News & Updates

Designed to educate and help build a closer bond between the high performance endurance community in New Zealand, the inaugural ‘Stepping Up’ Distance and Walks Camp in Tauranga is set to take place from Thursday-Sunday 23-26 November.

Hosted by the Athletics NZ Distance Event Group, the focus of the four-day camp is to provide a collaborative development opportunity for our top athletes (18+ years of age). Athletes who already have a top-five U20 or senior national ranking or are targeting a top-five U20 or senior national ranking and who are committed to ‘stepping up’ to achieve international representation and/or to significantly improve their national and/or international ranking performances are invited to attend.

Coaches are encouraged to attend with their athletes and can benefit from sharing their insights and learning from one another alongside our invited key topic presenters.

Distance Event Group Lead Coach Craig Kirkwood said: “This inaugural event group initiative is all about bringing together our best New Zealand-based distance runners and walks specialists and their coaches to connect, collaborate and contribute. We can all learn from each other.” 

The camp offers opportunities for daily group training sessions (with flexibility for athletes to maintain their individual training plans) and is complemented with number of interactive presentations from invited presenters, covering key topics including: 

• Developing a running/walks career plan – with personal insights shared from Sam Tanner, one of NZ’s current leading international athletes.
• Athletics NZ development pathways and support systems.
• Understanding and leveraging the World Athletics points system.
• Femmi theory and approach to running training, health and wellbeing.
• Athletics NZ athlete wellbeing support and safety systems 
• Functional testing processes to support individualised strength and conditioning programmes and injury prevention.  

Look out for registration details next week.

***To find out more about the event group initiatives go this recently updated part of the website

***For a full list of the forthcoming event group calendar go here