About Phil
Phil Clark has over 30 years of experience of competitive running and almost as many years training runners and pro athletes. As an athlete himself, he has trained for the Olympic games and has participated in national and international competitions. As a coach, he developed athletes in football, track & field, the Triathlon, Olympic weightlifting, baseball, basketball, rugby, and Ultimate Frisbee.
In 1994, Phil graduated from Yale University with a degree in Economics and accepted an invitation from Dan Pfaff, one of the finest master coaches in all of sports, to train with an elite set of premier athletes. Phil joined the ranks of some of the world’s best athletes, including NCAA champions and Olympic gold-medalists. Pfaff trained Phil during this time and, most notably, privately tutored Phil in the theory and methodology of physical training.
In 1996, Phil was named Assistant Coach for the Widener University Track & Field Team. He coached male and female sprinters, jumpers, and throwers. Upon Phil’s arrival, the team had not one regionally recognized athlete. In just five months, Phil developed nine Conference Champions.
Phil’s success as an athlete and coach led him to start his first business in 1998. The business, Phil Clark’s Muscle Systems, concentrated largely around distribution of the library of workout manuals he had written. More than 5,000 of his manuals were sold throughout the world. Phil also provided services as a private trainer for professional athletes such as Brad Scioli, Tony Hunt, and Jason Davis of the NFL. Soon, he expanded and went on to start training competitive runners, fitness enthusiasts, and everyday exercisers.
Phil opened Run Shoe Store in 2009. At Run, he introduced filmed gait analysis to the Delaware Valley. Phil’s expertise and ability to identify proper footwear for specific individuals led to an on-going relationship with Temple University’s School of Podiatry, whose Director of Sports Medicine, Dr. Howard Palamarchuk praised Phil’s gait analysis method as “equal to that of Nike.” Students of the program visit with Phil to discuss proper fitting of athletic footwear.
In 2010, Phil opened The Training Station, often lauded as Philadelphia’s premier gym facility. Over the past 7 years, the Training Station has garnered Philadelphia’s top honors awarded to gyms and gained a devoted following. Both the gym and Phil have received local and national press and often appear in network television segments and newspapers. See the Press > In his time training before and throughout his years at The Training Station, Phil has amassed over 10,000 hours of personal training of more than 300 different clients.
Phil is registered as a coach with the USA Track and Field Coaches Registry, the national governing body for the sport of running. Phil has appeared at churches, schools, and organizations for motivational and informational talks about the best ways to train. As a prominent member of the Philadelphia community, Phil is engaged in civil activism, and has authored a report about the economics of nationwide education programming. He is also a contributing writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Read some of Phil’s writing at The Training Station Blog and The Run Shoe Store Blog.