappeared for the day.

Yeah. And that, as a parent now, sounds like a scary thing, but that's what we did when we were growing up. And absolutely, there's a lot to be said for that, isn't there? That kind of makes me think about the whole talent versus training concept, really, because you just said, you know, they weren't the most talented, but they were probably the, you know, they were, they were working harder. And I'm going to come back to the recovery thing, so I want to talk about that as well. But I've read a few books over recent years about the whole 10,000 hours rule, that's outliers or bounce or whatever it is. And there's a lot to be. There's a lot out there at the moment that it's more about kind of the effort you're willing to put in rather than talent that you're born with. Clearly they had a. An upbringing that allowed them to kind of develop later on. But where do you stand on this whole talent versus training piece?

Right. Well, I read with a smile some of the stuff, you know, on resilience and 10,000 hours and bounce and all the rest of it. Alastair was awarded a degree, an honorary degree, with Johnny, about a year ago, and I was in the audience and he said, and I agree with this, that, yes, talent's important. Yes, work is important. You don't become world champion without work and you don't become a world champion without some degree of talent. No doubt about that. But a third part of the question, which people don't want to talk about, is luck. Who you meet when you meet them, when the ball bounces your way as opposed to bounces the other way. So there is. I was an athlete, but I could never high jump. I didn't have enough bounce. So I could have worked my socks off for entire athletic career trying to jump 2 meters, I wouldn't have done it. I didn't have the talent. I had the work ethic, but not the talent. So one without the other, you know, both are required. But also a third element is just Opportunity and luck and chance and the rest of it and recognizing opportunity.

I think you make a brilliant point. Can you identify any moments where the ball did bounce towards the Brownlees and kind of gave them that luck that ended up creating the phenomenal success that they had?

I think it was more in their case because in endurance, you know, it is, it is. There is a correlation between hard work and what you can achieve, as well as the talent. I think the luck in their case was, you know, meeting up with Jack Maitland at the age of 12, who was a fantastic coach, particularly young athletes meeting up with me at 14, 16. I'd come to Leeds at 50 years of age, having worked out in my mind what it is that it takes to be a brilliant endurance runner and the development pathway I've been responsible for. British juniors and so many of them hit the wayside and I've worked out why I knew what it looked like an athlete should look like at 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, what training they should be doing, what training they shouldn't be doing. And the Brownies walk in to the track to meet somebody at the age of 16 who knew how to get them to be one of the best in the world at 24. That's luck. So the luck, I think. And then I brought fantastic physio over from Ireland, who'd been working in Ireland, to work in Leeds. She wanted a new job. And what athletes need is a great coach and a great physio. And that physio helped them, helped the boys on their way as well. So I think their luck really was. Now, having said that, champions tend to find their own luck as well, you know, So I don't want to. I don't. You know, the word luck is probably not the right one. It's opportunity, recognizing it, seizing it, and making the right judgment call about it more often than not making the right judgment call about it.

Yeah, it's making your own luck. You've got to. You've got to seize the opportunities when they're there, haven't you?

You've got to recognize them and seize them and make the right judgment call, you know, and the better the athlete gets, the more opportunities there are and in fact, the more sort of elephant tracks there are, especially around 18, 19, 20, 21, 20. Britain, if you look through achievements of young triathletes at the World Junior Championships and look at the correlation to senior level success, it ain't that good, you know. So lots of youngsters set off on the way, get the opportunity, they make the wrong Call.

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And you mentioned there about, you know, what it takes, you knew at the right time for the Brownlee, the brothers, what, what it took to become a great endurance athlete. What, what does it take to become a great endurance athlete?

