Ben Dhiman is advertising for a coach

Ben put a post up yesterday. Paid performance coach role, details and application in his bio.

It got people talking.

Hiring a coach by open advert is not how it is usually done at that level. So why has he gone about it this way?

Everything I have seen of Ben points to one of the more thoughtful athletes in the sport. Listen to him talk at length, read what he writes, and it comes through. Catch him in a thirty second clip and you can come away with the opposite impression. Before UTMB he was openly saying that winning was the goal, which most athletes will not do, and that is easy to clip into arrogance. It was not arrogance. He had run the race three times already, two of them without finishing, and been second the year before. Afterwards he called it a hell of a process to go from someone who just wanted to win with open ambition to someone who really knows how to get it done. That is where the belief came from.

So he will have thought this one through too. I think the answer is volume.

The alternative is approaching coaches one at a time, getting on a call with each of them, working through them in series. That is slow, and it only ever shows him the people he already thought of.

This is casting. When a film has a part that has to be right, nobody phones three actors. They hold auditions on both sides of the Atlantic even when the film is obviously British or obviously American. You see as many people as you can, you cut it to a shortlist, and only then do you start having real conversations. Ben has cast his net wide. He will shortlist. Then he will call.

What he is going to get is a pile of applications from coaches telling him they can take him to the next level. That they have the thing nobody else has.

He is clever enough to see through that.

Writing training for an athlete at that level is not the hard part. There is no secret session. No single workout, and no single type of workout, makes the difference. It is time at intensity, arranged sensibly, and plenty of people can do that competently.

If I were sitting down with him, I would not be pitching the next level. I would be arguing for the opposite.

He has just run the fastest UTMB ever, off the back of a block most people would call high risk. It was high risk. He pulled it off.

The whole season pointed at that race. In June he ran 9:38:02 for the 90k at Mont-Blanc, forty seconds behind the winner and ahead of Cristian Minoggio. He trained through that one, without a proper taper. After that he went more specific and leaned into volume, giving up some intensity to get it.

The job now is not to go hunting a few more percent. Those come from being able to do that again. And again. Minimal interruptions, minimal time off, and the whole year planned so that he can put a block like that together when it counts.

That is what makes people fit. Consistency. Plenty of elite careers lose weeks or even months because the risk got taken one time too many.

So what does he actually need.

Someone he gets on with. Someone who will rein him in when he is about to overcook it, and push when there is room. Someone who understands the whole picture, the family, the sponsor commitments and the travel, the way he lives, and can balance all of it. Not a lab. Not credentials.

And the biggest one, the thing I suspect he is really shopping for, is having the decisions taken off him.

Every stress counts. Training stress, bad sleep, work, whatever is going on at home. The body does not file them separately. Planning your own training is a stress too, and at his level it never switches off.

The only stress you want to be adding on purpose is the training. Everything else is for reducing. A coach takes a whole category of it away, and he gets to put everything he has into training, recovering, and the rest of his life.

That is not a silver bullet. It is the closest thing there is to one.