"When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else," author David Brin says. Holding ourselves accountable is no easy task during normal times. Add in mandatory social distancing and seclusion from our normal running communities, and the problem gets even harder. While runners like to boast about how self motivated and disciplined we are, the reality for many of us is that we rely on our teams, clubs, and coaches to hold us accountable. As the motivational bulwark of accountability to others has been removed, runners everywhere have had to find new and innovative ways to hold themselves and their teammates accountable during this pandemic.

Just like the thousands of organizations that have used modern technology to access their communities during quarantine, runners have begun to migrate to running platforms to both share their training triumphs and hold themselves accountable to teammates and training partners.

At Trackster, we believe that the best running experience comes from tight team bonds built on daily accountability and community. During the COVID-19 lockdowns we have seen many teams and runners utilizing the Trackster team training log and coaching features to implement a sense of normalcy and accountability, all for free. No matter how dedicated and motivated an athlete is, the support and accountability of a team can make training solo more manageable and motivational during a time like. Here are a few Trackster features that can help you and your team get the most out of your miles while social distance training.

Create Team Page & Invite Athletes

Coaches can create a team profile page as a central hub to monitor team activity. The "Invite Athletes" function easily allows for coaches to send invitations to their team members' emails and phones to join their Trackster team page.

Create Plans, Add PDFs/Video, Training Calendars

The "Plans" function helps coaches to create specific training group plans. Coaches can add athletes to different plans based on their training group, write detailed daily training plans, and add PDFs and Video files to the plans, all of which is added to the team training calendar. Athletes will see the training plans they have been added to on their profiles and on their training calendar. The calendar allows for color coding different group's training, saving as a template for future use or adding old templates, and exporting the calendar as a PDF.

Team Training Post Social Feed

One of the things we found that we found other team training platforms lacked was a social media-style feed for team training posts. With the Trackster team function, posts from all athletes in the team are displayed on a social feed. Athletes and coaches can like, comment on, and get inspired by their peer's daily training, helping to build a culture of accountability and aspiration.

Take Attendance in App

Knowing who's showing up and who's been absent is a crucial component in building a thriving team culture of accountability. Many coaches have to deal with a large number of athletes of all ranges and levels, and keeping track of attendance can be difficult. With the Attendance function, coaches can easily record practice attendance and keep their athletes accountable.

Belonging to a team gives us not only community, lifelong friendship, and inspiration, but also holds us accountable and helps us develop invaluable virtues and traits. During this time of uncertainty, many teams are an anchor for young athletes in a tumultuous world. At Trackster we believe coaching is an essential job, and we are here to help coaches of all levels do that essential work through the most versatile, 100% free training platform.