Well, what I was very aware of was that there were two things that were required that you would lose races for. Basically a couple of reasons. One is you didn't have enough endurance or you didn't have enough speed. You could also lose them because you made a lot of stupid decisions in the water, on the bike and the rest of it. But if you had a lot of endurance and a lot of speed, it gave you the best possible chance. Now the problem is when you try at a young age to develop endurance, often it was that, that's the easy bit. So often 15, 16, 17 year old females do a lot of endurance training and don't and they neglect speed and technique. And so what was critical was all the time these Brownlees were happily doing a lot of endurance cycling to school running. The rest of it was to make sure that they also included enough speed into their training. And so at a formative stage we worked on, in my case, I was a run coach, Jack with swimming and cycling, Jack mad. I worked on running technique, running speed to maximize their potential in that zone between the ages of 16 and 22, something like that, until it became counterproductive. You know, we would have spent so much time doing that it would have impacted their endurance. They weren't getting any faster, but they maximized that and that was critical. And that philosophy of being an all rounder, not just being. When I first came to triathlon and I looked at what the top guys were doing, they were running 10 by 1km on the track because it's a 10k standard Olympic distance. Alistair's never run, what, 10 by 1k. The first furthest he ever ran was 5 by kilometer, but he ran them very fast as for him, and same with John. So they maximize their potential at speed. Of course, it's now a question of just maintaining it and so on and so forth. But I had that philosophy, I understood that, I learned that from the Kenyans, the Ethiopians, that endurance was really important. But I also learned that speed usually lose, lose races because you haven't got enough speed of some description.

So that's interesting. So how did that manifest into their training then? What would their, I mean, I know that vary massively over the course of a year, but what would, what would a typical training week look like in terms of that blend between speed and endurance.

Well, for each of the three disciplines they would, I mean, as I say, it is different at different times of the year, but their training probably varied less than most people throughout the whole year. So their December training, their June training were marginally different, but it wasn't massively different. And effectively, in the running, which I know best, obviously they would be doing two run sessions a week which were very fast. They would be doing another 6, 7, 8 that were what we call polarized, if you like, polarized training. So the two sessions would be one at 5k pace, one at 10k pace roughly, and then the others would be as they felt relaxed, really getting the running done. And the swimming wouldn't be much different from that and the cycling wouldn't be much different from that. And this is now called by Professor Stephen Saylor, sort of studied other endurance athletes, polarized training, whereby you work a little bit at the very highest level, VO2 max intensity and above and just below lactate threshold. But you do a fair amount, a lot more at economy level, if you like, zone one, zone two, on a five zone basis. So that's polarized. So you don't do much in between. You don't mix and get confused by doing, you know, quite hard training. You do effectively some form of recovery training which is long and you do intense training and you do that 50 weeks of the year. And you don't look for any excuses.

Because I remember when I was chatting to Joe Skipper, he was saying that the worst advice he hears is at race pace training, it should either be faster or slower. And so is there a place for at race pace training in and if so, where?

Well, certainly it's Olympic distance, you know, I mean, obviously, you know, Joe's got different challenges in the main, so I wouldn't, you know, I was looking for Alison and Johnny to compete in Olympic Games and win Olympic Games. So they would run at race pace or faster. In two sessions out of nine running sessions a week, the race pace would be once a week and then faster than race pace would be once a week. Because a limiting factor at the end of the day, the limiting factor was the rate of uptake of oxygen. And that rate was best achieved by intense training. That, that was a limiting factor. What Joe's doing is a different physiological task. Yeah, you know, and you know, in the long distance stuff and that, and that's, you know, that is a separate issue. And I wouldn't go into that zone because I'm not an expert. But for Alistair to run off the bike and run 29 minutes and a bit for 10k, as he did in the London Olympic Games, which ranked as one of the four or five fastest 10ks in Britain that year by any British athlete behind Farah in 2012. That takes a degree of speed.

And is that also a powerful mental tool against their opponents, the fact that they renown for flying out on the blocks very quickly?

Yeah. I met up with Alasdair a couple of weeks ago for a breakfast after a lake swim and I said, you know, it could have been even better, Alistair, if only you listened to me.

And what did he say to that?

He puts up with it. He's put up with it because what he wanted to do was to distract people psychologically. So he got off the bike and he ran a 245 kilometer and then he ran a 250 kilometer and it'd be 50, 60 yards ahead of him and then he'd hang on for grim death. Physiologically, that's not the best way to get the fastest possible time over a 10k run. Psychologically, it's the best way to confirm in the minds of your opponents that they are inferior and he is superior being and they might as well just run for second place. And he did that all his career and they did that all their career. And, you know, if only they had listened to me, they would have been even better. No, no, I never, I never discouraged. I never discouraged that because I understood that this was. That the race is about the entire human experience. It's not just a physiological lab in the outdoors. Yeah.

