Last weekend 3 – 5 August I had my first training weekend together with some other athletes in Linz and I can definitely recommend it. It was not organized professionally but more a bunch of friends getting together to ride and train.

We started of on Friday with swimming. 1st on the menu was doing some video recordings of all our swimming styles. After that we followed a program to exhaustion and finished it up with pasta and bed time.

Saturday we worked in a good 130km bike ride. Cycling in Oberösterreich is much better than Vienna. Nice rolling hills, less traffic and a big area to explore. Plus great Icecream next to the Danube before heading back in to town.

On Sunday morning we worked in a good 12km run and followed it by analysis of our Friday swim. This is the best training that I received so far. I can clearly see my mistakes

1) I am not flexible enough in the shoulders. (The last couple of days my colleagues looked at me weird in the office, because of my stretching exercises behind the PC)

2) I enter the water with my arms and not with my hand, creating drag. In the swim on Sunday I tried to focus on getting a feeling for entering my hand first and according to my coach it looks a lot better

3) Stretching my hand further out after entering the water to get that extra 20 – 30 cm grab of water

4) High elbows and rotating more out of the shoulder

The rest looks good, I grab  water well and the rest I am pretty happy with.  I was able to focus on those things when doing some exercises on Sunday. Which included doing more stretch exercises swimming backstroke and stretching my shoulders to loosen them up. I took a time split of a 50m in 25m pool of 42sec, I am going to try and bring that down.

Getting together with some other Triathletes to talk and exchange and motivate and train is highly recommended. It makes the work-outs more fun and also you realize there are other people who don’t think you are crazy