This blog explores getting the paper: An exploration of context and learning in endurance sports coaching which was published in Frontiers in Sport and Active Living to Publication. I encourage you to click on the abstract below to freely access the paper.
Introduction
Many years ago, a mentor suggested:
“If you’ve read a paper and it’s interesting, reach out to the author and ask for a chat to find out more”.
This is because what makes it into print does not reflect the messy realities’ of conducting research. Rather, a manuscript goes through multiple iterations, in which compromises are made to satisfy co-authors, to match the submission criteria of a particular journal and constant filtering to achieve word counts. This is even before it reaches review. The job becomes one convincing editors and reviewers that your work is worthy of publication. Some are more objective than others, and invariably authors will typically be provided with contradictory feedback and take it very personally.
The purpose of this blog is to provide you with my perspective and reflections on getting the paper An Exploration of Context and Learning in Endurance Sports Coaching across the publishing finishing line.
Developing my Philosophical Position
Have you read the book ‘Range’ by David Epstein? Before I die, I would love a chapter in an updated edition of this book, which explores being a generalist in a specialised world. I’m a generalist operating in an academic world that if full of tribal specialisms, usually ending in ‘ology’. These tribes typically come with disciplinary ways of thinking and knowing. If you don’t assimilate with them, then you are typically not accepted by the tribe. I’m not very good at assimilating and I am slightly incapable of being constrained by disciplinary rules and ways of thinking. Rather, I’m a meerkat mapper, who is inspired by science, the humanities, the arts, and whatever tickles my fancy at the time. I see connections & synergies when others often see disagreement or division. Rather, I’m a practical academic who focuses on ‘real world problems’. My skills are exactly what the institutional powers want from researchers; however, there is an invisible academic milieu which creates tensions in how to conduct complex, practical, and impactful research.
Strangely, as an applied discipline, Coaching Science has many tribes with their own unwritten rules on conducting research. If I needed to find a home, it would be in the “It Depends” tribe led by Big Chief Dave Collins and his warriors. This is because this wise tribe understands the rules of other tribes, applying them when this brings rigour to research processes but not being constrained through dogmatic adherence to rules that don’t create new knowledge.
‘A wise (wo)man proportions his belief to the evidence.’ John Hume
The Statue of John Hume on the Royal Mile
One challenge is that those who guard the gates to publications are editors and reviewers who may belong to and sometimes be big chiefs in other tribes. If the ‘new knowledge’ you produce contradicts or challenges their perspectives, then the defences will be higher. The ‘fun’ bit is to submit a paper to somewhere where defences are lower. This is challenging as a ‘Pracademic’ generalist.
Fortunately, I have found a home, in the Critical Realist village. This village is one in which it is fine to think that reality and truth are emergent properties of existence and are dependent on context. It is also fine to be comfortable with the subjective nature of human thoughts, feelings and emotions which are very real to our existence. We are happy to accept that some truths can be explained objectively by data & statistics. However, more important to understand is how those truths co-exist in complex systems, like the world we exist within. Critical Realism has allowed me to find a home in which I can make sense of being a general researcher. It is an ontological approach that allowed Joe and I to use big words to explain the philosophical basis of our work, to demonstrate that we were sufficiently clever to justify our work being published. The Short Guide to Ontology and Epistemology by Tom Fryer is a great place to start if you are interested in learning more. Thanks to Tom for reviewing our section on Critical Realism in the paper too. His contribution was not the single cause of the paper being published, but he did contribute to overall causation.
Motivations for Conducting the Study
Our motivations to publish were important in not giving up. Let’s get the obvious out the way. 40% of our time (in academia workload allocation is not an objective measure) is allocated to research, so we’re expected to publish. We want to keep our jobs. But the project emerged from previous experiences, particularly in my last big job at British Cycling.
One of my roles was to mentor coaches towards completing their Level 3 coaching qualification. Completion rate of this qualification was unacceptably poor, and my job was to help get an acceptable number of coaches over the finishing line. To do so meant understanding why so many were struggling. Because I’m relatively open about my beliefs, this means that others tend to ‘open up’ and be honest with me too. In my discussions with the coaches, it was clear that the learning curriculum didn’t serve the wants or needs of most coaches or prepare them for the challenges of their role. Furthermore, assessment was primarily based on an idealistic periodised model of training that did not account for the assumptions highlighted by John Kiely on his important paper on the topic. Methods were more suited to elite performers than the ‘weekend warriors’ or PB chasing time-triallists that most coaches worked with. This really upset me, and my working environment was such that negotiating even minor changes to curriculums usually resulted in conflict. Fortunately, one of my working partners was TrainingPeaks. I loved working with Dave Schell, Joe & Dirk Friel and the rest of the team there. Not only did they give me greater insight into the international endurance coaching context, but they were also open to new ideas in ways that NGB’s were not. As a business, TrainingPeaks success was dependent on meeting their customer wants and needs. Whether you like it or not, this company has influenced the endurance coaching milieu more than anyone.
