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2016 Clermont camp - race day

On the first day of camp, at our evening meeting, Karel talked to the campers about the purpose of camp. Our campers knew they were training with an intentional overload of stress and that they would be "racing" an Olympic distance triathlon on the last day of camp. But we emphasized that the race is not why they are at camp. We could not have them worried or overly focused about the race and we certainly did not want them to save their energy for Sunday. With every camp workout having a specific purpose and placement, we knew with the right mindset, our campers would be impressive on race day - even after 3 days and over 12 hours of training. At our team meeting on Saturday we all had a good laugh that on Sunday, we would have our shortest workout which was the Olympic distance race. With this, we also told our athletes to make sure they thank their body for being strong enough to tolerate so much training volume and intensity in 4 days. Of course, we told them they had the...

2016 Trimarni Clermont Camp - day 3

We always tell our campers that day 3 of our training camps is the hardest - mentally and physically. However, our campers really surprised us in Clermont because they were actually really looking forward to a change of scenery on Saturday morning for the endurance ride as well as a brick run. We started day 1 and 2 of camp with a run workout so I think they were also looking forward to getting on the bike first thing in the morning. We also let them sleep in on Saturday and we didn't start our ride until 7:30am. Every night, our campers went to bed earlier and earlier so just a good sign that they were recovering well from a day full of training. Our campers also fueled exceptionally well for every workout and ate well throughout the day so I knew that poor fueling or unhealthy eating wouldn't be an issue for our campers. The Saturday workout was endurance focused with a 3 hour ride followed by a 20 minute brick run. We all rode to the Buckhill loop and instructed ou...

2016 Trimarni Clermont camp - day 2

It was an early start to training on Friday morning for day 2 of camp. We arrived to the 10-mile Clay Trail at 7am, before the sun came up. We timed it perfectly as we spent a good 15 minutes on our dynamic warm-ups after the 3-workout day on Thursday and when we started our warm-up, we ran into the sunrise.  The workout on the Clay Trail was our camp long run. Rather than having our athletes run for 90 minutes, we focused on a warm-up (30 minutes) and then the MS split into intervals with short rest. This is one of our favorite workouts as the time ticks away and you can find yourself keeping good form despite the planned fatigue as the set continues on for multiple rounds.  We require all our athletes to run with a hydration belt to get comfortable consuming sport drinks/water while running so I was not concerned about any of our athletes having a "bad' workout due to fatigue, dehydration, cramping or GI distress (yes - not one of our athletes has had GI distre...