1 Month to go

Today is yet another landmark day. Today it is exactly one month until the London Paralympic Games begins, and two weeks before the swim team head off to our training camp over in Swansea.

The swim team is going to be based in Swansea from Tuesday the 14^th August until Saturday the 25^th of August at which point we will be traveling to the Paralympic village. The team will be in Swansea to conduct their pre-games staging camp.

The past few weeks have defiantly been keeping me busy after returning from Australia’s training camp it was back into the pool continuing to build on the hard work that we did whilst away. The weekend following my return we had a time trial swim. The aim of this swim was to see where my times were at and monitor how I was tracking in my build up to the games. My time was slightly off my personal best time but overall we were happy with how this swim went at this point in my preparation

Once I had finished my time trial I went to the Jet Park Inn hotel where we had a team information weekend. All on the Paralympic athletes that are based in New Zealand were at this information weekend so it was a good chance to meet the member of the team from other sports that I have not had much to do with up until this point. We also got to see our uniform for the first time while we were there. It is a predominately black and white uniform with dashes of blues and gray on some of the garments

This weekend just been I was back in the pool racing again. This time we were racing at the Auckland relay champs, the team that I was racing with did extremely well. I was in North Shore’s B team for the 4x100 Freestyle, which finished 2 overall so not a bad result.

Lastly I have had a lot of people asking when I will be racing, where they will be able to watch my races, and how they can keep up with my progress. I will be trying to get these emails out more often when I was over in London and racing. But as well as this I am currently working on a new section to my website which I hope to have up and running before I leave. This will have the dates and approximate times of when I will be racing as well as links to where races can be watched online. Sky sport will be covering the games but they are only going to be having two one-hour slots each day of highlights. I will let people know once I have got this section up and running.  

Gold Coast training camp

Well I am now back from my training camp over in Australia, so have decided it is about time that I updated everyone again on how the trip went and what is next. I was going to do this while I was away but we had to change hotels for the second week that we were away and our new motel did not have Internet that was easily accessible. 

So…. What’s been happening? The first 8 days, we were over in Australia the entire Paralympic swim team came away; all 8 swimmers were there. The weather was perfect sunny all day everyday although admittedly despite all that sun is got pretty cold in the mornings and at night so the early morning swims were a tad cold stretching out poolside before getting in the water. The pool there was extremely good it was a 8 lane 50m pool that was almost always empty which surprised me as back here you would never see such a good pool never being used.

The first week there wasn’t too much downtime it was full on hard work. I covered 80+Km up considerably from my usual 50-60Km that I would normally do in a week. We did however get a bit of a brake on Friday; we only had one swim that day with the rest of it off, so we made the most of this. The team went to movie world where we did some team bonding whilst enjoying the rides at the same time. The brake was short lived though as Saturday hit hard with one of the toughest training days I had on the entire camp with two solid blocks of hard work the first a swim and core set, followed by yet another brutal session in the pool that night. After we had finished all of Saturday’s training we had dinner before heading off to see the Warriors smash the Gold Coast Titans. It was an awesome game to watch with loads of action. The atmosphere was like being at a Warriors home game with Warriors supports almost outnumbering Titans fans.

The next morning was business as usual with more long hours in the pool. On the Monday morning most of the team packed up and jetted off back to NZ. Becs Aine and myself stayed on for one more week of hard work. The second week was much the same as the first lots of unforgiving Km’s in the pool. That week however the weather was not as good it was quite overcast most of the time on the bright side the mornings got much warmer. Down time that week was mostly spent watching movies and resting back in our rooms although on one of the days we went out sight seeing and shopping.

Now that I am back in NZ I am so far just focusing on my training and working towards being as prepared as I can be for London. Oh and continuing to work on growing my beard which is a good luck tradition within the males of Paralympic swim team. We have 27days now before we head off to our staging camp in Wales.