Testimonies from Liza Coaching Athletes past and current:
Omer Shapira
Liza helps me to get back to mountain bike racing.
Working with Liza is great, and I am seeing better results faster. As concrete example, I am starting to race this season, although I thought I will compete only the next spring.
Liza is very knowledgeable and experienced. This makes working with her extremely effective, way beyond what one could expect from generic periodization program.
Liza is great instructor. As an example, when teaching an out-of-saddle sprint motion, she highlighted the dominant vs. non-dominant movements in a way I can practice on my daily commute.
Liza is creative in her coaching. Every now and then there is additional drill that is building up on what my body knows already.
Liza is actively racing and training, which gives her the edge - and the creds - of being fresh on what she instructs. And finally, Liza has great sense of humor and is fun to work with.
I highly recommend Liza for either personal training, on-bike coaching or general advice.
Jeff Radick
I highly recommend Liza as a personal trainer and as fitness class instructor.
Over the several years I have worked with Liza, she has provided excellent training for me in the gym and outdoors, for core fitness, running, and cycling (indoor and on the road), as well as advice on diet for weight loss and improved performance. Working with her I have lost 60 lbs and improved my overall health and fitness enormously.
Her own substantial experience at elite levels of athletic achievement informs her advice, but she tailors the program to the individual's strengths and limitations so the workouts are always challenging but achievable. And always she is a terrific motivator, always with a cheerful and positive attitude that is contagious.
Margaret Lum
I met Liza on Canary Challenge's training rides in 2013, when she raced for Vanderkitten, as she came highly recommended as a cycling coach by peers from my last company. I was always inspired by endurance racing and triathlete friends. Having tracked their cycling and IM races in 2013-2014, I developed a curiosity for what it would be like to race in a triathlon. Difficult events in my life and a serious self-examination turned into officially signing on with Liza in 2014, after finishing my double centuries, with real changes to shift from 200-mile bike rides to becoming strong in swim/bike/run, while applying discipline, focus, and an aptitude for learning three sports. When I started my training, I didn't know how to swim or run, and had serious concerns about overcoming fears I had acquired about these sports in the past. Through Liza's coaching, I was able to overcome those fears, and was able to have amazing adventures in the process (awesome Boost swimming clinic with LizaCoaching clients, training run in Switzerland). With injury-prevention and the healthy of her clients as a priority, Liza gives her athletes a trajectory for success. Engineering types such as myself love to analyze their data, their form, their efficiency, their nutrition, and Liza is mutually pragmatic to combine these in planning. Apart from being a great coach to individuals, she also puts on super fun spin and bootcamp classes, as well as group rides, which add positive energy to keep a full training week going. I recommend Liza to anyone who shares a passion and discipline for athletic pursuits in cycling and triathlon, whether with racing goals or even a goal to be a happy and healthy human. As a LizaCoaching client, I have gained a balanced perspective how to learn, grow, live, and continue to train with integrity.
Stacy Griner Washington
I highly recommend Liza for your personal training, cycling or triathlon needs. Liza is an excellent and knowledgeable personal trainer, cycling and triathlon coach. When I met Liza, I had signed up to do the AIDS\LifeCycle 7-day, 545 mile bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Prior to meeting Liza, I had no cycling background and had just purchased my first road bike a month before. I knew the ride would be a challenge and I knew taking me on as a client would be challenging since I had little to no experience cycling. Being the phenomenal coach that she is, Liza rose to the challenge and took me on as a client. She created a custom personal training plan for me that included basic bike handling skills, endurance training and nutrition. She not only tailored the training to my physical skills, she also helped me to develop an athlete mindset. All of this resulted in a very, very successful ride. With 5.5 months of training, I completed the 7-day, 545 mile ride feeling stronger than the day I started. I not only improved my physical fitness, but I also gained a new level of self confidence. So much so that Liza and I are now working on my next goal which is to complete a 70.3 distance triathlon. I have no doubt that she will help me get the results that I want.
Kathy Harris, current Ironman Triathlete.
I started working with Liza Rachetto in 2016 after a very successful entree into long distance triathlon racing. Having graduated from sprint to olympic to half ironman to ironman distance triathlons over the course of 4 years, I qualified for the Boston Marathon and had had a season of getting close to top ten in my age group in longer races. I thought it was time to consult a coach who could help me over that hump and into my new 45-49 age group. My primary goal was to get faster and stronger – or so I thought. As the year progressed, it became more and more apparent that another discipline of racing was missing: strength training. Liza taught me about patience and re-directing my goals toward a different kind of success – to enjoy this active lifestyle and embrace the daily ups and downs of training for endurance events, especially here in the Bay Area. Now into my third season of working with Liza year-round, the primary element to training at 48 years old is consistency: Show up every day. Do the work. Ask questions.
