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Without further adieu, here’s Volume 16 where we pick the brain of one of Franklin County’s most knowledgeable running coaches.
Barry Auskern has heard the queries, seen the quizzical looks on people’s faces. A running coach? A coach, for running?
“A lot of people didn’t necessarily think about getting a coach for running, partly because there’s this sort of preconceived idea that everybody knows how to run,” he said. “Think about being a kid running on the playground, everyone is doing it at some point. Why would I need a coach to help me with a sport that I kind of do naturally?”
That occasional skepticism hasn’t stopped him from finding his niche in the sport. Auskern has been coaching runners for decades, and he now spends his time invested locally in the Sugarloaf Mountain Athletic Club, while spending his summers working at running camps at the famous Craftsbury Outdoor Center in Vermont.
“It actually came to me very quickly,” explained Auskern, who grew up on Long Island, of coaching runners. “I began working with high school kids, and my primary goal was for them to fall in love with the sport the way I did and develop a lifelong habit of being physically active and spending time outside. If I can get the kids to buy into that, that’s 90 percent of the battle. Then start to teach them about racing strategies, the importance of a good night’s sleep, the value of nutrition because the food they eat becomes the fuel they burn in a race.”
From there, Auskern moved to Massachusetts in the 1980s. He said the running community changed significantly in the 1990s, and road racing exploded throughout the region.
“When you go to a race now, you see a whole cross section of the community,” he began. “You’ll see people who are very talented and have been racing since high school, and people who are running their first 5K ever because they signed up for a ‘Couch to 5K’ program.
“Races now are as much community events and charitable fundraisers as they are races,” he continued. “Take something like the Hot Chocolate Run in Northampton. Three-quarters of the people there are running that race to raise money for a good cause and that may be the only race they do all year. They don’t care what their finishing time is, they’re out there with friends and happy to be involved. Those sort of races, prior to 1990, didn’t really exist. When you went to a race, people that showed up were competitors, out there to run fast. It’s a very different mindset. I think one thing that happened as a result is the level of participation has exploded.”
When Auskern got involved with SMAC, he said the track workouts he was running grew rapidly. Quickly, 20 people were showing up each week, and there needed to be somebody in charge.
“When that happens, there needs to be one person willing to take charge, come up with the workouts, get everybody started on time, keep everybody motivated,” he said. “I think I was the only one that volunteered.”
His progression as a running coach continued from there. He said he read a lot, talked to other coaches about important aspects that they stressed in their training.
“Every coach has a different philosophy but there are certain fundamental principles that all good coaches will follow,” he began. “The most important one is to make your hard days hard, make your easy days easy. That sounds simple, right? It makes sense though. You need those easy days to recover to make the hard days count. The problem is nobody wants to run easy because people think, ‘If this is an easy conversational run, how am I benefiting?’ It really goes against the whole mentality of no pain, no gain. And yet, a physiologist would say the only way to get the benefit from hard is truly easy days to let your body rebuild.”
Eventually, Auskern found his way to Craftsbury. While cross country skiing in Vermont one winter, he saw a brochure about the summer running camps there. That prompted an email to former camp director Lynn Jennings, who won a bronze medal in the women’s 10,000-meters at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
“They were looking for a high school coach that summer,” Auskern recalled. “She asked, ‘If you have a group of kids running and doing hill workouts on a hot day and one kid just can’t do it any more, how do you handle that situation?’ I don’t remember everything I said but the bottom line is I want camp to be fun for these kids, that’s the most important thing. If you have to cut a workout short, you do it.”
Whatever Auskern said, it did the trick. He’s been coaching in the summer at Craftsbury for the past five years, though this summer’s slate of camps were canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“You’re surrounded by very, very talented and knowledgeable coaches so you pick things up along the way,” he said. “It’s been a great experience and a great place to be involved with.”
Auskern said the running app Strava has been one of the best training tools for runners, and he’s been able to connect with people through it despite the pandemic. Still, there’s no substitute for the real thing, he said.
“As great as Zoom coaching can be, there’s nothing better than being able to run with a person, being able to watch their form,” he offered. “I really believe that if you go online, you can find a whole bunch of training plans to do a 5K, 10K or marathon. They’re all good plans, but the problem is those plans are written in black and white. They don’t account for things like, ‘Oh I got sick and have to miss a week’ or ‘I had a really bad day at work and now it’s 6 p.m. and I don’t have the energy.’ They don’t adjust to the realities of day-to-day life, and I think when you actually work with a coach, there’s somebody there who you can turn to and you can tell them what’s going on and they can give you feedback and help restructure what the week’s going to look like.
“There’s a level of human connection that I think makes a huge difference,” he continued. “When a runner knows somebody behind them is as invested in their running as they are, that makes a world of difference. It’s about creating that human bond and relationship. An online program will never substitute.”
In a normal year, Auskern would’ve begun SMAC track workouts at Deerfield Academy earlier this month with close to 30 runners. Those workouts were also canceled for the year, and he’s spent his spring and early summer navigating the waters of trying to find space to work out on his own. He’s made the occasional trip to Greenfield High School’s track, but the bulk of his running has been done on Green River Road.
“At the end of the day, you’re seeing more people getting involved with running through all of this,” he said. “People are running, trying to stay active, and that’s something that they can do in a world where we haven’t been able to do a whole lot. Eventually we’ll be back to running camps and all of that in person, but for now, everyone is just trying to get by the best they can.”