February 2022 was the first month of the year that I have been in decent shape, with consistently good training. There has been no races this month, but the North West Regional Academy held a short training camp at Stonyhurst College from 18th - 20th February. The camp was affected by storm Eunice, so some training was cancelled and we found alternative ways to train.
For the first day, the plan was to do an aerobic ride and a swim benchmark set, however the road conditions were too bad to do the ride, so we ended up doing an easy swim in preparation for the hard swim in the afternoon. The swim benchmark set was a set of 6x100m, off a time of 6 minutes, where you have to do every 100m as fast as you can. I started with a time of 1:00 and steadily dropped to 1:02 throughout the set, which I was happy with.
For the second day, the plan was to do some transition/handling skills work and a brick session in the morning, and then do an open water specific swim skills session in the afternoon. The transition/handling skills session was wet and cold, but we still managed to learn from the session and get some good practice in. The planned brick session was 4 reps of bike-run, however on the second rep it started to snow and so we could not carry on with the cycling as some parts of the course were starting to flood. Therefore, we ended the session after 2 reps, and went inside where we set up bikes on rollers/turbo and had a cool down inside.
For the third day, the plan was to have a run session in the morning, then in the afternoon a gym session and a recovery swim. The run session was a cross-country focused session, we did 4 longer intervals over hilly terrain and finished with some short strides at the end to get some speed work in. The gym session was down to the individual athletes to do themselves, and the swim went well, recovering from the weekend.
Overall, it was a good camp apart from the weather, and has set me up strongly for the season ahead.
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