No Rest for Dolphin

There was little chance of Swindon Dolphin swimmers putting on weight over the holiday period as the High Performance, Olympic, Junior Olympic and Development squads attended the annual Christmas training camp at Milton Road . Each squad had a minimum of 11 pool sessions (including two 3 hour sessions for the Olympic and High Performance squads, on Christmas and New Year’s Eves), with swimmers from the top squads that attended all 13 sessions completing over 60,000 metres, or approximately 40 miles.

This year’s “Tough Enough” session* comprised 55 x 200m swims in a single session and was completed by 13 swimmers. The total of 11,000 metres is the swimming equivalent of the Marathon .

Running throughout the camp was the Christmas Decathlon, made up of a mixture of swimming challenges and land based exercises such as press-ups. Miriam Bermingham and Jon Audis emerged as outright winners of this competition.

* = This year’s 55 x 200m set included a large individual medley block, a main set of 20 x 200m freestyle on very short rest intervals (2:30 seconds for some swimmers) and towards the end, a descending set of very high intensity finishing at maximum effort.