Athletics: The adaptable and creative will emerge from Covid-19 lockdown fitter

Top flight Whanganui athletes and sister act, Lexi (left) and Genna Maples, use the driveway at home to train under Covid-19 Alert Level 4 lockdown.

What follows after April 22 is unknown in these times of uncertainty and this is also so for sports as they await government advice and decisions.

I spent over two hours on Tuesday morning discussing what might happen by video conference with the New Zealand Secondary Schools Athletics Association. The only certainty was the uncertainty in the weeks and months ahead.

In an interesting article in Tuesday's Dominion Post Eugene Bingham wrote under the headline "Slow down. Speed up and have some run fun". He talked about not dwelling on all the things that he was missing out on and the races cancelled. Instead he talked about being creative in his shortened runs including in his case the revisiting of "fartlek" (speed play) in his training.

Athletes, especially runners, are more fortunate in lockdown than other sportsmen and women from team sports who need both teammates and equipment.

No one knows when formal sport will restart and any glance at the daily newspapers and television highlights this. However, athletes can lay a sound fitness base so that they can get back into action more quickly when there is any restart.

It is easier for runners and they are most used to the business of laying this sound base. The key is adaptability and creativity to each individual situation.

On Monday I spoke to Ed Fern, a leading coach based in Hawera, and asked how the group of athletes he coaches were coping under lockdown. He mentioned how he had set up a gym in his garage for small groups that was rendered unusable at the announcement of alert level 4 a couple of days after setting up. Some quickly borrowed some weights and others had their own to work with in their own isolation bubble.

I have heard from many athletes I work with after I inquired how they were coping. Many said that they found training within alert level 4 restrictions was a real "boredom buster" and many confessed to being fitter than at the same time in previous years. One young runner said that on his daily runs he had run more kilometres than at the same time last year.

Location had much to do with what they can manage to do. All I was able to do was offer some ideas of essential ingredients for them to add then bring creativity to utilise what they were able to do and any equipment or improvised equipment they had at home.

Genna Maples is fortunate that her sister Lexi has come home to share their bubble. This gives an athlete training partner. They have adapted their training utilising their steep driveway for resistance runs (against gravity) and have utilised other improvised equipment at home.

They can add gym type circuits with this equipment, some sprinting on the flat combined with aerobic runs from home.

Aria Carroll, like Ed Fern's athletes, has some weights at home and can add weight training building on exercises started with Collegiate's strength and conditioning coach Gil Barnitt last term. She can add other home-based activities and do some short sprints and runs from her Christchurch home.

I had a text from a former school team captain, Mary McCartin, replying to my text inquiring about both her and her sister who is based in New York. The former captain should have been moving to a law job in Singapore which had obviously been postponed and in the meantime was working from home at her parent's farm out of Taihape.

As she said, "I could not be more isolated". Runners who live on a farm have their own highly isolated bubble and have familiar training opportunities in their country location. They, like others, have few distractions but unlike others they have fewer adaptions to make.

School students go on to online learning this week as they await further announcements. There will be more demands on their time but I suspect the ability to take exercise will continue to be a great "boredom buster" and in the process they might be very surprised by how fit they get.

Next week we might know more about what lies in front of us. I will return to my review of the season and look back at how athletes rank both within the club and nationally. I will start with the strong middle-distance disciplines.