When I started in academia, my 1st research project was to write a narrative review on coach learning, specifically posing the question: does coaching research influence coach learning and practice? The answer was a resounding ‘not usually’, in which I concluded researchers needed to consider why, at a philosophical level, research translation was poor. Furthermore, working in the industry as a sport scientist, coach developer and coach helped me develop a deep understand the barriers, challenges, and facilitators for change for research translation. I’m humbly frustrated when attending conferences or reading papers which people have put so much work into and thinking “that has no chance of translating into the real-world’. This is why I argue that research methods must be supported by philosophical approaches that have potential to lead to translation, in which context, and co-creation of research questions with stakeholders is considered. Unfortunately, my paper on the topic wasn’t published. However, conducting the review had a profound effect on me. It demonstrated my previous delusions of expertise as an NGB coach developer, gave me a passion for understanding coach learning and allowed me to explain the ‘why’s’ of effective coach education.
The present study and my motivations to conduct the study emerged from these experiences and supported a belief that coach education curriculums for endurance coaches typically did not reflect the context many operate in. Furthermore, they failed to consider what motivates coaches to learn or what they need to learn about. I wanted to fill the ‘academic’ gap and see what I could do to change this.
Designing the Study
Many studies start with a research question. Of course, I wanted to be different. As an early-career researcher, I joined a programme at the university called Crucible, which was designed to promote interdisciplinary research. I met public health researcher Dr Aileen Grant and psychologist Dr Sinead Currie there. They introduced me to research methods used in health care settings, specifically from behaviour change & implementation science. Joyously, this resulted in a public health paper being published. Less joyously, I was left asking why the fiddlesticks are the behaviour change & implementation sciences not being used in coaching? In the published manuscript, there are only a few references cited in relationship to these sciences. However, a great deal of inspiration in study design came from these them, specifically, in co-creation of research questions with key stakeholders in the industry. These were shared questions, not ones simply based on my academic agenda.
The result was a complex survey, in which an esteemed colleague suggested: “you are trying to do way too much and will struggle to get a paper published”. Her prophecy came to pass. The manuscript was rejected twice, once a desk rejection and another which suggested ‘major revisions’ which I made, and then it got rejected again. I could have made publishing easier by chunking the work into 3-4 discrete papers. However, doing so was incongruent with the philosophical approach being adopted and it would have resulted in separate narratives that reflected context insufficiently.
Participant Recruitment
We eventually recruited 9803 participants. This is almost unprecedented in sports research. How did we achieve that? It wasn’t too hard, specifically because I’ve spent years building relationships & understand what people’s agendas are. People like Joe Friel, Chrissie Wellington and TrainingPeaks helped promote the study through social media. This was no accident. This is because I had helped them with ‘stuff’ in the past. Research is a relationship building process and with good relationships, people are more likely to help. Colleagues at Cycling Ireland, Cycling New Zealand and a few other organisations were great too. A few organisations are notable by their absence in my acknowledgement list (I’ll leave it at that). Fundamentally, I used a marketing strategy, working with people that could give me a global reach and focussed on their agendas more than my own. I’ve written a piece on Participant Recruitment here too, which you may find interesting.
Study Design and Data Analyses
Months were spent on study design and data-analyses. These processes are covered in the paper. The next stage was to sort data in Microsoft Excel. There were probably 800,000 excel fields which needed tidying, theming, normalising and presenting. I was thankful that I had piloted how my Online Survey outputs would download into Excel, as something as simple as a misplaced comma could add hours or even days to analyses. If you view Table 5, it probably took two weeks to produce. This single table could have easily been used to write a complete paper on. There was lots of data which was omitted from analyses. There was enough in there to support a Ph.D. thesis. Will I go back to do the analyses it? Probably not. I’ve moved on in my research journey, having achieved what I wanted to, and the motivation isn’t there. Notwithstanding, I’m happy to share the data if you fancy doing deeper analyses without having to recruit. There’s data for around 9000 athletes in there.
Write-Up & Funding
I’ve not mentioned my co-author Joe Cowley yet! He was an amazing critical friend who was instrumental in completing the manuscript. As previously stated, we had previously submitted to two other journals and were rejected. There were many times when I thought ‘f**k this for a game of soldiers’. But my superpowers are invoked when I fear letting others down, and I didn’t want to let Joe down.
Everything takes so long to do. We used 127 references, and to do so meant reading them properly. We were inspired by the educational writing of Jennifer Moon, which can only be properly appreciated by reading her books, not simply picking the bits that suit our narrative. In their wisdom, the citation manager Mendeley failed to continue to support Mac’s after an update. This meant years of developing my citation processes changed overnight, becoming far less efficient as a result.
