Athletics NI Advice for Athletes

Dear Members,

During this unprecedented time, Athletics Northern Ireland would like to thank all of you for your support in helping to fight the spread of Covid-19. Your training has probably been affected and you are likely to be training alone with remote or virtual contact from your coach and, with no competitions in the short term, it is likely that you have gone back into some ‘base training’. We recognise that some of you won’t find this easy and we will help if we can.

It’s been very pleasing to see the athletics community coming together with various ideas to support each other and to help all to continue enjoying their athletics or running and we thank you for that.

At Athletics NI, we have been publishing athletics-based support materials and activities and we have created a section on our website with Coronavirus Advice that we will update at regular intervals. This section includes Advice for Athletes with information that has been written specifically for athletes by a group of doctors who are medical experts in athletics. At a time when there is a large amount of information on television and social media, it can be overwhelming and much of the advice we hear and read is aimed at the general population.

The latest advice on how to make sure your immune system is in good shape along with when and how you should return to training if you catch the virus is on this page:
https://athleticsni.org/Coronavirus-Advice/Advice-for-Athletes

Please take special note of the advice that people who get Covid-19 may have an increased risk of developing myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) and this may occur as late as days 5 – 8 after your symptoms have got better. Every runner and athlete should have at least seven days rest from when your symptoms have fully resolved before you restart training.

For training support, we have put new content on Our YouTube channel and NI Futures website.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Athletics+NI
http://nifutures.com/

Additionally, our pathways team have created a guidance document addressing health/wellbeing and home training options – a copy of which can be provided by Laura Kerr [email protected] or Amy Foster [email protected]

We are here to help, should you have a question you’d like to discuss please don’t hesitate to get in touch. On behalf of all the team at Athletics Northern Ireland, thank you for your patience, stay safe and let’s use this time to make get better together even though we’re apart!

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