The psychological element of that is. Yeah. Whether it's. Whether it's the best way to get the fastest time is one thing, but equally, is it the. Is it the best way of making sure your opponents don't get their fastest time? So that's the other kind of flip side of the coin, isn't it?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And yeah, you'd have understood what he was doing if you got off the bike with him, so you would have been fine.

I'm not sure I could have taken it, though. I think it would have still killed me. And you mentioned the importance of recovery. Certainly when I was chatting to Phil Graves, he was saying, used to train with the Brownlees, the intensity of their training was just off the charts. And the importance of recovery in a successful endurance athlete's career. Why is it that you felt that they could recover so quickly from such intense training? And have you found any ways that have boosted that, that you know, that were a factor in how quickly they did recover.

I mean, the harsh reality is that the best way to do it is to recover better, is actually just to subject yourself to it again the next week. There are no shortcuts. I mean, I've had long conversations with Alistair and Johnny about say, recovery from a massive effort, lack of race. When do you start training seriously again? I always used to suggest, and they seemed to go along with that. It took about six days, seven days to get over an Olympic distance race. And they always wanted to shortcut that to three or four days. And occasionally they would take the annoy me by pretending to have done something that they hadn't actually done. Training intensively on the Wednesday after a Sunday race, you know, and then they were just winding me up, you know, because. But, but by and large, for instance, we looked at ice baths, we looked at heat, we looked at recover doing nothing, we looked at doing something, we looked at doing a lot. We looked at a whole set of different things. But sometimes it's just time that enables you to recover from a big effort, you know, and there is no shortcut. You just have to know that it takes you as an individual 10 days, takes another athlete seven days, takes another athlete three days. But you have to know. Now I'm not sure why you would want to shortcut that anyhow, so. But in terms of daily training, I think part of the reason they were able to bounce back after a hard Tuesday's training, for instance, on a Wednesday, they wouldn't train that hard on the Wednesday after. The Tuesday tended to be pretty intense and the Thursday was pretty intense. They would, they would swim easy on the Friday. They would try to swim easy on the Wednesday mornings, 7am but they would swim. And sometimes Jack Maitlands had a great phrase, he said, all you need, he said, to recover is a slightly longer warm up every day. Eventually you recover, eventually you recover. So get there, get in, warm up, slowly start. And certain things like swimming, you can seem to do a session despite your tiredness. Sometimes with running, it's almost. It's a much bigger challenge. You do need longer to recover if you go into it tired to start with. But the reason why they were so good at it is I think from the age of 8 and 9 and 10, they were very, very active. They were the equivalent equivalent really of Kenyan Ethiopian athletes running to school every day and running home. They lived an active life from an early stage. They were used probably to carrying some tiredness with them all the time in daily life.

And you said that for some people it might take seven days to recover, some three, some much longer. How would you best assess that? Is that based on feel, is it based on training peaks or is it based on results?

Yeah, well, I'm a great. I've always been pretty suspicious of physiological markers, if you like, or proxies for people for telling you that, you know, we can have, we can sort of look at various things that would say, you know, you haven't recovered yet because you haven't had enough sleep or you've had too much sleep or you've had the wrong sort of sleep last night, you know. Now that may well be true, but some of the best physiologists I've ever met have said we're not yet in a position to be able to indicate when somebody is or is not ready to train again after a hard session. And the various gizmos, let's call them that, that claim to do that, have not really got a lot of valid and reliable scientific evidence that they are able to do that. So I say, well, that's not very helpful, professor, what should I do? He said, just ask them, how do you feel? And he said to me, the particular professor I'm thinking of, you will know better by looking at them when they walk through the door, whether they are recovered or not, rather than anything they might be wearing on their wrist telling you whether they've recovered or not. And I think that's probably the case. I would suggest that you, you know, for an athlete, if they're starting off carrying fatigue into the next session, start slower than you planned, less intensity for the first quarter of the session than you planned, and then go from there. You might come through it, you might have to stay in that lower level than you planned, but so be it, really. Get to know yourself and what you can do after a hard effort the night before or the day before or the morning, you know, and this is the evening, for instance. So know yourself, know your body, know what you can do, learn about yourself from your own feedback rather than relying on somebody else to tell you or something else to tell you.

