During the Easter holidays, our Academy athletes were in Sport Wales, Cardiff for their next camp. This was the first of the longer camps and saw athletes training alongside our NTPCW (National Triathlon Performance Centre, Wales) athletes for several sessions as well as working with some of our practitioners on a variety of educational activities.

12 athletes joined the camp for 4 days of swim, bike, run, S&C, performance lifestyle and nutrition sessions. The focus of this camp was for athletes to work on ‘professional athlete behaviours’ (e.g. hydration, fuelling, recovery etc) and to experience ‘training like a triathlete’. There were some very impressive performances from the athletes across various sessions.

On arrival, athletes headed out for an aerobic run around the park before a workshop with Chris (Performance Lifestyle) & Alice (Nutrition) around planning and managing a busy school-training-life balance.

Thursday, the first full day, saw the athletes completing a hard swim session at Cardiff International Pool with the senior athletes- 40 x 100m long course was a great start to the day! After a quick refuel, the athletes then joined the seniors on an aerobic run around Cardiff Bay. The final session of the day was a technical bike at Maindy, again with the seniors, where athletes were practising their cornering, dead-turns and transitions. After a long day of training, the athletes then headed to Tesco to buy ingredients to cook their own group dinner! A tough day out but a good opportunity to experience life as a full-time/University triathlete.

Friday didn’t get any easier with a morning run session around Bute Park, once again with NTPCW and joined by 4 of our Affiliate Academy athletes. The junior athletes ran very well with almost everyone completing a big volume build session before heading straight to the gym for some S&C with Jack (S&C) and Jess (Physio). The training day was finished off with an open-water skills swim session in the pool and followed up with a race planning workshop back at Sport Wales. Another big day completed and some very tired bodies as we went into the final day.

Starting the day with an easy aerobic swim was welcomed by the Academy athletes before heading back for a short UK Anti-Doping workshop prior to lunch. The athletes headed to Maindy in the afternoon for the final session of camp- a hard bike and transition session to help them to prepare and sharpen up for the first race of the season in a couple of weeks' time.

The next camp will take place in Sport Wales in August. The focus of this camp will once again be on ‘training like a triathlete’ and open-water swimming, making the most of (hopefully!) some warmer weather!

To find out more about the Welsh Triathlon Academy Programme, please see HERE.