30 Swimmers and Coaches from Dunstable Swimming Club have recently returned from a week long training camp in Calella near to Barcelona, Spain.  The swimmers, aged from 11 to 17, trained for two hours, twice a day in a 50m Olympic standard pool. In addition, they took park in land based physical training and a high ropes teambuilding course. The main aim of the training camp was to “kick start” the winter training program for the older swimmers with a view to performing well at the county and regional championships next spring.

The club championship’s for 2007 have recently concluded have been swim over three consecutive Saturday evening’s  (17^th, 24^th November & 1^st December).  For this year, the format was changed to heat declared winners, this created room in the programme to include addition events, which were the 200m freestyle and the skins. Both events were well received, with the skins providing an exciting finale to the championships.

For the first time at this year’s club championship, a “Skins” event was introduced on that last evening of the championships. For those who are new to this event, the “skins” is a knock-out event where the fastest six swimmers in the 50m freestyle event are invited to race. Each heat is swum every 3 minutes, with the last person eliminated until only two swimmers remain. The final two swimmers then battle it out to find the Skins champion. It’s about tactics as well as speed, as the swimmers will want to conserve energy for the later heats. As the heats continue and swimmers eliminated, the excitement (and noise!) builds up to the final.