And would you apply that into your main, the main training as well? So would you. Are you more keen on them trying to train to field than to data?

Yeah, very much so. And so Alistair and Johnny, I mean, they've hardly ever been in the lab, for instance, you know, which people. As you can imagine, I've been asked to give talks in different parts of the world and I always felt slightly unarmed, ill equipped because I didn't have the latest physiological assessment of the Olympic champion. VO2 max lactate thresholds, power outputs and the rest of it. Because that's what so many triathletes want and triathlon coaches want because they come up through that. They come up through the scientific belief that you can measure everything and only what you measure is of value. And if you can't measure it, it can't be of any value. And that's completely against my fundamental beliefs and actually against Alistair's as well. There are some things that are valuable to measure and might help you, but it can't tell you how to train those things. So yes, I feel that I've got more out of athletes like Vicki Holland and non Stanford and Georgia Taylor Brown and Alistair Brownlee and Johnny Brownlee, through less concern about data and more concern about how they feeling today. What levels of training can we actually push them to? What levels of training do we have to maybe back off a bit from? What does the overall week look like, what does the month look like, what does the year look like and so on and so, and, and how is their life outside of, outside of the training? You know, have I heard a whisper that there's been a problem at home? How do I approach that? What, what account do I take of that? None. Some. A lot. Those are the judgment calls of a coach worth their salt, not what's their heart rate at the end of the first rep.

So much more focus on emotional intelligence than necessary. You know, clearly they need to know the sport side of it. But it sounds like the emotional intelligence is a, is a huge factor. So I was going to ask you which this kind of leads on nicely, what makes a great coach? So, yeah, what makes a great coach?

Well, there's been a great piece of work done by a colleague, an ex colleague of mine at Lees Beckett on serial winning coaches in different sports interviewed a dozen and they should be nameless because it was anonymous, but they were coaches who'd won European championships in football with more than one club, same in basketball with more than one club in rowing. Several Olympic games in a row, Olympic championship. And he found some really, some really interesting things. He didn't think there'd be much in common because those sports are so different. Individual sports, team sports, highly professional multimillionaire coaches versus guys who, you know. And he found out a number of different things and one of the things he found out was this sort of benevolent caring that they had for the person as opposed to the athlete, that the athlete. Sportsmen felt that although they were a hard taskmaster and they had high standards, always high standards to coach. They cared about them as a person and would make appropriate adjustments. So I think you've got to know your onions as a coach, because great athletes, as I said to you right at the beginning, don't have much time for somebody who pretends they are an expert and aren't. They can see through. They can see through that straight away. So you need to know your onions. You need to know. You need to know your power outputs, your drag coefficients, your VO2 maxes, your lactate thresholds. You need to be able to answer the technical demands of the sport and know about it. But that's not a great coach. A great coach is the one who knows the athlete, the individual on top of all of that, and the athlete feels that they care about them. It's got their back.

It's really interesting, isn't it? Yeah, it's about getting. I suppose it's about how they get the best out of an individual.

It's not just.

Just about, you know, it's nurturing them into delivering the best results, isn't it?

It's about that and it's recognizing that you don't always get the best result, but you'll be the fair the next time for them. So, you know, part of the problem is in British Olympic sport is that there's a reasonable amount of movement between sports by various individuals, not so much the coaches, usually performance directors or the sports scientists or whatever. You know, Alistair would go to the fourth Olympics, I think, and he would be on his fourth performance director. If I were the fifth performance director coming in, I would be asking myself, why should he listen to a word I ever say? Because he thinks I'll be gone. You know, you've got to be there for the journey with the athlete. They've got to feel their wit. You know, I think both with Jack and myself, they knew that come what may, whether we were employed or unemployed, we'd both be in leads and we'd still be looking after them.

