Following on from the empowered-athlete thread and the ‘what did you notice?’ debrief — this one’s about a moment we rarely coach: the ten seconds straight after a rep. Watch an athlete after a missed rep. Most replay it — you can see it on their face — and they carry it into the next effort. Our coaching instinct is to fill that gap with corrections, which just gives them more to carry. The tool I use is a 10-second reset, taught exactly like a drill. 3️⃣ parts: one breath out, one word — their cue, in their words, not mine — then eyes back to the start line. That’s it. We rehearse it after good reps too, so it’s automatic long before it’s needed after a bad one. Why it earns its place: come race day you’re in the stand, not beside them. The reset is how an athlete coaches themselves between efforts when you can’t. The athletes who’ve built it don’t have shorter memories — they’ve got a routine that decides what travels to the next rep with them. Ten seconds, done well, decides the next rep — and enough next reps decide the session. What do your athletes do in the ten seconds after a rep at the moment — and is any of it deliberate, or is it dead time?

G'day team — sharing a workflow that's saved me a stack of admin time this season. After each session, before I've even left the track, I record a 60–90 second voice memo on my phone: what we worked on, what I saw, what's next for each athlete. Then I drop the transcript into Claude or ChatGPT with one saved prompt: "Turn this into structured session notes — focus, observations, next steps per athlete." The magic is in the timing. Straight after the session, the detail is still fresh — the stride fault you spotted in rep three, the cue that finally clicked. By the time you're home at the laptop, that same session has flattened into "good session, worked on starts." Three things that make it stick: keep the memo messy (rambling is fine, the AI does the tidying); use the same prompt every time and keep it saved where you can paste it; and send each athlete their one-line takeaway that evening — that's the bit they remember. Ninety seconds of talking gets me notes I actually plan the next block from, plus a feedback message per athlete, before I've left the car park. What's your current system for capturing what happened in a session — and where does the detail leak out for you?

Quick one for the crew before the week gets away from us. The most useful AI habit I've built this year takes three minutes and happens in the car park after training. Before I drive off, I record a voice note: what we worked on, who moved well, what broke down, what I want to attack next session. Then I drop the transcript into my AI tool of choice with a simple prompt: "You're my assistant coach. Summarise this session, flag the two biggest technical priorities, and draft a session outline for next week that addresses them." The magic isn't the AI — it's that the detail gets captured while the session is still fresh. Most of the good stuff we notice on the track has evaporated by the time we're home. Speaking it beats typing it because you'll actually do it, and the AI turns the rambling into structure. I keep a running doc of these summaries per athlete, so by week six there's a proper longitudinal picture instead of a vague memory. If you want my exact prompt, it's short — happy to paste it in the comments. What's your current system for capturing what you noticed at training before it disappears — voice notes, notebook, memory, or nothing yet?

Another AI workflow — this one picks up right where the voice-memo session notes leave off, and it's been the biggest goodwill-builder in my coaching business this year. Once a month, I take an athlete's last four session notes, paste them into Claude along with their one-page profile, and ask: "Write a short, warm progress update for this athlete's parents — what we've worked on, where they've improved, and what's next. Plain language, no jargon, under 150 words." Two minutes of tidying and it's sent. The parents get something specific — "her arm swing has stopped crossing the midline and her starts are noticeably sharper" — rather than "she's going well". Specific beats general every time, because it shows you're watching their kid, not just running a squad. The compounding bit: because the update is built from your actual notes, it doubles as a monthly review for you. Twice now the drafting has surfaced an athlete I'd quietly under-served that month — the notes were thin, and the update showed it before the parent ever felt it. Same rule as always: AI drafts, coach decides. Every line gets read before it's sent. How do you keep parents in the loop at the moment — regular updates, chats at pick-up, or only when something needs raising?

My weekly win was having amazing conversations with many of the athletes and finding out what motivated them to improve their running and enjoy their sport. It's fascinating to hear the insights from each of the kids. What it teaches us as coaches is how we can structure our language to connect to what motivates the students to participate, get the most out of themselves, and also challenge us as coaches to assist their development better.