MEET SI.
COACH. ATHLETE. SPORTS GEEK.
Most people call me Si.
I’m the coach behind Overdrive Endurance and the bloke responsible for most of the ridiculous stuff that keeps getting added to the Rogue Pack.
I’m Simon.
That probably tells you quite a lot about me.
When I do something, I want to do it to the best of my ability. I’m constantly asking myself how something can be better, how it can be more efficient, and how the people using it can get more from it.
That’s really what Overdrive is.
I also never really want Overdrive to feel finished. What we offer now should be better in a year, and what we offer in a year should be better again after that. I want to keep learning, keep building and keep looking for things that can improve what our athletes get from being part of this.
Because once you decide you’ve cracked it and stop looking for ways to improve, you’re probably already going backwards.
"Yes, it’s coaching, but I want to do coaching better."
I want the training to be better, the feedback to be better and the athlete experience to be better. I want the technology and tools around the coaching to genuinely add something rather than just exist because they look impressive on a website.
EVOLVE OR DIE.
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN COMPETITIVE.
Probably annoyingly so.
Some of my earliest memories of sport are school sports days, cross-country and football. I loved competing and I loved trying to win, but more than anything I think I loved trying to get better at something. I’ve always enjoyed that process of working at something, seeing where I’m not good enough and trying to close the gap.
I definitely wasn’t some ridiculously gifted kid who could just turn up and dominate everything. What I did have was a willingness to work at things. If someone was better than me, I wanted to know what they were doing differently. If there was something I was crap at, I wanted to work out how I could improve it. If I thought I could squeeze a bit more out of myself, I’d usually try.
Looking back now, that mentality probably explains quite a lot about the way I coach and also why Overdrive has become what it has.
SCIENCE-LED. NOT SCIENCE-BLINDED.
I love sports science. Probably more than is healthy. I’ll quite happily disappear down a research rabbit hole because somebody asked me what should have been a fairly simple question about running economy.
But I’m also very aware that athletes are not spreadsheets. You can’t look at one metric, one graph or one study and pretend you’ve solved human performance. Research gives us information, but it still needs interpreting and applying to an actual human being with their own history, lifestyle, preferences and ability to cope with training.
The science matters. Experience matters. Your training history matters. How you feel matters. What else is happening in your life matters. Context matters.
Good coaching is about pulling all of those things together and making the best decision you can with the information you’ve got at that moment.
That’s also why I’ve spent so much time developing things like Mission Control, Athlete Roadmaps, the Rogue Library and the Rogue Vault. They’re not there because I think endurance athletes desperately need another dashboard or another graph to stare at.
We probably have enough bloody graphs already.
They exist because I want us to understand what is happening better and use that information to make better decisions.
I WANT ATHLETES TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY’RE DOING.
I want the people I work with to learn. You should understand why we’re doing something rather than just blindly following whatever appears on the calendar that morning. You should start recognising what an easy session is supposed to feel like and the difference between a really productive hard session and simply smashing yourself into the ground because harder must automatically mean better.
Over time you should become better at reading your own body, understanding your training and knowing what we’re trying to achieve. You’ll still have a coach helping to make those decisions, but you become a more informed part of that process.
Because good coaching shouldn’t just make you fitter.
“It should make you a better athlete.”
QUALIFICATIONS MATTER. BUT THEY AREN’T THE WHOLE STORY.
I’m a British Triathlon Level 3 High Performing Coach, a qualified Athletics Coach, and I’m currently in the final year of my BSc in Sports Coaching. I also work in sports education teaching Sport and Fitness, so a big part of what I do is not just coaching athletes, but helping people understand performance properly.
Alongside Overdrive, I’m also involved with SPC, where the work is much more hands-on from a performance-testing point of view. That gives me the chance to look at athletes beyond just their training diary and actually measure what is happening.
That includes things like running gait analysis, VO₂ and lactate testing, and the use of force plates to look at strength, asymmetry, force production and how an athlete is moving. I like that side of coaching because it gives us another layer of information. Instead of guessing where the weaknesses might be, we can actually test, measure and then use that information to guide what we do next.
I’ve coached runners, cyclists, triathletes, marathoners, ultra runners, first-timers, Age Group athletes and people chasing some pretty ambitious goals. Some want podiums and qualification. Others simply want to finish something they previously weren’t sure they could do. I genuinely enjoy both.
The qualifications matter. The testing matters. The experience matters. But none of it is particularly useful unless you can take all of that information and apply it properly to the athlete standing in front of you.
That’s the important bit.
"You need somebody who can take everything they know, work out what actually matters, and help you get better in real life, not from a book"
WHY OVERDRIVE?
Overdrive came from wanting to build the kind of coaching environment I would personally want to be part of. I didn’t want it to become another online coaching business where somebody pays their money each month, gets a few sessions uploaded to TrainingPeaks and receives the occasional “great session mate” message underneath a workout.
I wanted more around the coaching. I wanted athletes to have access to good information and actually understand what they were doing. I wanted better feedback and better ways of showing athletes what was happening with their training. I wanted useful tools, a proper community and an environment where it felt like we were always trying to make things better.
That’s really how the Rogue Pack has grown. Mission Control came from wanting to give athletes a clearer view of their training. Athlete Roadmaps came from wanting them to understand where we were actually going. The Rogue Library and Rogue Vault came from wanting good research to be accessible rather than hidden behind journals and academic language. The Pack Map came from wanting an online community to actually feel connected. Rogue Ride and Rogue Run grew because I could see different ways people could benefit from what we were building without necessarily needing full 1-to-1 coaching.
None of it exists because I sat down one day and thought the website needed more features.
Most of it exists because at some point I’ve looked at something and thought:
“We could do this better.”
That is probably the simplest explanation of Overdrive there is.
WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT FROM ME?
I’ll tell you when you’re doing well, and I’ll also tell you when I think you’re doing something stupid. I’d much rather explain why I think something needs changing than just expect you to blindly follow instructions because I’m the coach.
If something isn’t working, we change it. If the data tells us something different from what we expected, we look at it. If new research or better information changes my view on something, I’m perfectly happy to change my mind. Coaching isn’t about pretending you know everything; it’s about continuing to ask better questions.
I’ll take your goals seriously whether you’re trying to qualify for something, chase a PB, finish your first event or simply become a fitter and more capable version of yourself.
I take performance seriously. If you’re giving up your time to train and you’ve got a goal that genuinely means something to you, then I think the coaching around it deserves to be good. Your time matters and the work you’re putting in should have a purpose.
I’ve also spent enough time on the other side of the coach-athlete relationship to understand what pursuing performance actually feels like. I’ve run 74 minutes for a half marathon, gone close to breaking 16 minutes for 5K, run sub-2:50 for the marathon all in my 40's, played football at semi-professional level, competed over 10,000m on the track at major events, and represented Great Britain as an Age Group duathlete.
I don’t think any of that automatically makes somebody a good coach. Being able to perform and being able to coach are two very different skills. But I do think it gives me some useful context. I know what it feels like to train seriously, to chase small margins, to put pressure on yourself to perform and to stand on a start line knowing you’ve invested months of work into what happens next.
But I was also a beginner once.
I know what it feels like when running five kilometres seems like a massive achievement. I know what it’s like not to understand training terminology, pacing, zones or why everyone suddenly seems obsessed with watts and lactate. Nobody starts as an experienced athlete, and I don’t think you should need an impressive race CV before your goals are taken seriously.
That’s important to me because Overdrive isn’t just for somebody trying to break three hours for a marathon or qualify for a championship. If finishing your first 10K matters enormously to you, then it matters. If you’re trying to take five minutes off your Ironman bike split, that matters too. The numbers might be different, but the process of trying to become better is remarkably similar.
And endurance sport is still something most of us choose to do. It should add something to your life rather than becoming another thing that makes you miserable.
So yes, we train hard. We look at the science, analyse the data and chase better performances. Sometimes we’re preparing for things that are genuinely fucking difficult.
But we can also have a laugh, take the piss occasionally and remember that none of us are performing emergency brain surgery.
Train hard, learn stuff, race well and enjoy doing it with good people.
That’s pretty much Overdrive.
SERIOUS COACHING. WITHOUT TAKING OURSELVES TOO SERIOUSLY.
WANT IN?
There are three ways into the Rogue Pack depending on how much coaching and structure you want.
If you want some proper direction around your running, good sessions, education and access to everything we’re building around the Rogue Pack without needing full individual coaching, have a look at Rogue Run.
If cycling is your thing, Rogue Ride gives you weekly live coached indoor sessions where we work on the things that actually make you a better rider — not just staring at coloured blocks and trying to hang onto a number.
And if you want the full thing built around you, 1-to-1 Coaching gives you individual programming, direct coaching support, Mission Control, Athlete Roadmaps and the complete Overdrive ecosystem around your training.
