Things have been very challenging the past couple years, and while it does seem to be dying down, the pandemic isn’t over yet. These things don’t end instantly, they slowly fade back to normality, though in truth, our world will truly never be the same again. It seems oddly coincidental that literally 100 years ago, we faced a similar situation, and it was so much worse due to the lack of technology to facilitate daily life.
When it comes to creating a triathlon training plan during this socially-challenging time period, you may think there’s not a whole lot you can do. After all, athletic training has generally always been something that required a lot of congregation of people, a lot of physical contact and a lot of heavy breathing around one another. It seems like the easiest way to spread contaminants and contagions, and well, it would be!
There is a reason why gyms came under fire in the news when they “bravely” reopened their doors to limited capacity when certain other businesses did not. It’s not a good idea. Other, more mundane criticisms of the gymnasium business aside, this is the wrong time to be reopening the doors on these places.
However, it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to abandon their passions, loves and callings no matter what’s going on in the world. We have to stay sane, there is a reason why our adoption of digital entertainment advance 15 years in the course of two, failed to mention things like telecommuting, online learning and E-commerce alongside it.
Well, that pattern continues here, because one of the easiest ways to build effective triathlon training plans right now is to make use of digital technology. You don’t really even need anything all that advanced, and you will see some significant benefits to this versus traditional training approaches. Before we get into that, though, let’s acknowledge that yes, there is something special about training together, the in-person camaraderie is not present. But, sacrifices are ultimately unavoidable to some extent.
That said, I did mention that there are a lot of benefits to this, and you don’t really need technology that you probably don’t already have, short of installing a piece of software. Everyone has a smart phone, and most athletes have smart watches with basic fitness functionality. That’s all the hardware you need, believe it or not. All you need is a training app, and there are many of them out there that are cross-platform, because you are never going to convince the android users to switch to iPhone and vice versa.
This will ever want to train on their own, picking their favorite venue, while complying with their own schedules. They will even be able to virtually compete by comparing times, biorhythms and even life camera footage from their phones. As their coach, you will be able to coordinate with everybody, motivate everybody, and even use apps like face time or discord to have meetings and motivate them.
This will be a common way of training in the future, though physical meet ups will return to some extent, because they do have their advantages as well. Welcome to another rapid adoption of a digital solution that frees everyone from the fetters of coordinating schedules and other unnecessary compromises in the 21st century!
