Coach RunRev Gerald Collins - Endurance Run Coach in Southwest Ohio

I’m Coach Gerald Collins and I help runners who want something different from the usual training process.

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More Than a Coach

I didn’t come into running because everything was going right. I came to it in one of the darkest places of my life. It was an attempt to find a way to save my marriage and my family.

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in the early 90s. She fought it into remission for over 15 years. When it came back, she fought that too, her tumor markers were actually going down. Then on Friday, April 29, 2011, she told me they’d moved her to hospice and stopped chemo. Two days later she could only speak in short sentences. By Monday she was barely responsive. She passed early Tuesday morning, May 1, 2011.

I didn’t handle it well. The grief put me in a dark place, and it started costing me my marriage. In May 2012, my wife gave me an ultimatum, find a way to deal with this, or she and my daughter were leaving.

She was right. So I started running. I spent a month just training to run one mile. When I finished that mile, I felt like I’d won something. That August I ran my first 5K. It was supposed to be a one-and-done thing. Instead I fell in love with the local running community, and running itself.

In the fall of 2013, I ran my first marathon and dedicated it to my mother.

Running didn’t take the grief away. But it gave me somewhere to put it, and it saved my marriage.

Now I help other people find that same thing, using running to work through whatever they’re carrying, with faith at the center of it.

Experience You Can Trust

RRCA Level 1 Certified Coach (currently studying for level 2)
80/20 Endurance Certified Coach
Host of Stronger Than the Struggle Podcast
Featured on multiple podcasts, including The Behind The Shades Show and Running His Race

I started RunRev Coaching because I couldn’t find a coach who talked about faith, mental health, and running in the same conversation. So, I built the thing I needed.

How I Coach

Plans are only useful if they fit your actual life, so I build them around what you’re dealing with, not a generic template. In practice that looks like:

Adjusting the plan when life gets hard
Listening before I start prescribing anything
Building trust before I push performance
Bringing faith into it when it matters to you

I care about your times and your race goals. But mostly I care about you finishing this stronger than you started, in whatever way that means for you right now.

Where Faith Fits In

Faith isn’t forced here. Nobody’s required to pray with me or talk theology to work with me.

But I’m a minister, and my own faith is a big part of how I got through my mother’s death and how I coach now. If that’s something you want woven into your training, it’s there. If it’s not your thing, that’s fine too, we’ll focus on the running.