Monday, February 13, 2017

Wow! What a great fortnight with the coaches!

Dear Swimmers

I hope you have had a great weekend and well done to this of you who survived the Busselton Jetty Swim yesterday - I heard the conditions were epic!

Later on this week I shall be jetting off to London for 4 days to be the keynote speaker at the world's largest triathlon expo at the ExCeL centre:



We have been invited by swim gear company Finis (who make all the paddles and tempo trainers we use here in Perth) to activate the Swim Zone over the 4 days which basically means myself and my team will be non-stop swim coaching from 9am to 6pm for the 4 days! This year they have built an entire pool within the conference centre which should make for some very interesting demonstrations and tutorials for the +30,000 swimmers and triathletes they are expecting to see over the weekend! I literally fly in 2hrs before the show starts and leave a couple of hours after it finishes! So short is this trip that I won't miss a single Wednesday Red Mist Endurance session.

Still, I should be well prepped because as you know we've spent the last 2 weeks training up the next batch of Swim Smooth Coaches here in Perth, pulling many 14+ hour days to ensure we bring them to the standard we require. 

Since we started this process in 2010, over 3,000 international coaches have applied to start this journey to become a Swim Smooth Coach, with only just over 300 of them being selected to attend the first stage (a 3-day Coach Education Course in various worldwide locations - every one of which I've attended to deliver as Head Coach) and then of those 300, only 30 have been invited to travel to Perth and go on to full Certification with us. So the coaches that you met recently are in that top 1% and travelled from:

  1. John - California, USA
  2. Linda - Florida, USA
  3. Mike - Kentucky, USA
  4. Shangrila - L.A, USA
  5. Kristina - Alberta, Canada
  6. Mary - Calgary, Canada
  7. Laura - Kent, UK
  8. Peter - Rhode Island, USA
  9. Roy - Taipei City, Taiwan
  10. Jana - Boksburg, South Africa

…and ably assisted and mentored by Emma and Adam from the UK of course!

They have just left, so it's going to be a bit quiet on the pool deck this week! Their tasks now are to complete the assignments and examinations we have set them to show us of their learning and pragmatic application of all the work we have covered here in Perth.

We started the two weeks coaching a very special young man (15yo Harold) who'd flown down from Hong Kong just for a swimming session with us. You can read about his amazing story and see his 8.15s improvement over 100m to win an international invitational meet in Hong Kong this last weekend here:


…the video analysis / ramp test is well worth a watch if you have time.


Anyway, I thought I'd leave you with a few photos from the coaches course last fortnight and a thank you for being so supportive of what we are trying to build here. Back in November - given that our next focus is building the North American program especially - I had considered shifting this two week course to Montreal, Canada instead (where one of our coaches runs a complete carbon copy of our program here in Perth), however, seeing how well you all gelled with the coaches and that Claremont Pool is very much the birth place of the whole Swim Smooth program, you'll be pleased to know that we will be keeping the annual training program right here in not-so-sunny Perth:





















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