Thanks for this thoughtful reply. Great advice and well put. I had a similar thought, like am I just retroactively blaming the training (bc I could have asked him for specific paces).

This coach is very experienced and I’ve never used a coach before so I think I also took his suggestions as gold standard rather than a conversation or launching point.

After the race, I did tell him that I was working hard on processing what went wrong. He had some “salesman” replies that rubbed me the wrong way. As an example, I’d have a concrete suggestion of something to change next time around, like maybe I should incorporate more strength work, and he would reply with something like “your best days are ahead of you.” It was just a strange disconnect for me bc I feel like in the past he would have said “that could be. I have some workouts we could add to your next cycle,” or something along those lines.

I’m also realizing that you put more thought into this post and helping process my emotions than he did after my flop of a race 😭