A must read for this week.

Our first session for the New Year was a good one. It is great to see everyone as enthusiastic as ever about improving their fitness through the sport of triathlon and also testing the limits of their fitness by signing up for more challenging events later in the year. By the way, the girls lead the boys by four to one in the New Forest Middle Distance Triathlon September 25th.

The long run seemed to be popular with a good number of you. We will continue with this option on a Sunday morning provided it is what you would like to do. This week we will keep to the same distance. Those faster finishers could complete and extra lap of the small side of Victoria Park to allow the other runners to catch up. That way no one will lose their friends eh Minky?

Having three coaches on deck during the swim was fantastic. It meant that we were able to pay more attention to each individuals technique. I hope you found the feedback useful. The majority of faults occur during breathing. Paul Newsome from Swim Smooth wrote a great blog last week about the common faults that occur when breathing during freestyle swimming. There are some very good pictures demonstrating these faults. It is a must read for everyone. Click here to have a look. I also spent the weekend watching Swim Smooth's Catch Masterclass DVD. I think it is well worth a look and will help you understand the importance of the catch to your stroke and the drills we teach to improve it. Paul's rendition of the Muppet's theme song at the end is gold!

We have been invited as a club to take part in the Mike Penman Memorial 10km race on April 9th by Victoria Park Harriers. Just turn up on the day and register. The race kicks off at 2:30pm from in front of the Victoria Park Harriers club house. This would be a great event to test your running fitness if you are not planning to compete in either the Ful-On Duathlon on April 9th or the Dragon Slayer Duathlon on April 10th.

This week is our long swim. It will be based on your CSS times if you did the time trials pre-Xmas. It does not matter if you missed that session we can give you an idea of the intensity we are after on Sunday. We will spend the first part of the session refining your technique. I expect that you will all have fins and a pull buoy by Sunday.

See you Sunday! Tim (LFTC Coach)

What's happening in the New Year

Welcome back everyone! I hope you have had an enjoyable break over the Xmas New Year period. As of this week we are back to our regular training sessions. Run at Well Street Common tonight at 7pm and our fitness and technique development swim and run at London Fields Lido on Sunday at 8am. The technique development swim at Kings Hall will start next Wednesday at 7:30pm. Apologies if you got the earlier version of this blog that said it started tomorrow. My mistake!

This week we will introduce an alternative 'long run' on Sunday. This is really for those people who attend the interval session on Tuesday. If you do not already have an interval session in your weekly training plan I suggest you continue to take part in the intervals on Sunday. Everyone will warm up together and then we will split into 'long run' and 'interval' groups.

The long run will be approximately between 8km and 12km excluding the warm up. The 'long run' group will exit London Fields at the Broadway Market end, turn left and cross the pedestrian crossing onto Sheep Lane. We'll continue down Sheep Lane crossing Andrew's Road to get onto the canal path. Here we turn left and continue along the canal path until we enter Victoria Park at the first entry point.

If you would like to run 8km you will run one lap of both sides of Victoria Park and then return to London Fields Lido via the same route we took to get to there. If you would like to run 12km you will run two laps of both sides of Victoria Park and then return to London Fields Lido via the same route we took to get to there. We will build on the distance/duration of the run, use different routes to keep it interesting and will include some hill training as well in coming weeks.

The downside of this kind of run is that we won't all finish the session together. What we hope will happen is small groups will form that will cover the same distance at a similar pace and we will all then meet for coffee later. The warm up will be 'coached' but once you leave on the long run it becomes a 'group run' and you will be responsible for yourselves.

This week's swim session is biased towards technique. Bring those pull buoys and fins that you asked for at Xmas! I would like to see a 100% strike rate with everyone bringing their own kit. There will be some sculling just in case you thought we left that behind last year. If you have been struggling with the sculling watch this video and see if you can mimic the technique on Sunday. There will of course be a fitness element as well so take it easy on Saturday night!

This article about Chrissie Wellington is an interesting read. Click here to have a look. See you later this week. Tim (LFTC Coach)