Making the most of the summer holidays, Welsh Triathlon Academy athletes attended the final camp of the 2023/2024 season last week in Cardiff. Held in Sport Wales over 5 days, athletes once again had the opportunity to train alongside our NTPCW (National Triathlon Performance Centre, Wales) athletes as well as continuing to work with our practitioners on a range of educational topics and workshops.

Across the 5 days, 12 athletes took part in open water swimming, group cycling, running, S&C, athlete health and cooking sessions to help them develop across many areas which are important to being a successful triathlete. The focus of this camp was to build on the April camp and work on ‘training like a triathlete’, thinking about improving professional athlete behaviours such as fuelling, recovery, nutrition etc.

The first day saw the athletes joining the senior athletes for a bike session at Maindy before attending a St. John’s First Aid awareness course to help athletes understand the basics of CPR, defib use and head injuries.

The following day was a predominantly technical day focussing on open water skills in the pool, running drills with NTPCW and movement control and capacity within S&C. After a busy day of training, the girls also prepared dinner for the whole group, cooking a tuna pasta bake.

Wednesday was the busiest day of the camp as we travelled to North Dock and Pembrey for a training day with the IRC athletes. North Dock provided a great venue for athletes to practise their group swimming, turning around the buoys and starts/exits whilst the cycle circuit at Pembrey gave athletes the opportunity to practice some basic technical riding, transition challenges and mini races to finish. It was then the turn of the boys to cook dinner for the group, preparing a chicken stir-fry.

Conscious that most of the athletes were racing at the Eton British Series race a few days later, Thursday was a relatively relaxed day. Aside from the hard open water swim with the senior athletes, the athletes had an easy run around the park followed by a technical and game-based session on the bikes at Maindy before a workshop on athlete health and puberty.

The final day of the camp began with a relaxing yoga and activation session before some running drills and a prep set ahead of the race. The athletes were then lucky enough to have a Q&A with some of our senior athletes to learn from their experiences and learnings over the years. Thank you to Dom, Ollie, Tilly & Ellie for giving up their time to share with the younger athletes! The camp finished with a short prep set swim at Met before athletes headed home to rest and recover ahead of Eton.

Academy selections will take place in September before beginning the next year with the first camp in October in North Wales.

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