From triathlete to professional moderator, practice makes better

I am an amateur triathlete…about as amateur as you can get.  I have never been even close to the professionals in any of events (swimming, cycling, or running), but I keep after it.  I leverage a lot of training tools from experts, and by training and exercising the different muscles for each event, I have gotten very comfortable with all facets of the triathlon and am proficient at all of them.  So much so that I am doing my first half ironman in a couple of weeks.
 
You are probably asking yourself (or should be asking yourself), what does this have to do with performing research?  The answer is you need to build up muscle memory in order to be successful at research just as you need to build up muscle memory around sport or anything else that is important to you.  
 
There are a couple of ways of building up muscle memory in this case.  The first is to get educated.  At GutCheck, we provide this education in a number of ways, including providing some thoughtful education on our site; by publishing discussion guide templates which our qualitative-expert-friends at iModerate developed for our customers; and we also have our own qual coach, Elizabeth T., who is more than happy to walk customers through the finer points of creating a solid discussion guide. (BTW – users love her.)

 If you are at a bigger company, you might have internal or external market research resources you can lean on to gain some great training, direction, and oversight.  The fact of the matter is, you’re not going to become a better athlete if you’re not looking for ways to improve, and you’re not going to become a better researcher if you aren’t open to asking about different methods or ways to improve your interviewing techniques.
Once you have received the appropriate amount of education, go for it.  Go exercise those research muscles you are developing.  Just like your first training run won’t be as good as your last run before the race, your first interview won’t be as good as your second, and your second won’t be as good as your third. Continuous learning, just like continuous training, will make your research (and your performance) the best it can be. And, as it tends to happen, the better you become at research, the more you’ll want to incorporate it into your projects.
 
What advice do you have for someone performing DIY research? How did you get comfortable as a moderator?