Southwold Swimming Club

Up for breakfast again at 8.15am and ready to check out. All went smoothly and we were away by about 9.00am for the final swim session at Total Fitness. As we were driving away Tammy "its not my fault" Tomlinson then came up with the revelation that Charlotte Bragg had cheated in the bingo the night before. Charlotte's head now has to hang in shame for such a low trick as blowing off the cardboard markers from Anna's card! In fact I missed out the bingo from yesterday's blog. It was a well attended game I suspect because it was seen as a chance to get "integrated"  with football boys from Essex who also played.

The final session was a pretty intense one. A few swimmers were moaning about how tired they were. We started off with a mixed warm up and then a little descending kick set to failure of about 15 minutes. A short rest then into a Race Pace/Lactate Production set with about 600m of fast swimming on fairly long rests broken into 3 sets. I think most of them surprised themselves how fast they could swim even when they thought they were tired. The swimmers completed the set really well with great effort and energy, and many 50/25 PBs equalled or bettered from push off swims. An easy aerobic swimdown to finish and then that was it all over. A quick buffet lunch and then another uneventful trip back down the M6/5 to finish the camp.

All in all for the 8 sessions in the week we completed about 30k of swimming. Not a big volume, in fact a bit less than usual for some but for others it was a bit more and they coped well. What we did do was plenty of technique and some intense work trying to get a bit of speed. I hope the swimmers will remember the lessons and coaching points from the week and apply it to their regular training. The camp will not provide long term improvement that will only come from applying the lessons learned "day in, day out" in training.

There has to be thanks to all the people that helped to organise the camp. That goes to Julie Thornton from Severnside Tritons who started this all off. She found the accomodation and all the venues, did the original costings before handing over to Southwold. Prior to the camp there were a number of people that gave their time doing various jobs including  Helen Hall, HelenRogers, Garry Rogers, Tammy Tomlinson, Caroline Buss, John Britton and Myself.  Tammy organised all the fundraising which has helped to offset costs. Then on the camp all the Coaches and Team Managers gave up their free time/annual leave to help for the week. Coaching during the week was good and thanks to John and Caroline for their efforts with John also acting as a minibus driver.

Although the coaching is not always easy, the Team Manager's role is probably the most difficult. It is vital to keep the 19 swimminers safe and organised in unusual surroundings, and that is no mean feat with lots of unplanned occurences to deal with. So the biggest thanks to Gary and Tammy for their help over the week.

I hope the swimmers enjoyed the camp because I did and I think it has gone really well. Are there things we could do and organise better, yes of course, but we can learn and correct for next time. We have managed to run this UK based camp for about half the price of an overseas trip. Yes it would be nice to have gauranteed warm weather but at the end of the day it is the work in the pool and the gym that counts and it doesn't matter where that is.

If the club wants to run a camp next year we need to plan from now. I personally think returning to the same place and venues would be good as we know what is arouond and can improve things from this year. But we will need new volunteers to do various jobs in the lead up and on the camp itself.

I hope the blog has helped people understand what went on, at least a little bit.

Signing off for now, Club Championships to get to!!!

Keith