Well, I suppose when it comes to coaching. Well, I was listening to a chat by a talk by David Brailsford not so long ago, and he made me. I don't know whether he was referencing the book, but there's a book called Legacy by James Kerr which is all about the All Blacks, a brilliant book. And he talked about role modeling or Dave Brailsford talks about role modeling. I don't think they use the term role modeling in legacy, but it's very much about the senior players kind of showing the younger players the way in the All Blacks and sweeping the sheds as they refer to it. How important do you think role modeling is in the world of triathlon and having, you know, the Brownlee, you know, does it work in the world of triathlon? Because obviously endurance sport is a very individual sport. But does role modeling happen in that world too?

I look at the history of Olympic triathlon in Britain and the first Olympics where triathlon was included was 2000.

And.

In 2000, 2004 and 2008, I think I'm Ryan saying Britain went into the Olympic Games with a world champion from the previous year and came out without a medal at all. And then in 2012 and 2016 we got medals and we've had strong performances since then. You know, in between those Olympics and people looking at Tokyo would be saying, along with the Americans and the French, the Brits would be a threat again. You know, so I think we've, I think the Brownies have changed it. I think the Brownies have inspired other British men to think that they can win and by their example and in Leeds have shown non Stanford and Vicky Holland what's needed in terms of training in order to achieve it. And Georgia and Jess Learmonthe. So I do think example and role model is important. And I've read legacy and there's a lot of good stuff in there. It's a team sport. It doesn't go, as you say, you know, that's the basis of your question. I think really it is different because it's team sport. It goes across differently. But I've got a couple of all black rugby jerseys for my winter training, My winter runs, because there's a lot that I admire about them and more what they try to do and how they try to unpick, you know, the essence of high performance over time and sustain it, have the continuity because that, as you'll know from your business experience, when I did my MBA 15 years ago, the case studies were on successful British businesses and they were Marks and Spencer's, which isn't anymore considered to be a successful British business. British Airways, which has come gone, come back and gone and goodness knows what. So the case studies, so that continuity of what is the essence of excellence is what we're discussing here. And Manchester United would like to know the answer when you find it, please.

And being a Nottingham Forest fan, so would they. They've been looking a long time since the, since the early 80s to refind it. You obviously coached, you know, the most successful guys in British triathlon, but also some incredibly successful female triathletes. Now I seem to remember hearing that you got yourself in hot water once upon a time answering a question around whether there was a difference between the way you coached women and men. So without getting yourself in hot water, do you think that there is a different approach to coaching men and females in the triathlon world?

Well, the answer is always with these things is, you know, it's pretty nuanced. It's yes and no. I mean the. Generalization holds for most but not for everybody. And that's where I get into trouble. I think the generalization is there was a study on attribution theory which gives you the heart of this, which is to what do men attribute their success and what do men attribute their failure? Men often attribute their success to their internal brilliance and skill and general all round fantasticness that they have if they happen to fail. Oh well, shrug it off. One of those days. External events couldn't, you know, females often attribute their failures to their internal lack of brilliance and success and their external successes to the fact that, well, so and so didn't turn up for the race. It wasn't really a world championships this year because the Aussies weren't there or you know, because they couldn't get there because of COVID or whatever. If they'd all turned up, I wouldn't have, you know, and that, that I've seen that in a lot of, a lot of athletes, you know, that the females often have a lack of real confidence in themselves as performers, whereas a male sometimes have too much confidence in themselves. And so I would suggest that a coach who has males and females, whilst the physiology of the training has similarities but not identical, often the psychology and the sociology of coaching males and females is different and the coach needs to flex their style a bit, that the females may want more reassurance, more confidence that what they're doing is right and they're going in the right direction. If they keep doing this, they'll be doing the right thing. And some of the males maybe some questions asked about what they are doing, why they are doing it.

