For our July training weekend we were headed to Nottingham, amid reports that the Trent was flooded due to the heavy rainfall that has characterised our British Summer so far. A diminished team gathered together for Saturday because Deb was off on expedition in Vietnam like the intrepid explorer, and all round action heroine that she is, and Rosie and Suzie were somewhere over Europe flying back from The Dajue Mountain Natural Water International Rafting Competition 2012 that took place in China!! Check out their blog below…SO proud of you girls!!
http://79.170.40.166/palmequipmenteurope.com/blogs/ww/we-still-love-china-raft-race-day/
Monty Python forms the basis for our warm ups.
We started off with some flat water slalom on Saturday morning, working on communication and NOT TOUCHING THE POLES! The only problem was that Fran hadn’t slept that well the night before due to too much coffee so communication was not her strong point; “I don’t like talking” she said nearly throwing all her toys out of the pram.
Bryony: Endurance training in the sunshine in our penultimate Euros training weekend. Muscle achingly, gut bustingly, will testingly awesome!!!
Fran "Who put that chocolate there? It wants me to eat it all"
The afternoon session was also of slalom, spent on what was available on the white water course. Lacking our buddies and their extra power we had a tough session, managing to get surfed almost every run in a hole where we almost ditched poor Alli a couple of times. It is all good practice though, take a look at where we are going to be racing for the Euros in a month’s time…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=Z9K0uwI15z8
What we needed that evening was a morale boost. Which we got in the form of Fajitas, Guacamole and Articulate : The Fast Talking Description game. But Sunday morning came around pretty quickly, Dave does love his early morning sessions, and with it came Suzie and Rosie!! Fresh from their awesome success in China, we were finally had 6 on the raft again! The smiles quickly turned into determined gurns as we set to our task of 10 x 5 minute sets at 6-6.5 km/hour with 1 minute rest in between each. Phew!!
Rosie’s take on her few days of excitement: ‘Flying in from a rafting competition in China for team training was completely bizarre…being plucked from the crystal rivers of Danjue Mountain under the care of Government Officials, then spending a night with a newfound friend in the towering heights of a Shanghai skyscraper, landing in Heathrow to travel straight up to Nottingham to be together with the team again, to raft again on the murky waters of Nottingham…I’m only having time now to reflect on the whole experience, its really hit home now how rafting gives us the opportunity to grow so much, and meet the most incredible people!’
DON'T HIT THAT POLE!!
Come lunch time Alli had to jet off to be important at a conference so we were lucky enough to have a guest appearance from GB Veteran Jenny Chrimes for our afternoon session. 6 timed runs of the course which included the run up the bank and paddle up the canal. It was a fantastic way to end the weekend with lots of smiles. We are now on the home straight for the Euros all going all out in our personal training over the next month. Thanks always to Palm for the kit we get to train in which keeps us warm and dry and keep the Nottingham sludge off us!
Thanks to Jen for standing in for the afternoon.
Keep your mouth closed!!
Words by Fran and the team.
Photos: Bryony, Rosie and Dave.
Once again our training weekend was set for North Wales. Spirits were high as were the water levels! But so was the strength of the wind. We were minus our coach for this weekend but he had done his home work and left us with a gruelling weekend plan to follow. Session one was a flat water session on Bala Lake doing sustained speed sprints. It was really hard to sustain anything with the wind that we were having to battle against, but we are ‘in it to win it’ so we soldiered on! After about an hour morale was pretty low when we realised we wern’t even half way through the session, but at least we were all still dry thanks to our Palm cags and dry trousers!! With an almighty roar from Suzie of “I am NOT TIRED” we put our heads down and finished what we had started! Then we quickly made a run for a lovely warm café in Bala for a cuppa, chat and re-coup.
Session 2 was spent on The Mighty Tryweryn practising our slalom skills. If only sometimes the water could flow a bit slower…and annoying rocks weren’t always in the way…
Most people might go home after a full day rafting like that, put their feet up, have a well earned cup of tea and watch Antiques Roadshow or re-runs of The Good Life. Not us. Nerys was ready to Body-Rock us with half an hour of pain with a Capital P! We set up in Debs living room and did a pretty immense core/plyometric workout which had the bonus effect of giving the floor a good polish too! I’m not sure what was harder, a day full of rafting or that evening session.
We didnt' think it was appropriate to show you a photo of us looking sweaty in Nezza's workout so have one of us doing handstands instead!
Sunday brought us much nicer weather and a day spent in Llangollen. We once again worked ourselves hard in the morning using the canal as our flat water venue this time doing endurance style sets, then we moved onto the Dee in the afternoon running down from Chainbridge to Town Falls for some more endurance based training. It was fab running the river with water in it and was great preparation for the European Championships in August – our next major competition!
