The newbie becomes a mentor

Pablo and I recently volunteered to become mentors for the tri club’s new triathlon program. As relative newbie to triathlons I felt funny signing up to mentor, but I am also really excited about sharing our love of triathlons with others and helping a new group of triathletes find their way around the sport.

While we are by no means experts, we have enough races under our belt to be a decent resource for new sprint and Olympic distance athletes. We have walked down that road or shall I say swam, biked and ran down that road and as we continue our 2014 Ironman adventure I know I am always looking for others to help me, so I am happy to pay it forward. A quick shout out to one of our resources, fellow DC Tri Club member and blogger TriDreamer Holli (check out her blog), who has completed IM Louisville and just became a member of the Snapple Elite Team. Go Holli!

Mentoring and becoming more involved with the DC Tri Club is also just exciting, because it allows me to meet more kindred spirits! Most people I talk to about triathlons either tell me I’m crazy or say they could never do that, so when I run into someone who actually wants to go out and tri, I can’t help but get excited! And by the way, if you’re in the “I could never do that” group, YES YOU CAN! (Consider joining the DC Tri Club or your local triathlon team).

Mentoring is also a great learning opportunity for me. In recent months I have made the decision to not only begin shifting my behavior consulting practice to include services for adults, but I have also decided to focus specifically on health & fitness. I have started taking nutrition and exercise courses and post-Ironman, when I get my weekends back, I plan on completing a health coach training program. In the meantime I am excited for any opportunity to begin practicing these skills through the mentoring program. Of course I’ll also get to practice on myself, because the truth is, Pablo and I are definitely going to need to work on balance. As we embark on this Ironman journey (our coached training program officially starts March 3!), we are faced with balancing our personal, professional and social lives with our training schedule and we’ll each need to work on ensuring we get the proper nutrition to support our training and balance our training schedule with ample rest and recovery so we can stay injury free!

If you had a health & fitness behavior coach, what kinds of things would you want to work on?