You're on a quest too

What I often forget when I'm thinking about my pace, my distance, etc.

A couple of weeks ago, legendary running coach Joe Vigil passed away at age 95. He trained thousands of athletes during his career, first at Colorado’s Adams State University and later focusing on elite runners like Deena Kastor, who would go on to medal in the Olympics and set the American record in the marathon.

Some coaches have large public lives, sometimes achieving greater fame than the athletes they train. Others, like Vigil, remain mostly invisible to the public, unless their athletes decide later to share what they’ve learned from them, as Kastor did in her 2018 book Let Your Mind Run.

Thinking about that, of course, got me thinking about other coaches I’ve heard of here and there over the years. My mind drifted over to Eliud Kipchoge — probably the greatest marathoner, and certainly one of the greatest runners ever, to live. Who was his coach again? I wondered to myself.

Turns out, it’s a man named Patrick Sang, who also hails from Kipchoge’s native Kenya, and who was a runner himself before switching to coaching in the 1990s.

In this interview from a few years ago he shares his coaching philosophy, which struck me for its emphasis on learning — and for its lack of an emphasis on a destination: