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Welcome
Welcome to Training Block. Thank you for following us, supporting our mission, and helping build the Training Block community. I founded Training Block for a simple reason: I believe runners, and all athletes, should have better access to the resources they need for their training. It is my hope that Training Block will give the support athletes need to propel themselves forward in sport.
Why it happened
As any seasoned runner may caution you, run training is much more than lacing shoes and getting out the door. Training is prehab. Rehab. A training plan. Mobility and strength exercises. Stretching. Fueling. Mental strengthening. Often it includes physical therapy. ASTYM. Cryotherapy. Acupuncture. Massage. An athlete’s training is a daily, multi-faceted approach to life that is most successful when the athlete has a community of support behind them.
And yet. Interestingly, as dynamic as training truly is, athletes, especially runners, continue to have difficulty finding the right local resources - whether it be a coach, a physical therapist, a dietitian, a masseuse, etc. - that fit the athlete’s unique training needs (i.e., sports experience, price point, location, and so on). Until now, we have relied on Google, Yelp, and the like in our attempts to find these resources, but these websites often do not give us a good understanding of whether these professional services are what we are looking for. If we are lucky, we can get a good recommendation by word of mouth, but even that falls short. We need a platform for ourselves - for runners - where local businesses can show us their unique sports offerings, and where we can read the ratings & reviews left on these businesses by other athletes with similar training, goals, and athletic needs. Simply put, as athletes, we need a platform built specifically to support our training needs.
I came to realize the depth of this need early last year, out on some trails in North Carolina, while talking to my husband about our combined frustrations with training. My husband, a former D1 cross-country and track athlete, was maintaining a knee injury he’d carried for the better part of seven years. He'd had little success finding a sports professional that could provide the treatment needed to fix the issue. I was struggling with attempting to get back into shape without a coach or a plan, and I was staring down a big race that was four weeks away, feeling unprepared and out of shape. We both felt stuck.
In talking it over, we recognized a lot of our friends in the running community have voiced similar, yet varying, frustrations: I have a chronic injury. I can't find a coach that fits my personality and talents. I need to incorporate strength training, but I don't know how. I want to dial in my nutrition. I don’t know how to recover well between races. Each of these frustrations ends with the same statement: I don’t know where to find what I am looking for. My husband and I both felt like we, as a running community, need better support to reach our training goals. It was in those moments of talking that I decided I wanted to create easy access to that support. And so Training Block was born.
What it is
Training Block is a platform for athletes. It is local focused; meaning, it connects athletes with local services, resources, and professionals they need for their individual training goals: coaching, sports nutrition, physical therapy, strength training, acupuncture, cryotherapy, gait analysis, and so much more. The athlete can look over each local business’s background and service offerings, and can read other local athletes’ ratings & reviews of that business before making a decision about whether this may be a good fit for their training needs. Training Block allows an athlete to build a successful training plan and maintain healthy training throughout their training block.
In turn, Training Block is also a platform for local athlete-focused businesses. Many of these businesses are eager to serve the running community, yet have a difficult time getting in front of the athletes. Training Block provides them with a free platform on which they can showcase their services and better connect with the athletes they want to support.
Where it is going
As founder of this company, my primary objective is to support local athletes and our running community at large. One way of accomplishing this is to maintain transparency of Training Block’s objectives, mission, and path. As of today, Training Block is a search platform, which allows you to find local, athlete-vetted services and resources that best fit your training needs. In an effort to create an even better experience for athletes in the near future, Training Block has partnered with Square, and is planning to roll out options for booking services directly online through our platform. It is our goal to make the work of finding the right training services as easy as possible for each athlete, and to give athletes the option to book services easily at a time, price point, and location that works best for them. We are also building out community structure that makes it easier for athletes to connect directly with each other and share their recommendations. We are working tirelessly to make these next steps happen, and we look forward to bringing this additional feature to Training Block in the near future.
Until then, please enjoy Training Block, and help us grow by leaving thoughtful ratings & reviews of local athlete-focused businesses you have utilized as part of your training. We are here for you.
See you out on the roads.
Chelsey, founder of Training Block
