ironguides

The Venue:

Borsaen Villa is a luxury resort 50min drive from Phuket. The place was used as base for teamtbb for the 2007 season, and I lived there when I was still a professional athlete and part of the team. This made the experience even more interesting as the campers could experience first hand how and what training you need to do to become a world class athlete.

The resort has its own 25m pool with picturesque view to the montains in the area. Swimming was also done at the resort own lagoon, when the athletes had the chance to train their open water skills such as drafting, sighting and turn around the buoys.

Biking was mainly done on the back roads that goes from nowhere to nowhere. There were actually more dead snakes on the road than cars, which made the experience very safe, and we also had a support vehicle car following the last ride for any possible emergency

For the running workouts, we used the trails around the resort, there are countless options and one of the workouts intrusctions was basically “get lost out there and explore the area”.

The athletes:

From Juniors to Masters, Ironman finishers to newbies, girls and boys, we had them all!

Which was great since everyone brings something different to the table. Although they were instructed that “this is not a race”, it is hard to control the nerves when you have a bunch of type-A personalities traininig head to head in a motivating environment.

But what was great about the athletes is that there were basically no complains or negative attitude towards anything, it seems that small problems become non-existent in situations like this. That created a positive environment of positive people, doing what they most enjoy in their life, training, sweating, breathing, living…

Julian Hudson, one of the campers and an ironguides athlete, shares his thoughs HERE

The sessions:

As always, most athletes are strongly influenced by the ordinary advice on triathlon magazines or internet websites. And although the campers were training 4+ hours a day, this camp is not about getting super fit in a short period of time, the goal was to teach every athlete what triathlon really is and how to proper train for that, with a little secret thought here and there. All the sessions were followed by Questions and Answers during our meals, where athletes could understand the reason of each detail at every workout.

See you in Borsaen 2010, Coach Vinnie