Christian Parrett has been coaching cyclists for more than a decade, combining his own experience as a UCI-level racer with a Master’s degree in High Performance Endurance Sport.
But for Christian, good coaching is less about having one way of doing things and more about understanding the person he is working with.
His own cycling career started on a mountain bike, riding with his dad. He moved to road racing at around 16 and quickly found that it suited him. By his final years as a junior, he had finished inside the top five at US Junior Nationals and raced with both the junior and U23 national teams. That took him to Europe, UCI racing and eventually several years at Continental level.
Christian loved racing, but he also reached a point where he knew the WorldTour probably wasn’t where his career was heading. Rather than continuing simply for the sake of it, he started thinking about what might come next. As it turned out, coaching was already beginning to find him.
It started with a friend who had stopped working with his coach and was struggling after moving into the higher racing categories in the US. Christian offered to write his training, and after a winter together, the same rider who had previously struggled to stay in the bunch was suddenly competitive. Soon after, another friend approached Christian and asked him to do the same thing, but this time he wanted to pay. “He wanted me to actually have to answer his questions and open his workouts and look at them,” Christian remembers. “He said, ‘You’re my friend, but I want this to be a real coaching experience.’”
“Rather than continuing simply for the sake of it, he started thinking about what might come next.”
More athletes followed, and Christian gradually built his coaching alongside his own racing career. By the time he stopped competing, he had enough athletes to move straight into coaching full-time. More than ten years later, he is still doing it.
Since then, Christian has continued to build on what he learned as a rider. Alongside degrees in Sports Management and Spanish, he studied exercise physiology before completing a Master’s degree in High Performance Endurance Sport. He describes himself as a generalist and a problem solver, comfortable with the science and the data, but equally interested in how that information applies to the person he is coaching.
For Christian, understanding power files, physiology and training principles is simply part of being a coach. The harder part is knowing how much of that information an athlete actually needs. “I think it’s an art to explain something simply and explain something exactly at the level they need it explained.”
Some athletes want to understand everything. They want to know how Christian reads their power files, why a particular session looks the way it does or whether they should start measuring lactate. Others have little interest in going that deep and simply want to understand what they are doing and why. Christian is comfortable with both, letting the athlete help decide how technical those conversations need to become rather than giving everyone the same explanation.
His racing background comes into play in much the same way. For the junior riders he coaches today, Christian can explain what their first European stage race might feel like, how a race caravan works or what to expect when they turn up to a Belgian kermesse for the first time. These are small details, but they can make unfamiliar situations feel a lot less unfamiliar.
“It wasn’t that my advice was good. It was that he really believed in my advice.”
Christian never raced the Tour de France, but he spent years competing at a level where cycling becomes much more than simply being strong. He knows what it feels like to race professionally, make decisions under pressure and have to find ways to improve when you aren’t simply the strongest rider in the race. His own progress wasn’t automatic. He had to adapt as the racing became harder and eventually be realistic about where his career could take him, an experience that now helps him relate to athletes going through their own ups and downs.
That understanding also shapes how Christian thinks about the relationship between an athlete and a coach. “The most important thing in coaching is: do your words fall on receptive ears?” For him, having the right answer means very little if the athlete on the other side doesn’t trust it enough to act on it.
He saw that recently with one of the junior riders he coaches. The rider had been getting good results in UCI races and had a strong sprint, but wasn’t making the most of it when he reached the finish in a group. Before one race, Christian told him that if he arrived at the line with a small group, he needed to trust his sprint and win from that group. That day, he did. What stood out to Christian wasn’t that he had given him some groundbreaking piece of advice, but that he could see the rider genuinely trying to do what they had discussed. “It wasn’t that my advice was good. It was that he really believed in my advice.”
That kind of trust is a big part of why Christian particularly enjoys working with athletes who want more from their coach than a list of workouts each week. They don’t need to become best friends, but he wants to know the person he is coaching and have the kind of relationship where they can talk openly about training, racing and what is going on outside the bike.
He has found that athletes coming into cycling from other sports are often a particularly good fit. They already understand what it means to work with a coach, tend to give useful feedback and bring plenty of enthusiasm to learning a new sport. The same is true for ambitious juniors and U23 riders, where Christian enjoys helping young athletes figure out both the training and everything else that comes with moving through the sport.
At the same time, he is careful about judging coaching purely by results. Give a coach a group of exceptionally talented riders and chances are some good results will follow, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you how good the coaching was. Christian is more interested in whether the athlete is improving, learning about themselves and getting more out of what they already have.
Training still needs to be based on good science and the data has its place, but Christian believes those things only become useful when they make sense for the person doing the training. That is where he is at his best: understanding what an athlete needs, knowing when to dig into the numbers and when not to, and building enough trust that when something matters, the athlete listens.