Thredbo Training Camp | October 2019
Report by Liesl Peters
Once again, our friends at Ryde Aussi Masters (RAMS) took the lead in organising a long weekend swim training camp at Thredbo Village, in the beautiful Australian Alps.
The weekend of 4-7 October 2019 coincided with the NSW Labour Day public holiday Monday and the official close of the Winter 2019 ski season. Attendance for the weekend was open to Masters swimmers from any club, and, this time around, the Ryde and Tuggeranong stalwarts were joined by swimmers from as far afield as Griffith and Port Macquarie.
Thredbo Group
Lead coaches for the weekend were our own Anne and Greg, assisted by Ryde's Susan and Wendje. The first swim session kicked off with meet-and-greet introductions, followed by the all-important stretching exercises. Then it was into the pool for some timing and pacing sessions over various distances, to set our individual standards for the rest of the weekend. In preparation for individual debriefs prior to the rest of the weekend's sessions, coach Greg covered a few kilometres on foot walking up and down the side of the pool, using the GoPro to record overhead and underwater video footage of each swimmer.
Over the Saturday and Sunday, training sessions focused on freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke, and butterfly respectively, with at least one swimmer with too much energy breaking up the time in between by hitting the slopes! Hope there weren't too many rocks amongst the very limited snow, Richard. The rest of us simply enjoyed getting into the routine of breakfast, swim, rest, lunch, rest, swim, dinner, rest, etc, etc - relaxing and chatting in the lounge rooms of the various accommodation lodges.
Last Man Standing winners are grinners!
The final session of the weekend was the 'recovery and fun' session of Monday morning - with the serious training giving way to a 'Last Swimmer Standing' challenge. Every swimmer was challenged to set a pace time for an initial 50m freestyle sprint, and then to back up again and again and better that time as many consecutive times as possible. If you were slower than your initial time - goodbye! Otherwise, keep repeating... The eventual joint winners were Suzy and Nicolee - sharing the most valuable prize of all!
To state the obvious, the weekend would not have been such a success without the enthusiastic efforts of our four coaches, as well as those from Susan in co-ordinating the accommodation, etc. Sincere thanks to all.
On top of the benefit of the six concentrated training sessions in a relatively short timeframe, the fantastic food and wine and the relaxed and social company of fellow swimmers and new friends - all in the great location at Thredbo - was icing on the cake!
We're all looking forward to 2020...The training programs for each session are available at the links below.