An insight into another North East club

North Shields Polytechnic Triathlon Club have been working hard throughout the pandemic to keep their junior athletes active and engaged through a variety of structured sessions throughout the week.

Junior coach, Steve Turner, said: “Our club’s experience throughout the pandemic has been one of learning to adapt and focussing on what we are able to do rather than what we can’t. No one could have foreseen what has happened over the last 12 months, so we were in a position where our coaches needed to learn new methods of engaging our juniors.

“During lockdowns we continued to use our Facebook group page as our primary method of communication to parents. We started by offering run sets and cycling activities, however this very quickly evolved into a full virtual provision.”

A typical week for the junior’s schedule would involve a Zwift race on Monday, turbo or roller sessions on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, a run set on Friday, cardio, core and turbo or roller on Saturday and virtual cross county or cyclocross on Sunday.

In addition to the schedule, three of the club’s coaching team also coach at local cycling club, North Tyneside Riders, so all indoor cycling sessions were made available to the juniors at both clubs.

Aside from the physical activities set out by the club, juniors were also tasked with completing reflection and goal setting activities in which they considered the highlights of their triathlon journey so far and set targets for the year ahead and beyond.

“Many of our juniors also started keeping training logs, most often online, that were shared with their coach and formed the basis for coach/parent/junior Zoom check-ins. Coaches also offered ad hoc check-ins to juniors and parents as it was clear that juniors could need a boost or encouragement at any time,” said Turner.

“It wasn’t all work though. We also encouraged juniors to keep in touch with each other socially, whether this was through social media, group calls or gaming platforms.”

Club coaches took the time to plan in advance so that when the 2020 summer holidays came, they could offer the juniors more sessions.

“We certainly hit the ground running. During the six weeks of school holidays, 43 juniors engaged with 53.5 hours of bike/run, 17 hours of open water swimming and 8 hours of pool swimming.

“At this time, we learned the importance of a larger delivery group than just coaches,” Turner said.  “What later became our planning and admin team developed detailed risk assessments that reflected the pandemic and control measures for each activity at each facility we use and created a sign-up system for every session.”

This was made possible due to the club’s insistence upon following the guidance provided by British Triathlon. Ensuring a smooth transition for the juniors, the club even made junior friendly videos of the new systems in place at venues such as arriving swim ready at the pool.

“Here we also learned how quickly juniors grow up when you haven’t seen them for a period of time. This foundation then led to us broadening our provision in the Autumn Term to 3 weekly run sessions, 3 weekly swim sessions and a cycle session at Prissick Park each fortnight,” Turner said.

“We were really seeing our juniors make progress and thrive and really start to think about the 2021 season. This may be what made the first couple of months of 2021 tough, but our coaching team restarted our virtual provision and together we stayed safe and counted down the days until face-to face-sessions could resume.”

Reflecting on the past 12 months, Turner said: “Throughout the last year there have been positives and we are very proud that all juniors have returned to training. We hope that this will be with newfound resilience and new skills they have learned in lockdown. If the weather is ever unsuitable for a run session at the track in future, then, rather than cancel, we now have an alternative in the form of a virtual session.

“We will appreciate the 2021 season more than we would have. Alongside accessing our coaching offer, our juniors will be competing again, taking the opportunities to represent North Shields Poly and if selected, the North East while meeting up again with friends from around the region and beyond. Putting our wider team to good use, we’re also organising our first residential Triathlon Training Camp at the University of Stirling in August. Lots to look forward to.”