STATE OF PLAY
The Leeds elite training base was home to champs but blighted by injury. Now its former coach Jack Maitland is ready for a fresh start based on an ancient art...
Meet the coach on a yoga quest
Having played an integral role in the most successful Olympic triathlon programme in history, a lead coach could be forgiven for stepping down and basking in the success. Two golds, a silver and two bronzes for Great Britain spanned the London and Rio Games - all crafted from the fabled training base of Leeds - and it should put Jack Maitland among the pantheon of triathlon coaches in the world.
Maybe it does, but he still left the set-up earlier this year disappointed that results lacked consistency. On so many occasions it seemed the biggest threat to the Brownlee-led era of dominance was not the opposition, but threat of injury. His new coaching direction plans to rectify this.
“We were generally frustrated by the number of athletes developing issues despite us trying many of the conventional methods of injury prevention,” Maitland says. “It’s that experience coupled with the knowledge of how yoga can help that makes me so interested in trying a different approach.” The thrust of the methodology is incorporating yoga practice more fully into triathletes’ training regimen. Most coaches stress the importance of body conditioning in a programme, yet in practice it’s often the first element to be cut. True even at Leeds, where although Maitland would periodically include yoga, he found it tricky to “back engineer” into already established schedules.
Now, though, it’s a clean slate, and the coach only wants those who are open to the physical, mental and spiritual benefits yoga can bring. “I’m coming at it from a different perspective,” he says. “We’ll make it more of a foundation and less of a choice. Triathletes will need to buy into it and embrace the way we do things.”
The ‘we’ includes his partner, and long-standing yoga instructor Kirsten Steffensen, but Maitland’s own epiphany came during 10 weeks spent in Nepal in 1989 - a trip in which he also won the Everest trail marathon in a course record that stood for a decade.
“It was the first time I’d been to the East, and I always had a fascination with the Himalayas,” he adds. “I found the lifestyles of the gurkhas and sherpas and the Buddhist way of living interesting, and wanted to keep something of that in my life in Leeds.”
Almost three decades on he’s a devotee to how yoga balances the system hormonally. “I believe it’s super important for athletes whose systemic health is constantly under stress,” he says.
“Heart Rate Variability [a measure of the time between heartbeats] is in the news a lot as a measure of whether you’re recovering sufficiently. The methodology to improve HRV is similar to yoga practice. Take the breathing exercises, for example.
“It’s a convergence of ideas and if we could make athletes stronger so they can better sustain training loads, there could be great performance benefits.”
“Jack only wants those who are open to yoga’s physical, mental and spiritual benefits”