Thanks to those of you who joined our virtual training session this morning. I can't tell you exactly how many there were, just there were a lot! I had two full pages of people on my computer, some had more than that many pages on smaller screens. It was simply lovely to see so many new and old faces.

Signing in was a bit different, but sign in we did. There’s a chat function on zoom and we signed in there and still put numbers on hands. Some even remembered to sign out.

Just like normal we had a theme - thank you to those who joined in with that - you were great!!! The theme was ‘Castaway’ (the Tom Hanks film) given that we’re all marooned in our houses.

The session was in two parts

Part 1

Up to 20 minutes in some sort of cold water and that ranged from a bucket, a cup, paddling pools of all sizes, proper pools and even a lake at the bottom of the garden!

Part 2

This involved a quick change into warm layers and then the challenge was to get a tea bag into a cup from a socially distant 2 metres using a frying pan! Let’s just say that some found this easier than others!

Dover training

You may think that training in Dover is all about the swimming, whilst swimming is clearly an important element along with cold water adaptation and endurance, it's also about mental training and a shared experience. Whilst we can’t congregate in Dover, we can still keep each others’ spirits up.

We will start in person training as soon as it is possible and permitted. Until then, shall we do it all again next week?

Blogs

Clearly this blog post is a little different than the ones that I’d normally post each week, so, if you’re missing real training, we have a guest blogger ‘Joanna’ (who some of you may have heard about from a few years ago. She is going to write a blog about what may have happened in training and as if you were really there. Don’t worry, no open water swimming or non essential travel was actually done in the making of this blog!

I hope you enjoy it. Thank you ‘Joanna’ in advance.

The best bits

Here’s a short clip of some of the screenshots from this morning. I’ve no idea if I’ve actually captured everyone, it’s pretty much impossible to tell! Apologies for the poor resolution / quality, it’s the best I can manage with screen shots from a zoom recording!

Enjoy!!

PS - one of the people without video was ‘Joanna’ it seems she had technical issues that prevented her from having audio or visual! What could possibly go wrong with a blog!

DCT Virtual Training - Week 1