After a busy day on Wednesday, it was finally time to start our training camp... not-so-bright, but humid and early in the morning.
I was so lucky this year to find the perfect house for our campers - a Duplex just 1/2 mile from Waterfront Park (the race venue).
We love the idea of having all of our campers stay together as it promotes teamwork and it gives everyone an opportunity to really get to know their teammates. Although we do not force staying in the team house, this year, all of our campers wanted to stay in the team house which just showed me how much our athletes love the friendships and memories that are built during camp.
For the duplex rooming, the girls are upstairs and the boys are downstairs. We also have 3 athletes staying at the "coaches house".
We tend to have two themes at our training camps - a lot of training (the obvious) and a lot of education. We try to not let one overpower the other as it's so beneficial for every Trimarni athlete/camper to leave training camp with new tools, skills and knowledge but also a mindset that allows our campers to be more present in training. I find that during a training camp, our athletes recognize that the are capable of doing so much more with their body and mind due to the constant positive energy and support from one another. It's our hope that our campers can bring back the tools and focus for smarter training to assist in reaching performance goals.
For our first workout of the day (Thursday) we had a shake-out run on the schedule. We met our campers at the Duplex at 7am and by 7:15 we were down at Waterfront Park for our dynamic warm-up. We always stress the importance of a dynamic warm-up before training so we demonstrated a few of our favorite exercises. At camp, we make sure that our athletes are doing what we prescribe in their training as it's easy for our athletes (and any athlete) to be more focused on how much is accomplished in a workout rather than proper execution.
For the run workout, we had our campers run on the race course to get familiar with the route.
The workout was as followed:
1/2 mile jog warm-up
Dynamic stretching
10 min EZ jog
MS:
6 x 30 sec build to fast w/ 60 sec EZ
Cool down to house
We left our campers with enough time to refuel after the run workout and to get ready for our 9:30am Long Course Swim at the NTC.
For many of our campers, this was their first long course swim in a long time (or ever) and first outdoor swim in a long time. We just love this pool.
We try not to overwhelm our athletes with skill improvements when swimming but since swimming is so skill specific, having the opportunity to see our athletes swim is extremely valuable as it's easy to learn bad (inefficient) habits when you are a new swimmer.
We did not take it easy on our campers for the swim and include a few very strong efforts in this workout.
MS: 4-6 x (100 STRONG, then 10 sec rest (grab buoy), then 200 active recovery swim. Rest 1 minute and repeat.)
After the 90-minute swim, our campers had a "long" break from 11am - 2:45pm to eat, rest, relax and think about their third workout of the day.
At 2:45pm, we met outside the team house (this is the team Duplex in the above pic) and Karel talked about the purpose of the workout and provided the team with the main set.
MS: 4-5 x (2 min build, 4 min strong) w/ 90 sec EZ
Our amazing photographer Taylor!
We biked to the Oly race course and provided the team with one last talk before we sent each athlete off in TT order for the main set. We then regrouped and we all biked home together and covered the entire race course. 2 hours later, we were back home.
Later in the evening we gathered the team for our nightly team talk/recap and I lectured about long run sport nutrition to ensure that our campers would know how to fuel and hydrate for the Friday long run and for future training and on race day.
Our campers enjoyed their team dinner (thank you Taylor for feeding our athletes!) and then it was lights out early for me and Karel.
I'm sure it was all laughs and chats for a while before their bedtime.
