A December to Remember

By TERRY LAUGHLIN

I had the good fortune to spend the first 18 days of December in Florida and the Bahamas, enjoying warm sunshine plus more hours of daylight than in upstate NY during the shortest days of the year. Even better I spent two weeks teaching improvement-minded swimmers.

Extraordinary Swimming All-Strokes Camp

This camp, Dec 3rd to 8th in Coral Springs FL, was the first “field test” of the updated teaching sequences introduced in the new book Extraordinary Swimming for Every Body and our three new DVDs. We had 22 adults and seven coaches on board.

I’m delighted to report that our new learning sequences passed with flying colors. For example, on Tuesday morning we taught Butterfly to the campers, only a few of whom had any familiarity with Fly. Two hours later when we filmed everyone swimming a lap of whole stroke Fly, the group looked remarkably like “practiced” Butterflyers, rather than folks who’d just been introduced to it for the first time.

On Wednesday morning, when we taught Breaststroke, the transformation was even more striking. I believe these learning sequences proved so successful in part because they offer a more expeditious route to whole-stroke swimming. TI DVDs and drill sequences have always been known for a patient step-by-step construction of the whole stroke. With this series I aimed to find the most direct path to a reasonably efficient – and well-informed – full stroke. The benefits include: (1) the ability to practice integration of your skills sooner, and (2) gaining the emotional reward of “really swimming” sooner. (I should emphasize that the new drill sequences supplement rather than “obsolete” the sequences on “4-Strokes Made Easy.” The older drills will still prove useful in adding polish once you have a “swimmable” stroke.)

Another factor contributing to our success was the inclusion of a special section for “mature” swimmers on each DVD (i.e. Butterfly for Boomers, Breaststroke for Boomers, etc.). This new approach is the first I’m aware of that takes into account the losses in strength and suppleness typical in middle age and shows accommodations and adjustments that allow anyone to swim their best – and in many cases far better than when they were younger.

The All Strokes Camp was so enjoyable and so successful that we plan to offer it at Coral Springs several times in the fall of 2007. Watch the web site and this newsletter for updates on this.


Open Water Camp

From Coral Springs, I went to Cape Eleuthera, the Bahamas and the campus of the Island School for our first-ever Open Water Camp, Dec 14th to 17th.
I don’t believe I’ve ever enjoyed a camp quite as much as this one. After swimming in beautiful waters around the world, I believe Cape Eleuthera qualifies as an Open Water Nirvana, offering so many unique swimming environments that could find a great setting for anything we wished to do. Because it’s a cape, we could find wind-sheltered smooth water within 5 minutes by bike or van no matter which direction the wind was blowing. Finally the staff at the Island School, led by Justin Dimmel and Andrew Farrell, gave us impeccably professional safety and support for all swims.

The Island School setting was unadorned but beautiful. The swimmers stayed in open dorms – like military barracks, men in the Boys Dorm and women in the Girls Dorm, including two married couples, Bill and Dianne Lynch, and Ed and (TI Coach) Laura Tiedge. We ate in the school dining hall, on picnic tables inside or on a patio swept by tropical breezes. It felt like the sleep away camp you might have gone to at age 12. Except at this one, set on a peninsula on Cape Eleuthera, had the Caribbean a stone’s throw away from any point on campus.

We had 19 adventuresome swimmers and five coaches. About a third of our campers had swum one or more open water (OW) races, another third had some non-racing OW experience, and a third had done little but “bathing” at the beach. One had never swum farther than 100 yards in a pool. All had TI-trained strokes though, from DVD, workshop or private instruction.

In our morning sessions, we taught open water skills and TI techniques in a sheltered cove 50 paces from Girls Dorm. We did one morning session in a “current cut” a half-mile swim from campus. The current cut is a natural Endless Pool, with a tidal current flowing between a cove and a marina with direction and strength depending on time of day. Swimming against the current provided a rigorous test of the skills we’d been working on. We filmed this session from a bridge over the cut, allowing us to examine how strokes fared under stress. This was extremely valuable. The highlights were definitely the afternoon swims, designed as challenges and/or “destination” swims.

On Thursday afternoon, we took vans to “Fourth Hole Beach” on the leeward side of the cape. Half the campers swam a 2-mile out-and-back route along the shore, practicing focal points we had taught that morning. And half did the same but for a mile and a half.

Friday we ferried the group to an offshore sandbar for a group swim back to the school with four kayaks and an escort boat. We anticipated that some of our less experienced swimmers might board the escort boat for part of the route. But every participant completed a 2.5 mile open-ocean, cross-current swim with the final group swimming tirelessly for over two hours – with Coach Dave Barra at their side all the way. There was a powerful sense of group exhilaration and empowerment over the "team" accomplishment at dinner that night.

Saturday for our final session we ferried everyone to the Schooner Cays – a group of small “desert islands” about five miles out toward Exuma Channel. We set up a group race between two cays, about 1400m apart. After the challenging swim of the day before this seemed almost a casual event. Something still very challenging – swimming nearly a mile in open ocean – was now very much in everyone's comfort zone. They did beautifully. I can’t think of any swimming experience quite as memorable as swimming between two land masses.

I believe that OW swimming may be the highest expression of all that TI teaches and we plan to offer several camps at the Island School during the last half of 2007 with one or more designated as introductory camps for those with no OW experience and others for more ambitious or experienced swimmers.

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