No stone unturned in pursuit of dreams

The Daily Post recently penned a great article on the form of our Red Stag Mountain Bike squad member Samara Sheppard.

Red Stag Timber has been a major supporter of our mountain bike squad and we are both proud and delighted to announce that Red Stag have agreed to sponsor the academy for another 12 months.

The support Red Stag provides benefits our riders on many levels. It has enabled us to assist athletes with the cost of their international campaigns, to provide specific coaching, testing, training and monitoring, and for 2012 it has provided us with the opportunity to take our programme to another level with the acquisition of SRM power cranks and lab testing equipment.

Why is this necessary you may ask?

One of the golden rules of high-performance sport is understanding your chosen sport on an intimate level of detail - athletes cannot afford to waste time "junk" training or training with their fingers crossed hoping for the best.

Understanding the gold standard and being able to measure and monitor oneself consistently against this standard ensures that coaches and athletes can distinguish between what they think has happened and what has actually happened.

High-performance sport is expensive and with all that is riding on results in terms of sponsorship, performance enhancement grants, and justification for sacrifices made - it simply does not make sense to invest in perception.

Complementing the hardware we use here at Waiariki is the application of Training Peaks - a web-based training programme monitoring software.

All Academy of Sport athletes have a Training Peaks account, enabling our support staff and their coaches to access detailed training and competition information.

This appropriate use of available technology ensures the validation of athletes' goals and dreams with facts and figures - as the saying goes: "the numbers don't lie!", and at the end of the day, a dream is simply a goal with a deadline!

Meanwhile, our Academy of Sport founder Jane Borren has just had her accreditation for the Olympic Games ratified by the NZOC.

She will be travelling to London in support of New Zealand and Waiariki canoe slalom paddlers Mike Dawson and Luuka Jones. Not only has Jane invested a significant amount of her time, energy and expertise in establishing our top level Academy of Sport, she has also made this same commitment to Luuka and Mike. It is just reward for her initiative and drive.