The Truth: End of Season Reports Part 1

photo: Gordon Thomson

“It feels a bit strange to be finished - Glad and sad. I had a great group to work with this year and we all improved mentally and physically . We had a lot of fun and helped each other through out the year, we grew ….

Swim wise we all improved greatly. Training together in the early mornings worked well and knocking 34 sec off my 400 time just goes to prove it. It’s easier getting up on those cold mornings when you know what you are doing and who you are doing it with.

On the bike I now feel much more confident and know my body much better - I will have a go at cycle cross, mountain bike and road racing to try and get me up there.

Run - need to have a serious look at this - I feel there is a gear I am missing or just not tuned right !!!!

All in all - what a season - loved it, Made me feel like a kid. Starting to love the racing pain . There is nothing like it - nothing, no drug or drink ,it’s just pure you.

That feeling when you finish and you can just about stand.but you have a smile from ear to ear- gottalovethatshit”
 

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Swimming:

In the beginning of our adventure I highlighted that I felt time spent doing fancy swim drills is time wasted - unless we could swim 20-30k per week and I was on pool deck reinforcing the drills everyday - alas an hour 3-4 times per week is all the ‘real world’ allows - so our aim would not to be beautiful pool swimmers but fit and tough triathlon swimmers  

This was my goal over the year in the pool - the sets were challenging and sought to get the boys out of their comfort zone. Key to everything though was the group.  Out of all the sports, swimming is the most difficult to train for alone. Having a motivated, committed group environment was key to the pool based improvements that the guys showed.

There is a difference to swimming in the pool and in the open water - and as we train all year around in the pool our improvements are easy to monitor - the difficulty comes when we race in the open water. Some people naturally make better open water swimmers. It wasn’t necessarily the fastest pool swimmer which came out of the water first. I knew this from my own experience but trying to motivate and find the individual reasons behind this posed my greatest challenge for the year as a coach.

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