England Athletics visit Juniors and Teens sessions

On Wednesday three representatives from England Athletics came to observe what we do with the Juniors and Teens. It was our first session on the grass track and using the long jump pit and the sun was shining.

Rich and Sam watching the Bleep test while Caitlin and Mimi recover from their efforts.

England Athletics representatives:

• Rich Ayling, Club Suport Manager

• Sam O'Shea, Board and NED Secretary

(both in photo) and

• Amy Godwin, Marketing Manager.

Amy came to interview Kerry Newell on women in coaching roles, in particular her progression from starting out to her current coaching roles, as can be seen on her "Pace to Peak" website.

Three of the five Teens, who have expressed an interest in becoming coaches, are coached by Kerry each week.

The Juniors session comprised (after group specific warm-ups) :

• long jump run-ups practice and

• 50m effort relays with batons.

Leo (photo), Jo, Ben, Kate and Tom supervised the relays while Anna, Jack and Seb (photo) provided "on the board" feedback.

Oscar and Rowley getting some speed up on the runway and the two Alices demonstrating how to hit the board! Looks like the Juniors had fun jumping and doing the relays!

For the Teens session, half of them were doing a measured and recorded Standing Long Jump (SLJ) and a Bleep test, as part of our performance monitoring. The other half had done these the previous week, indoors, and so were doing some long jump run-ups practice and either two pairs of 80m and 150m or 150m and 250m on a rolling two minutes.

Oscar getting ready for take off, Seb is airborne; Andy, with rake, keeps eye on SLJ distance! Kerry and Rich discuss coaching.

Ben got interviewed for the EA on his involvement in athletics, and Evie demonstrates perfect triple extension in SLJ

Ben posted highest Bleep test result to date (Level 13.1), going two levels beyond the previous best by Joe (and indeed his dad, Tim - on right in photo below).

Start of the Teens' Bleep test, with Tim (right) checking they're all lined up correctly.

We use the Bleep test as a measure of aerobic fitness, so usually the sprinters don't do so well, but Tom (in red top in photo) did rather well, improving by three levels, showing the benefits of the winter training in the Old Kennels Car Park.

Ben watch states VO2max of 66, whereas the correlation shows 57.5.

The correlation was developed by Topend Sports from the published tables in Ramsbottom et al. (1988) "A progressive shuttle run test to estimate maximal oxygen uptake." British Journal of Sports Medicine 22: 141-5. The calculator appears to be accurate to within 0.1 ml/kg/min of the published values.

Either way, Ben's very fit! Jack Daniels' Running Formula gives 5k and 10k times of 17:30 and 36:24 respectively for 58 VO2max. In comparison, Ben ran just over 3 minutes for 1k at the Mark Cawte memorial games at Swindon on Sunday (see News feed).

We were fortunate to have much help on a big evening for us, for both the Juniors' and Teens' sessions. In addition to the coaches: Kerry and myself, we had :

Juniors helpers : Anna Zaparka, Ben Thomas, Jack Smith, Jo Musk, Kate Jacobs, Leo Crawford, and Teens Seb Compton-Evans and Tom Hoskins

Teens helpers : Andy Neal, Denise Mence, Gemma Conway, John Fraser, Rob Darvill, Tim Stickney and Zoey Dunn