Many people reflect and review at this time of the year. I am one more year older and one more year closer to the 50-54 age group. Hopefully one more year wiser too. People always ask me if I am going to race. Not in 2009 unfortunately. I would like to race, trust me but with all the MAO duties and my kids still spending lots of time at home there is no chance. I like to be around for them if they are at home. Once they go to school 5 days a week it will be a different story.

MarkAllenOnline is also one more year older. We have now been around for 8 years since 2001. I still remember our first athlete. A guy from Texas got online and bough a 20 week peak performance plan. He was not very good in email when I tried to reach him. I was thinking the other day of thanking our first athlete somehow but then remember this guy was hard to reach. Too much work so the idea went out the window. Today we coach many more athletes and some that are very friendly too. We have a really fun group many who I have gotten to know very well too. Many I meet at races and at my training camps and trips to the Hawaii Ironman. Our web site looks different than in 2001 too. The other day I found a web site that keeps old pages around so it had a version of our 2001 web site. WOW! That was wild to look at. We are working on a new version too by the way. But it is going slow. Our web site is in three languages and it is not easy to change.

Every year we try to add new things so as to make the athlete experience better. We always had unlimited email support, but then later we added extended coaching with some phone support and a couple of year ago we added the forum for people to see many questions asked by others and our answers. We now have videos and soon we will have a cart where you can buy some of the products we feel are good and we recommend.

The new thing now is this social networks where people that have things in common can communicate with each other and share pictures, videos and short messages. One of our athletes made a MarkAllenOnline group in Facebook. So I joined the other day. As soon as I opened the account I already had 12 people that wanted to be my friend. The web site has this concept of “friend” where you get messages from people that want to be your friend and you either accept or reject. I guess you can also ignore too. Facebook somehow keeps track of email searches so anyone that ever searched for my email was put on a special list waiting for me to open an account. So when I opened the account I got their message that they wanted to be my friend. Wild!

Well in any case via Facebook you can potentially meet many more of our athletes all over the world. I will send an invite to all our athletes to join the group. So hopefully we will have many athletes join in there to share ideas. I have about 45 friends already. Most of them are from Boulder and many triathletes of course. I am waiting for a message from my roommate when I was 14 or 15. If you read my blog frequently you may recall I went to a boarding school for middle and high school. When I opened the Facebook account I filled in the names of my schools including high school. So Facebook has another feature where it matches your high school and graduation date. Bingo my roommate Jesus Chacon was in there and his mug shot too. He looks identical for crying out loud. He has not responded to my “be my friend” request yet.

So who knows what the future holds for MarkAllenOnline? What other feature would we have? We always have to strike a balance between what would be good to have for the athletes while remembering that this is a business and what I do for a living.

Speaking of business, coaching in triathlon is getting big. Some of these coaches are becoming triathlon celebrities. Their names are the headline of many news flashs. I guess that is good for us eh? Looks like if you are in triathlon you have to have a coach. Ah wouldn’t that be great. Well it saves people from many headaches and race horror stories.

The other thing I have noticed lately are copy cats and detractors of the way we do things. When Mark and I sat down in 2000 and decided how to make this thing a go. I said and still say. It is all about results. If our people that we coach do well and improve then we will do well and improve. That is the bottom line, nothing else maters. We can have the best marketing or the best partners or whatever but if our people do not do well and do not go faster, feel fitter and feel better then we are doomed. Also our goal is to coach age groupers for the most part, the age grouper is the heart of this sport. Without the age grouper there will not be any triathlon. So our advertising, our team and many things we do are to showcase how our athletes who are mostly age groupers improve and get results.

I created our elite team about 4 or 5 years ago and over time many other teams have popped up. One company advertised to have a team and they literally took our press release and added their name to it. Wow I guess I did a good job with this team concept. But I am glad other companies realize an age group team is worth the effort to steal my idea. I was what you would call an Elite age grouper in my day and I had a few sponsors that gave me stuff but it was a lot of effort just to get a box of Powerbars. With our team these age groupers get all kinds of good products and we take care of it. The power of the team works great. Imitation is the highest form of flattery.

Now when I was an age grouper I remember reading about the pros and what they use and do. But my mind was always somewhere else. Mark could win Kona riding one of many bikes, I can still out swim most people even with a lesser wetsuit. So just because a professional athlete does something it does not mean it will be good for you, or it is the best or that you should even try it. Many top professional athletes get paid to wear and use many of the products. I remember one PRO bought a bike he liked and painted the logo of his bike sponsor on it. This was before internet. Surely today this would be huge news. For this reason and for others too we generally do not coach professionals nor we go out of our way to coach professionals. Many coaches hang their hat on the fact that they coach a top professional. That is great and something to tell the grandchildren I am sure but how does that make you a good coach for me. Maybe yes maybe not. Many coaches coach a pro for free just for the publicity. We have received many emails, (one last week) from professionals that want our coaching in return for publicity. No thanks. I still have to put food on the table for my family. I think that if my goal is to coach age groupers and make a living doing it. I should tell you how my age groupers do. For this reason we put full page ads in triathlete of our age group stars. They have jobs; they have to balance kids and spouses with their training. I think that if we do well with them there is a better chance we do well with you too. So now over the last few years guess what is happening too? Many other companies are featuring age grouper in their ads. Maybe I am making this up but is MarkAllenOnline a trend setter?

Of course anytime you do things well and appear to have some success you then have the detractors. The most challenging part of our methodology for many people is having to slow down and follow our heart rate guidelines. Over the years we have lost a few athletes that could not do this. So now people call our methods and coaching out and criticize it. No better place to do that than in internet forums which I check out once in a while. Of course many of the people that criticize us have something to gain by it. They are usually coaches or scientist who coach and write stuff that is in opposition to what we do. One outfit had a testimonial where a “John from Memphis” (don’t you love those infomercial quotes) says the MarkAllenOnline plan got him to the finish line of his first tri but with the new coach the quality of training was so much better. There is no such thing as bad press they say. Plus if everyone was ignoring us then it would most likely mean we were not doing a good enough job. They respect us at some level, otherwise they would not even bother I suppose. We just have to keep getting results. So you guys lets make 2009 a year with even better results. I’ll see you at the finish line or at least on the online results!