Writing is a very slow process too. Whilst writing 1000 words can be done in a day, a single paragraph may also take a day to write. The reviewer may then ask you to delete it because they think it’s not relevant. You do so and then in your subsequent submission, they ask you why this very important point is missing. You put it back and then the paper is rejected. You submit it elsewhere and so the cycle continues. My Buddhist training in the principle of ‘letting go’ is very important to maintain sanity. It also allows me to remove sentences, paragraphs or pages without a second thought if they lack relevance. Writing happens through transcribing one’s ‘inner voice’ into something relatively coherent. However, when editing these words, the same voice interprets and fills in gaps in ways that co-authors and reviewers cannot.
Joe was so amazing too. He has a young family, a high teaching load and still always found time to help me. He’d generally turn things around in 24-hours. After he chatted with Dave Collins, Frontiers was suggested as the best place to publish. This is because they are an open access journal (important for REF) but this means that publication needs to be paid for. If it was a few hundred quid, I would have dipped into my own pocket, but it was more costly than that. Therefore, Joe submitted a funding application to the Uni’ and it was accepted after 6-months of waiting.
Reviews, Revisions and Final Submission
When the original manuscript was submitted, it took 6-months to get reviewed. This including chasing the editor. Limited feedback was provided and the paper was rejected. The next submission took a similar time to be reviewed, and major revisions were requested. Of course, this happened at the beginning of my busy teaching semester when there was no capacity for writing. Revisions were made when there was time, but the submission deadline was missed. This meant restarting the submission process, there was a new editor and reviewers. They rejected the paper, giving feedback that contradicted the previous reviewers.
Third time lucky! After a 6-months wait to get funding approved, the paper went to Frontiers. The manuscript needed to be on their template, a different citation convention and submission through perilous navigation of their Online portal. Simple things such as using a Times New Roman font and single-lined spacing are very challenging for my ‘neurodiverse’ brain too. Amazingly, the reviewers’ comments came back after a few weeks. Less amazingly, major revisions were needed in 2-weeks. Reviewer 1 was very positive, giving valued feedback and a few suggested additions to enhance clarity. Reviewer 2 was less positive. Things also went a little wrong when I failed to notice additional very detailed feedback in an attached document on the submission portal. This meant we had to apply for a week’s extension and these ‘hidden’ comments took that time and emotional energy to address.
When we write, we do so by ‘transcribing’ our inner voice. Mine is typically garbled, so it takes time to refine the transcript into something coherent. Similarly, the ‘inner voice’ of a reviewer will guide their understanding of your work and influence what feedback they give you. Hopefully, that feedback is based on rigorous cognitive processes, but humans are fallible and biased creatures. Additionally, who the messenger is will heavily influence our emotional responses to it. Joe is my mate, and as a co-author, his feedback was always received positively, as was Reviewer 1’s because he said lots of nice things. Emotions were slightly heightened with Reviewer 2. There were two ways that his feedback could have been appraised:
1) To spit nails, call the reviewer names, tell anyone who will listen about the injustice (they will reinforce your beliefs by telling you about worse Reviewer 2’s) & then grudgingly try to please them by saying something disingenuous in your accompanying response in the hope that they will approve submission.
2) Read their feedback carefully, consider their position, make changes, or rigorously defend your position where appropriate.
I spend the next 3-days adopting both approaches and writing a considered response to Reviewer 2. On reflection, I enjoyed defending our position because this is what I expect of other; to be able to rigorously justify ‘why’. It also meant carefully constructing a humble argument to demonstrate why our position may differ from those coming from an alternative ontological position. It also meant providing additional evidence to support some arguments and humbly accepting when we had got something wrong. Following the recommendations of Reviewer 1, I was also able to adapt a section from the rejected ‘coach learning’ paper to fill in the gap. If I was starting from scratch, this would have taken more than a week to do.
To End
When the email with ‘approved for publication’ arrived, the emotion was one of relief, not joy. Counting the time spent on getting this paper to publication is impossible. But it has taken over 4-years from project inception to get over the finishing line. The process could have been easier, the end-product is something both Joe and I are proud of. It reflects our wider philosophy of how research should be conducted. It is an unconventional paper, and its format may challenge some. However, we are confident that the paper is also as fair a reflection of Context and Learning in Endurance Sports Coaching as we could have possibly presented. Motivation to complete the project was sorely tested and there were times I wanted to quit. But I couldn’t let down Joe and I really wanted the work to be published.
Admittedly there are some big words in the paper and some difficult concepts to grasp. But we are academics who need to demonstrate how clever we are too.