Ski to Sea

First off i would like to open up this blog, after some hibernation in the fall, by saying that my coaching stint with the RSC was awesome. The kids coming up through the club are fun to coach and hard to keep up with on the slopes. My last weekend with the team we raced at Silver Star for a slalom. A part from freezing rain on the sunday, as a club it was a great trip and a lot of fun!

After Silver Star I packed up my stuff and headed down to Victoria where i will be living for who knows how long. Im training with the National triathlon centre, it hopes of one day representing Canada on a world stage. I must have brought the snow with me cause its snowing at sealevel quite heavily.

this is my second week of training and the centre is very motivating and encouraging by being surrounded by other triathletes the same age reaching for the same goals. My coach here is Patrick Kelly. He has been coaching triathlon since '82 and has had stints as Canadian and Japanese Head Coach. He has helped make this transition to Victoria very easy and seems to have high aspirations for me this year.

Swimming is what the focus is right now. Lots of volume and lots of technique work. Ideally this is the technique i want to have with my swimming like . Swimming is done at the Commonwealth Games Pool just outside Victoria. We swim 5k 6times a week which is more than i am used to but i seem to doing alright. Last week we had a 2k Steady state set, which was not hard just repetitive swimming with songs on repeat in your head. On my playlist it was a two song repeat of David Bowie Lets Dance and the killers , Bones .

Today we did what they call a break point test where it's 7x50 free LC descending. The key point is you MUST descend every 50 by 1-2 seconds while taking your # of strokes per 50. The point where your stroke count jumps in your breakpoint

ie. for me it went something like this:


1. 45s, 31strokes
2. 42s, 30 strokes
3. 38s, 31 strokes
4. 36, 30 strokes
5. 35, 31 strokes
6. 32, 34 strokes
7. 29, 40 strokes

so my break point is 35s per 50 at 31 strokes. The next time we do the set the goal is bring the time down to 34 or 33 and still hold 31 strokes per 50LC.

I have been working a bit down at Hyack float plane terminal this last little while, but am hoping to start coaching some swimming with the Island swimming group. An old coach of mine, Sureen Gosal, is the Gm of the club so i got an in.

Don't worry this will be the most boring blog you will see from me, i just had to check up for people who thought i was dead and or living like a hermit.

AR