Our formations for the Europeans are:
Sprint: Front – Deb, Rosie
Middle – Suzie, Alli
Back – Bryony, Nerys
Slalom: Front – Deb, Rosie
Middle – Fran, Alli
Back – Bryony, Nerys
Endurance: Front – Deb, Rosie
Middle – Fran, Suzie
Back – Bryony, Nerys
So watch out for us and cheer us on!!
We all trailed off home on Sunday sad for another weekend to be over, but Fran and Suzie, being gluttens for punishment, couldn’t wait to get out again. So two days later they were on the Menai Straights this time in Sea Kayaks doing sprints once again…maybe they should hook us up to the mains power supply.
Words by Fran and the girls,
Photos by Coolpics Photography, Alli McIntosh, Naomi James, Sea Kayaking Anglesey
We started off this most recent training weekend down a member or two because of illness and last minute work commitments BUT NOW WITH AN OFFICIAL COACH!!! We are so lucky and pleased to announce that Dave Brown, Coach Extraordinaire, has agreed to come on board with us.
The North Wales Massive were hosting this training weekend so we headed to Bala Lake for our morning flat water training session and the punishing torture that Coach Dave was about to inflict upon us. 7 Sets of 6x100m with 5 people paddling whilst the 6th person had do press-ups, or sit-ups, or the plank in the middle of the raft until the next 100m mark when we could change. In a sick way we loved it!
On to session number two up at Canolfan Tryweryn, a more ‘sedate’ slalom session with us aiming for certain gates and avoiding kayakers at the same time! No planks or sit-ups to do here, but every time we hit the gates Dave made us carry the raft arms-straight above our heads for 10seconds per gate!! We stopped hitting gates pretty quickly.
Most might think that was to have been the end of our day…but Coach Dave had other plans. We went to a village hall in the middle of the Welsh mountains and did the Canadian Abs test (Susie ‘The -Wall’ Jackson did 152 sit-ups in a row!), then a 5minute step-up test (that Nerys ‘BodyRockTV’ Blue insisted on doing in double time!), then a press ups test, and to finish, flexibility tests (Rosie was delighted to finally quantify the effects of 4years of yoga practise); yoga really does improve strength and reduce your risk of injury! At one point Coach Dave said ‘I had planned to do the bleep test with you tonight but I won’t because I don’t want to break you’…too late, we were already broken, but rolling around on the floor laughing as well, so it wasn’t all torture.
A 5:30am wake up was required the following day as we only had Dave for the morning before he was running up to Scotland (and probably away from us). We thought the day before had been gruelling…we hadn’t seen anything yet! Dave got us to do an hour of pyramid sprints with minimal rests, but we gave it our all, our minds set on the podium in Czech Republic in 3 months time. But it’s not all work and no fun because our reward for such immense effort was to head to the Siabod café for a full Welsh breakfast (shame it wasn’t fried in coconut oil though).
The rest of the day was much more chilled out doing some endurance paced training, and we were off the water at 1pm and driving home by 2. Pretty good work for sure, but then we were all practically on our knees. Afternoon naps were the order of the day next and trying to put off the onset of the inevitable stiffness to come. Gutted for the girlies who had a long drive home!
Words by Fran Kohn and the Girls.
Photos thanks to Gaele at www.coolpicsphotography.co.uk and the girls.
What a corker of a weekend the Team has just had in Nottingham. Firstly Rosie presented us all with a cardboard box full of luscious pink cags from Palm! Not only were we wonderfully warm and dry on the water thanks to Palm’s Swirl Cag, we were also finally all MATCHING!!!! Except for Fran’s Blue helmet but we will have to let her off there.
So with our Palm Amaris Pants, Helix Play Vests (great low profile for racing) and New Swirl Cags we set out on a weekend full of promise, and it did not disappoint. We were all feeling great from the high protein nutritional eating plan made for us from our previous training weekend spent with Ed Tooley, and psyched to be with each other again. This time we had top coach Dave Brown coming to observe us and see whether he might want to be our coach. We started off with our beastly warm up set by Nezza -’kiss my rubber’-Blue which included loads of running (with the buggy!), stretches coordinated by our unofficial warm up secretary Rosie, then finished off with some hill sprints! Then it was time to get on the water. Over the weekend we did both flat and white water training focusing mainly on slalom and sprint. Dave’s inputs had a brilliant effect and we finished each of the two days all having learned something and taken something on board to work on later. It was really helpful having ‘eyes on the bank’ to really see what was going on, as being a group of ladies, when it comes to going through what worked and what didn’t…well we do love to talk!
Despite the water quality being pretty grim over the weekend we were all on a high at the end because Dave said that he would love to come on board and be our coach – although he is pretty intimidated by our shoulders apparently – so in the build up to the Europeans in August/September we are getting very excited about what this collaboration could mean for our rankings and looking more long term towards the Worlds in NZ next year we can hardly wait!! Thanks Palm for making us look so professional and keeping us so dry, and thanks to Dave Brown for making sure we truely ached after Sunday.
Words by Fran and the girls.
Photos thanks to Georgie.
