The advanced group is coached by Wayne Smith. This group consists of Intermediate and High School age children who have a reasonably advanced level of fitness and are capable of training runs of 40 minutes to an hour. This does not mean that is all they do! Wayne runs a programme capable of targeting specific events and keeps the kids well motivated.

The junior group is more of an entry level group for children just starting their harrier careers, and is over-seen by Kim Creagh and Paul Webb with assistance from various other club members. Paul takes a group on Mondays and Wednesdays at 4:30 at Taradale Primary School. On Mondays they do running games and activities and Wednesdays they do fun running drills and skills.

If you or your children would like to join either of these groups, please e-mail by clicking the link above and I will put you in contact with the one of the groups.

TRAINING PRINCIPLES
The basic training priciples of running, as a sport, are relatively straight forward. They involve a simple system of 'Stress and Recovery'. When the body is placed under stress, it responds by making itself stronger when it recovers. The key here is that to make itself stronger it must recover. A lot of people miss this point and never allow their bodies time to recover. The recovery phase of training is just as important as the stress phase, because without the recovery there can be no improvement. In fact, without the recovery the body will enter a downhill spiral where it becomes slowly weaker and weaker.

So a training program will involve a session of stress, followed by a session of recovery. In addition, the body will respond better if different levels of stress are applied. For instance, if you go out and run 5km every day, at the same pace day after day after day, you will become very good at running 5km - at the pace that you run day after day after day. If you want to run 5km faster, you will need to stress your body, allow it to recover and then stress it again, but in a slightly different way. by doing this you will force your body to adapt to the different stresses and get stronger accordingly.

You might try your usual 5km, follow it with a really slow 5km the next day (as a recovery) then run a really hard 2km the following day. This will stress the body and work the muscles in a different manner. Follow this with a recovery day, and then try a longer run, say 7km, at the same pace you used to do your 5km. Once again this will place a slightly different stress on the body and force a different response. Follow this with a 5km day at your old pace and then have a day off. Repeat this for another 2 weeks and you should start to feel the benefit.

This a very basic example of a 'stress and recovery' programme but it can be made to work with what ever you are trying to achieve.

The Bluewater 5km series of Fun Runs and Walks is held every Tueasday evening in February and March and again in October/November. Details here