Okay, brilliant. And what about. So I've got two daughters, one, my youngest is only 11 years old, really enjoys her cycling, enjoys her swimming, running, not quite so much, but thinks she might be willing to tolerate it to get into triathlon at some point. How do you think the youth set up has evolved over recent years? And how important? I mean, I was chatting to Nikki Barlow and Laura Siddal and both had only Got into triathlon kind of mid to late mid-20s, really. So coming into it very late, how good do you think the youth setup is at the moment in the uk and how important is it that they come into it at triathlon at an early stage? Or is it something that, you know, like Laura and Nicky, they can really come into from other sports later on?

Yeah, yeah. Well, as you're probably aware, Vicky Holland started triathlon at Loughborough University, Non Stanford, at Birmingham University, having both been English schools champions, or, sorry, in Non's case, Welsh. Very Welsh scores champion at athletics, you know, so they've come in from a different route. Georgia Taylor Brown has, whilst being a very fine athlete, has come in through a swimming, running, triathlon, more triathlon based. And I, I basically triathlon is a big endurance sport and endurance takes time and your daughter's got plenty of time and the man who made time made plenty of it. So we can all relax. Okay. So if she wants to head off and do other things for a year or two and then come back to it, there's plenty of time for that. So, you know, if Non didn't do her first serious triathlon till 20 years of age and was world champion at 26, Gwen Jorgensen, 26, before she did her first serious one, 30 by Olympic champion, you know, there's all the time in the world, especially on the female side. The men is more, you know, you don't quite get that coming in late from the men. They tend to come in a bit earlier and stay in it. So. But to answer your question about the British, I'm very impressed with the organization and the clarity that the British Triathlon have got in place for their young athletes. So, you know, they've worked hard since 2012 on establishing regional and national training groups who meet on a regular and consistent basis, selected according to appropriate criteria and are educated and all the rest of it. You know, the young athletes and their parents and their coaches are educated. So compared to other sports, it's a good system. But what I would say is that the most important thing is fun and enjoyment for youngsters and if they can be wanting to go to the next session, then that's great, as opposed to being taken even better. If they can cycle to the next session, whatever that is, that would be even better.

Fantastic. And I think, actually I heard you say on another podcast about the importance of fun in training. So that doesn't just apply for the children, I think you believe it should be for everyone, should it?

Yeah, oh, absolutely, absolutely. And really, the you know, you say your daughter isn't. We had this with Lucy hall when she came to Leeds a few years ago. She wasn't a runner. She enjoyed watching athletics, interestingly, but she always felt pressurized as a runner. And I asked her to relax and just enjoy the grass under her feet and the changing seasons, the trees changing their leaves, and take the watch away, throw it away, never measure, never worry about it. You know, maybe once a week, get the watch out and just take that pressure off and enjoy being, you know, enjoy running, enjoying the fact you're young and you can run. You know, if people want you to swim fast, you'll swim fast. If they want you to cyber fast, you can do that. Loosen the running, it's different for you. Enjoy it. And once you've got the enjoyment, you can start to do the work. Once you can start to do the work, you can start to do the intensity. Once you can do the intensity, you can start to get the rewards. And Jess Learmont came along and did a few of those sessions as well. Try to encourage that as well with her.

I think that's tremendous advice. And actually, I have a huge amount of sympathy for. For Bromwood, my daughter, because I hated running. For years I said that running is like sport with all the fun bits taken out. And I just. And it was only. I think actually, it probably rings true to what you've just said. The way I got into running was. Well, firstly, I decided I wanted to do a triathlon, and I couldn't do a triathlon without doing some running. So there's a necessary evil to a certain extent, but it was. The way I got into it was listening to Born to Run, the book that I'm sure you'll be aware of while running. And actually, he wasn't talking so much about the grass underneath your feet, but it was about the psychology of this is what you were born to do. This is, you know, this is how we've evolved as a.

As a.

As being as Homo sapiens. And actually, that is what got me. And now if I'm. If I'm thankfully, touch wood, I'm not injured very often, but if I'm ever injured and can't run, I think I probably miss it more than the. Certainly more than the swimming and maybe even more than the cycling, because I think it just. I think it probably does me the most good out of all the three, so. But it's definitely the psychology that's helped. What are your career highlights? What are the magic moments in your career that you could sort of pick out for us.