Liza isn't the type of coach who writes a 6-week plan and then leaves an athlete all to herself. She expects life to get in the way of training. With that comes a required flexibility in her planning that relies upon her extensive experience as a professional athlete and the knowledge that she continues to acquire. I rely on Liza to pull me back when I want to push too hard or race back-to-back weekends or become overwhelmed with trying to find a work-life-training balance. Her admirable and inspiring dedication to her athletes allows me to trust her judgment, and her responsiveness to my emails with thoughtful information and, sometimes, tough love, reinforces that trust. The relationships she's established with local physical therapists, bike shops, and other sponsors, by extension, gives me a wonderful mountain of resources when I have questions about gear, nutrition, and more.
Last year, we traveled to Cabo San Lucas together for a half ironman (me) and ironman (Liza). Since my race started an hour before the ironman, my only goal was to get as far as I could on the bike before Liza caught me. When I caught sight of her day-glow yellow kit in the front of the pack with about a dozen men on her wheel, I became all the more inspired, not because I went faster to see how far I could get before she caught but because she was head down, focused on racing. She was in the moment – a state of mind that's difficult to achieve. And, when she came in for the 4-lap run, I had the chance to watch her hold the front of the race for women age groupers, see her fortitude, understand her focus, and see how her consistent showing up and believing were operating to support her focus. Wildly exciting! She takes nothing for granted. She inspires by doing. She learns from her successes and mistakes to pass along that knowledge to her athletes.
Maryellen O’Connell
Liza is the BEST trainer I ever met!! I was new to working out, and Liza was always encouraging, gave GREAT advise and was a delight to learn from! Because of her I learned how to run (sounds funny huh?), exercise, lose weight and improve in all my self care. She knows SO much about the body, injured and older and beyond! I would recommend that ANYONE could use this gals skills, she will help you tone, trim and smile!
Preeti Kota
I was a regular on Liza's bootcamp for over a year and saw a noticeable improvement in my fitness levels. I started out from not being able to run a short distance to running over 5 miles. Liza has gone out of her way to help customize exercises for people with injuries. Liza is a great bootcamp instructor and is a true inspiration to work with.
Luc Vantalon
I am a 52-year old triathlete looking to best myself races after races; 10 years in the sport, the last 3 coached by Liza. What a difference a great coach can make?
I shaved 2 hours on my IM time, and I am a better, stronger cyclist than I was 10 years ago. However numbers don’t say it all, the pieces come together because
Liza's approach to training comes with a great sense of purpose: You interval at this power because this is where your threshold is, you go for a slow run because your
body needs it, you push hard the last 6 weeks before an IM because this is the time to harvest your fitness, and of course nutrition, nutrition, nutrition. Liza has a network of
great professional friends, always pushing the boundaries of what to do next, but of course she will try it herself before dropping it into your plan.
And the real secret is that it gets better the second and following years, we are tuned, workouts get micro-adjusted and injury-free progresses keep coming.
Brittany Steers
I've been a competitive athlete since I was four or five years old. I've always had a coach of some type until I reached college and academics and life took over. I am very disciplined and have my Masters in Exercise Physiology so I was always able to find and tweak training plans for specific events I was training for. This strategy and joining the local triathlon club worked well as a newbie to long distance running and triathlons. As I progressed as an endurance athlete however, I found these free online plans for individual events did not set me up well for a season of racing nor did they give me flexibility when life inevitably takes over. Working with Liza has solved all those problems for me. She is very knowledgeable about triathlon and endurance sports, takes the guesswork out of training, and has become both a friend and mentor. As a female athlete, it has been invaluable having a female coach who can relate to the unique issues that female athletes face physically and psychologically. I've only been with Liza a short time, but have seen myself get fitter and stronger than ever before... yet without the usual exhaustion and fatigue that comes with hard training!
Jerrold Alcantara
I’ve worked with Liza Coaching, LLC close to 3 years. For years my triathlon training strategy prior to Liza consisted of unstructured training, followed by a cookie-cutter free training plan handed down by a friend of a friend of a friend, then joining a non-profit group that provides free triathlon training and coaching. While that strategy helped me crossed the finish line before cut offs I was hungry for more. Working with Liza Coaching has helped me achieve numerous PR’s (shaved 4+ hours from my full Ironman and 2.5+ hours from my Half-Ironman finish times), while achieving a work/life balance and most importantly, bragging rights among friends.