By Elizabeth Waterstraat | Multisport Mastery
After nearly 20 years of coaching endurance athletes, I finally found the words for something I’ve believed all along. The biggest lessons haven’t come from training plans, race results, or helping athletes achieve personal bests. They’ve come from watching people.
The athletes who flourish aren’t always the fastest, the strongest, or even the most disciplined. They’re often the ones who become clearer about who they are, what matters to them, and what they’re willing to pursue – even when it doesn’t look like everyone else’s path. And while I’ve learned these lessons through endurance coaching, I believe they apply to far more than sport.
Endurance Coaching Is About More Than Athletic Performance
I recently finished The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd, and it helped me put words to something I’d been sensing for years. Over time, we’re all shaped by the things we repeatedly value. The conversations we have. The behaviors we reinforce. The questions we keep coming back to. In coaching, these things eventually become the culture surrounding the athletes and the community. But culture isn’t necessarily something we sit down and intentionally create. Often, it’s something that takes shape through years of showing up, making decisions, and choosing what matters. Looking back over the last two decades, I realized I wasn’t searching for a coaching philosophy. I was simply putting words to one that had shaped my coaching all along.
Seven Beliefs That Have Shaped My Coaching Approach
These beliefs have influenced how I approach endurance training, athlete development, and the relationship between athletic goals and personal growth.
1. Movement is about much more than fitness.
Training for a triathlon, marathon, or another endurance event can improve physical performance. But the benefits often extend well beyond the finish line. Movement can become a pathway to confidence, optimism, meaning, and connection. Sometimes what an athlete gains from training has very little to do with the result.
2. Most people are capable of far more than they believe.
After years of coaching athletes with different backgrounds, abilities, and ambitions, I’ve seen how often our perception of our limits shapes what we’re willing to attempt. Athletic goals give us opportunities to challenge those assumptions. Not everyone will achieve every goal. But the willingness to explore what might be possible can change how we see ourselves.
3. You don’t need permission to pursue something that matters to you.
You don’t need to be naturally talented, have an impressive athletic history, or meet someone else’s definition of an athlete. You can decide that something matters to you and begin pursuing it. That decision alone can be meaningful.
4. Everyone has the capacity to discover an athlete within themselves.
For some, that discovery happens early in life. For others, it comes much later. Some athletes are drawn to competition. Others are interested in personal challenges, health, adventure, or simply discovering what their bodies can do. There isn’t one correct way to be an athlete.
5. The quality of our questions often matters more than the size of our goals.
As coaches and athletes, we spend considerable time discussing outcomes. How fast? How far? What finishing time? What race comes next? Those questions have their place. But I’ve found that other questions can be just as valuable. Why does this goal matter to me? What am I hoping to learn? What am I willing to commit to? Does this pursuit fit the life I want to live? Sometimes asking a better question changes the direction of everything that follows.
6. There isn’t one right way to pursue an athletic life or a meaningful life.
It’s easy to look at what other people are doing and assume there’s a path we’re supposed to follow. The next race. The longer distance. The faster time. The bigger accomplishment. But a meaningful athletic life doesn’t have to follow a predictable progression. What matters at one stage of life may not matter at another. Our goals are allowed to change as we do.
7. The hardest work isn’t always achieving goals. Sometimes it’s discovering which goals are worth pursuing.
Endurance athletes tend to be good at working toward something. We know how to commit, follow a plan, and keep going when things become difficult. But commitment alone doesn’t make a goal meaningful. There is value in occasionally asking whether the thing we’re working so hard to achieve is still something we truly want.
Why Clarifying Your Values Matters
Writing these beliefs down wasn’t about creating a new coaching philosophy. It was about clarifying one that already existed. And that’s not a lesson reserved for coaches or athletes. Whether you’re leading a business, raising a family, changing careers, pursuing an athletic goal, or simply wondering what’s next, you’re already living from a set of beliefs. The question is whether you’ve taken the time to identify them. What matters to you? What do you want to spend your time pursuing? What assumptions about yourself have you never stopped to question? And what might become possible if you allowed yourself to explore a different direction? Clarity doesn’t mean having every answer. It doesn’t mean committing to one identity, one ambition, or one version of success for the rest of your life. It means understanding yourself well enough to make more intentional choices, while remaining open to where those choices might lead.
What Can Endurance Sports Teach Us About Personal Growth?
Endurance sports provide an interesting place to explore these questions because training and racing asks us to repeatedly confront uncertainty. We commit to goals without knowing exactly how things will turn out. We experience setbacks. We adjust expectations. We learn that progress is rarely linear. Sometimes we discover strengths we didn’t know we had. Other times, we learn that something we once wanted no longer matters quite as much. Both experiences can be valuable. Over the years, I’ve come to believe that some of the most meaningful outcomes of athletic pursuits are the things we carry into the rest of our lives. The confidence to attempt something unfamiliar. The willingness to change direction. The ability to recognize what matters and let go of what doesn’t. And perhaps most importantly, the curiosity to keep exploring.
The Value of Knowing Who You Are and Remaining Open to Who You Might Become
For me, the pursuit of athletic goals has never really been about winning or hitting targets. It’s been about discovering who I am, what I value, and what’s possible. That understanding has shaped the way I coach, the conversations I have with athletes, and the community that has developed around those shared beliefs. But the larger lesson extends beyond coaching. We don’t always need another goal, another accomplishment, or another plan. Sometimes we need to spend a little time understanding the beliefs that have been guiding us all along. Once you’re clear about what you value, your decisions become a little easier. The path won’t suddenly appear, instead you’ll have a better understanding of what you’re walking toward.
Ultimately, that is clarity. It doesn’t tell you where to go. It gives you the confidence to explore where you could go and who you might become.
Keep Reading
- What Shapes Our Coaching: The Multisport Mastery Approach to Endurance Training
- Our Coaching Framework
- Raising the Bar: From Complete to Compete
About the Author
Elizabeth Waterstraat | Founder and Endurance Coach, Multisport Mastery
Elizabeth Waterstraat is an endurance coach and founder of Multisport Mastery, with 20 years of coaching experience and 26 years as an endurance athlete. She works with triathletes and endurance athletes of varying abilities, helping them develop the fitness, skills, and confidence to pursue ambitious goals through consistent, purposeful training.
Her coaching philosophy is built on communication, education, and partnership, with an athlete-driven approach that emphasizes the process as much as the outcome. She believes effective coaching requires understanding the individual, maintaining focus on meaningful goals, and finding balance between athletic ambition and the demands of everyday life. Through her coaching and writing, Elizabeth encourages athletes to take ownership of their development, build confidence through knowledge, and create a positive, sustainable relationship with sport.
Learn more about endurance coaching and triathlon training at MultisportMastery.com.
