Ryton Triathlon Club was founded in December 2000 by Sue Gardener alongside her husband Colin Gardener. After two decades of growing the club, the unprecedented events of 2020 have seen the club get creative with their junior members.
“As soon as we realised that we were in it for the long haul, we needed to feel like we were engaging all of the kids with something,” said Sue.
The club has around 80 children between the ages of 7 and 18, so began a set of challenges during lockdown, with the first taking place in April on the club’s closed Facebook page that is dedicated to the younger members.
“We began with a transition challenge that had the kids standing in a bowl of water and then timing and videoing themselves completing T1.”
Sue continued: “We got all the children to video themselves catching a helmet, putting it on their heads and then throwing to someone off screen, and Sophie, one of our academy girls, cut the video together to make it look like they were all passing it to each other.”
Other challenges throughout the months allowed the children to test their agility using tin cans, strength with a press up challenge, and hand-eye coordination by throwing and catching a ball. There were also activities focused on socialising with the community.
Sue said: “One of our coaches organised a family quiz night, so the questions were all triathlon based and we did that via Zoom in June. I organised a scavenger hunt that was all rainbow and triathlon themed, so they had to find certain things, submit photographs and make a collage of the things that they found.”
For the final month, the children embarked on a four-week Zwift challenge that split them into teams of three and challenged them to an increasing number of miles to cycle each week.
“They each had to do a 5-mile, 10-mile, 15-mile and a 20-mile cycle, including the little ones who did brilliant,” said Sue. “Then they had to send in photographs of either their Zwift screen or a map to prove their distance.”
The club would normally hold an awards evening at the end of each year to celebrate the achievements of its members, however the ongoing pandemic has halted those plans.
“Because that wasn’t going to happen and we weren’t going to be spending that money, we subsidised ‘lost season hoodies’,” said Sue.
“The front has a rainbow club logo and the child’s name with ‘2020 The Lost Season’ and then lists all of the events that never happened, and they’ve all got them, and they look fantastic.”
Sue continued: “Our club logo is in red, black and white, and we had that turned into rainbow colours and we had morphs printed with the rainbow logo on as a prize for some of the winners.”
The club are currently working to a return to activity, recently resuming coaching. Sue said: “I set up a booking app to make sure that we had the right coaches, with the right number of kids, so we weren’t going to overstep any of the guidelines.”
Sue believes that the club has become more of a community over the past six months, saying: “We’ve kept in touch with them and kept sharing things even between all of the challenges. If people were doing things like going out on a bike ride, we encouraged them to share what they were up to.”
She continued: “Kids were getting together with other kids on Zwift which was fantastic. The groups that got themselves together, I think they have a bond now that is brilliant, they love each other and they’re like family.”
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