For some of the poor souls whose sporting endeavours are nothing to do with school, they may not have had a break in their training regime over the summer. But for many sports, the dreaded back to school week, is compounded by the even more dreaded back to training week!
Athletes all over the land will be suffering aching muscles as the strength and conditioning resumes and over-tiredness as they get back into the training groove. And parents will be having to get back into the routine of feeding, clothing and transporting athletes, and generally trying to get to grips with term-time life again.
This months blog is just a timely reminder to parents that now is the time to plan ahead and get organised. A bit of careful planning now can set you up for an easy run of things for the rest of the term and help to avoid some of the pitfalls of having a busy school aged athlete to manage.
Firstly, do you have an up to date weekly schedule for where your young athlete needs to be when? That way you can plan ahead with food and laundry for the impossibly busy days and get your weekly routine in order.
Secondly, do you have a full term's training and competition schedule so that you can see what's happening in the medium term.
Thirdly, do you have a full term's school events diary including school trips, coursework deadlines, exam dates etc.
Sometimes schools will have a sport support programme to help athletes to compare and manage diaries across school and sport (and certainly, if they don't, it's worth suggesting this as an idea). If this isn't the current practice in your child's school, it's down to you. Take the sport schedule, the school diary and your own diary and identify areas of potential difficulty. For example, does a major competition clash with an exam period? Does a family wedding clash with a training camp?
Once this is done, it's time to assess the best course of action. Can you as parent and child manage the situation? Do you need to contact the school and/ or the coach to highlight a potential problem and come up with a solution?
Most things are not insurmountable, and the earlier you identify a potential problem, the easier it will be to deal with it.
If you take two key themes from this month's blog they should be planning ahead and communication.
Once you've done all that, and the laundry and cooked the supper. You can rustle up some post training recovery flapjack to have in the freezer......you are a high performance parent after all!!
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