Training Camp Logs (Part II)
During my time in Montréal 🇨🇦 I tried to publish as many training camp logs as I could to share with the coaching community. These are all from a 13-month period, mostly in 2015.
If you’ve been in Montréal, or most of Canada in the winter, you know that it’s pretty cold, and dark. Getting out of that for a winter training camp is a great idea to boost the vitamin D levels, and generally improve mood - but also get some good training in. We were looking for a fairly cheap, somewhat different location to take the athletes and through a contact I’d made at a conference we were able to head out to Kingston, Jamaica in January of 2015. It was a good camp, we had some great experiences including hanging out with Usain Bolt.
In March 2015 we went for a training camp down to Pine Crest, Florida again, to get out of the cold Montréal winter. This was a 2-week camp to get ready for Canadian World Trials in April. Fun fact that the last image on here shows me coaching with my good friend, James Gibson, whom I would go on to coach with at Energy Standard in Turkiyë
In 2015 I had an athlete selected to attend the Mare Nostrum tour as part of a Swimming Canada delegation. I wasn’t attending so I sent along a detailed training plan for the coach and athlete to follow throughout the 2-week trip. This was a great way to communicate expectations to both athlete and tour coach, and giving the tour coach a framework for the trip takes a lot of pressure off trying to write sessions during a busy period.
Canada were at the time, and I think still do, using international competitions as open water selection since the vast majority of the time it’s too cold to swim outdoors in Canada. The Cayman Islands “Flowers Sea Swim” was a great celebration of swimming and had events for everyone.
In the summer I was named head coach to the Canadian Junior Worlds team headed to Singapore. We staged at the Singapore Sports School where my Dad had coached for many years, and then moved over to the OCBC Aquatic Centre for the competition. We had a solid team which included a young Penny Oleksiak - a year away from winning the Olympic gold in Rio 2016, as well as Taylor Ruck, and Maggie MacNeil who would also go on to win Olympic gold in Tokyo 2021. Maggie was in my training squad for this trip.
Final log on this post is from January 2016 where I was the lead coach for a camp in Thanyapura, Thailand. We had a small squad of, I think 6 athletes. Three of mine from the training centre in Montréal - Ashley Macgregor, Barbara Jardin, and Mary-Sophie Harvey, and another 3 from other programs across Canada.