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A great conversation with Derek Covington '86 who is a human high-performance coach specializing in integrating well-being and mindfulness principles to enhance holistic performance lifestyles.
Derek's journey into the field of performance wellbeing and mindfulness has been a blend of passion, curiosity, necessity, and serendipity—a journey shaped over a lifetime. It began in his early days as a national-level hurdler striving to qualify for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
Eight years after missing the Olympics as an athlete, he entered the Sydney 2000 Games as a performance manager, launching a twenty-five-year career that spanned nine Olympic Games in high-performance sport.
What started as an experiment in preparing the Tokyo Olympic team through mindfulness unfolded into a deeply personal and professional journey. Curious about its potential, he committed wholeheartedly through a training certification at UCSD, exploring how mindfulness could transform the way his approached his work and his own life.
Mindfulness spoke to him personally as much as it did professionally. As an introvert and chronic overthinker, he often felt anxious, overwhelmed, and driven by a relentless urgency to get things done perfectly. In the high-pressure environment of the Games, he struggled with sustainable ways to manage himself and often bottled up his emotions, projecting calm on the outside while feeling entirely tangled inside.
His journey has since broadened to include certification in elite athlete performance wellbeing through Loughborough University's collaboration with the Wellbeing Science Institute, allowing him to combine his passion for strategy, performance, and well-being in how he works with athletes, coaches, organizations and teams.
Always at the forefront of performance, he remains fully engaged in sport, actively championing excellence in his role as High Performance Director in athletics, embedding mindfulness and performance wellbeing into the very fabric of the pathway from grassroots to high level sport.
Also, as the Head of Performance Well-being and Mindfulness at www.innerstride.co, he works with high-performing individuals and teams to help them flourish to reach their full potential through coaching, training programs, and strategy implementation. Their approach integrates different disciplines to maximize not only athletic performance but also overall well-being.
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