I've had a few great moments but it's often when you're in the moment, I'm not very good at sort of recognizing it. It's only afterwards and thank you for asking because it's made me think. But I guess standing in Hyde park, after Alistair had won and Johnny finished third in the Olympic Games with all the pressure that had been on, I was asked to be team leader about two years out because there have been lots of issues within British triathlon and the team leader moved to one side and head coach had resigned and one thing or another and it was a rocky road and I managed to keep things on track and we had a. And Alastair got the gold and Johnny got the bronze and the medal ceremony was about to start and there was a third of a million people watching and we were waiting a long time because Johnny let us all down by being ill and was in the medical tent. You know, the Brownies tend to spend a bit of time in medical tents and I was just standing there and there was nothing actually happening. There was no sport happening. There was no, no, there was no metal, you know, presentation parties being gathered together. It was just still. And I looked across the serpentine, loads of people and I turn around, loads of people and I felt completely alone. And completely satisfied, you know, simultaneously relieved actually, to be honest. More than happy. Didn't feel, didn't feel happy. I was exhausted. But yeah, I think that was probably one of those moments where you, you can picture it now, you know, as it was. I can picture it. And that was just before they managed to get John out of the wheelchair onto his feet and onto the poem. Brilliant.

I mean that must have been incredible. It was certainly an incredible moment. I had a feeling that might be the pick but so then to ask a slightly different version of the same question. What's the funniest moment that you've had in your career?

Funniest? Yeah. Well, that's interesting. I find that a tough one. I've always tried to pretend to be serious so that the athletes knew that they could take me seriously, as it were, and not to be too flippant but probably actually involve John again because one week before that moment that we just described, we went to a normal training venue on a Saturday morning to do some last minute strides and relax. And John and Alastair shot off. Too competitive as always. Alistair at the front, John chasing John put his foot down a rabbit hole. This is one week before the Olympic Games. Tumbled, rolled over, carried on running, came back, I said, what did you do there? He said, I just fell over, Mark. I said, okay, John, don't do it again. He then did the second rep and put his foot down exactly the same hole. It's almost unbelievable. It was a 1200 meter circuit of grass, you know, to actually find the same hole twice, you know, and rolled forward and I couldn't help laughing even though it was not a laughing matter. And John is very gymnastic, so he could sort of fall and roll and get up and continue. I think if Alistair is less gymnastic to put his foot down there would have been. You'd still be reading about it in the press now.

Amazing, amazing. And I can't help but ask you, you know, how has retirement been? You know, had you made huge plans for retirement? Clearly the last few months of retirement probably haven't been overly exciting, but how involved are you still in the sport and you know, how much are you keeping your eye in with the sport? So how has retirement been?

Yes, well, you're right, it has been very interrupted. I retired in 2017 and thought I'd be doing this, that and the other, but I had major health problems at a cardiac bypass and one thing, another and then once I recovered from that, Covid came. So I don't feel that I've learned how to retire yet. But life's grand. I do keep in touch. I keep in touch with Ian Mitchell who's now coaching the Brownlees and Georgia Taylor Brown as a lead coach, which is great. And I would meet up with Mitch once a week and we would talk and share experiences. I do the same for the endurance running coaches in Leeds there's British athletics have set up what they call a talent hub and I talk to those coaches about the way forward. People like yourself are kind enough to ask for my time at times. I did a six month review of coach education for British athletics. In the last six months I met 30 of their coaches and interview them. They're high performance coaches because they're looking to change the way that they educate and develop their high performing coaches or high performance coaches. And athletics, as you're probably aware, has had a few tough issues but it's all seemed to fading away now. So I'm reading a lot, I'm reading a lot.

Which leads me on to one of the questions I was going to ask, which is is there a book or books that you found to be really helpful either on your journey or maybe you gave them to your athletes to read? Any particular books? That you find yourself recommending regularly.

When I was in a sort of management role, you know, how do you get the best out of people and how do you manage your time? Stephen Coveney's books was useful, basic text, but things have moved on since then and I find myself reading books written by coaches. That's good. Books on excellence. You've mentioned two or three of them already. Legacy, 10,000 hours, the sports Gene and so forth. One I read very recently was by Professor Philip Tetlock and his colleague on superforecasting called I've Got it Here. What is it called? The Art and Science of Prediction.

Ah, brilliant.

Basically government sponsored project in the us asking people big questions like is Donald Trump going to win the next presidential election?

Well, stay off that political question. I'm very opinionated on that, but I think it's best kept for another audience.

And so on and so forth. But big, big questions like, you know, is China going to be the major economic power in the world in the next 10 years? And before everybody says yes, in the 1980s, everybody thought Japan, China was a third world country and Japan was flying high and everybody thought Japan was going to be the dominant industrial nation, post industrial industrial nation in the world. And it didn't, it stalled and things are different. And the question is how can you forecast a future? And it's about a way of thinking, a way of gathering information rather than necessarily what you gather. And I think that that really is an important, important issue for us is how do we coach? How do you get the best out of people? What's the way of doing that? And who can illuminate that question for us and give us some, give us tease out some potential answers. That's what interests me. And that's about human potential really, to be honest. And it's what leaders in business need to work out, as well as coaches as well as athletes.

I think that sounds fascinating. That sounds right up my street from both the sports and the business point of view. So that's going to definitely be going onto my reading list and it won't be far, far off. So, you know, that sounds fantastic. And one final question, because you've been incredibly generous with your time. Covid aside, what most excites you about the year ahead?

I think I'm not very imaginative as an individual. What excites me is doing the same thing tomorrow as I did yesterday and then the day after that doing that again in the same place with the same people at the same time. And I think that's what creates excellence as well as imagination as well as vision, as well as the rest of it. I think we underestimate the power of just perseverance in. We're looking for the shortcut. And what excites me is a prospect of doing better in Tokyo Olympics next year than we did in Rio, where we got first, second, third and fourth in the two races with Al, John, Vicki and Non and getting first, second with Al and John John this time, and then Georgia, Jess and Vicky Holland or wherever else they select, being first, second and third in the women's race.

Do you think that's likely, that we will succeed beyond the previous Olympics?

Superforecasters would say that question you just asked requires a way of thinking and the first thing you do is look at the chance of it happening in the past. Has it happened in the past and some sort. I think it is a possibility, but highly unlikely. But if I were still in charge of Leeds Triathlon, secretly, that's what I'd be wanting Britain to achieve. You know, first, second, third in the women, and first and second.

Well, I think. I think there's a lot of people that will be hoping that that's the case. It would be amazing to see that.

It would be.

Be brilliant to see that happening.

So let's keep our fingers crossed.

In the meantime, I'm gonna definitely read the art and science prediction, so I've got a better idea whether it's going to happen or not. But no, Malcolm, it's been an absolute.

Pleasure to chat to you. There's so much brilliant advice in there.

What an incredible career you've had, amazing.

Experiences, great stories to tell and great wisdom to pass on.

So a huge thank you for giving up your time. I know, I know everybody's going to really enjoy this.

Thank you, Charlie. Thanks for your questions and I've enjoyed our chat.

As you can tell, Malcolm knows this sport inside and out, but he also has an incredible passion for it. And so I love chatting to him, particularly around what makes a great coach and the emotional intelligence that's needed with coaching an athlete, but also the way the Brownlee brothers try to psychologically break their opponents. I thought that was absolutely fascinating. So I'm sure you'll agree there's loads of great stuff that we can all take from this, whether you're a coach or whether you're an athlete. And I hope you got as much value out of that conversation with Malcolm Brown MBE as I got from it. So, until the next time, keep on training. And remember, this podcast is brought to you by Brits Superfoods. So they're the number one live wheatgrass juice experts producing field grown, organic and freshly frozen nutritious wheatgrass. And I absolutely love it. If you go to the Show Notes, use the link there and you'll get a free gift if you order your wheat grass or one of their Superfood drink juices. And don't forget to download the Triathlon app for more amazing podcasts, but also to help you train, compete and to build your tribe.