I now understand why people fall in love with Northern Manitoba. What a great place.

Last week I had the pleasure of conducting a swimming skills/ open water camp in Flin Flon and Denare Beach Saskatchewan. Denare is 30 km west of Flin Flon just inside the Saskatchewan border, but still on Manitoba time.

We had 11 athletes at the camp most from Manitoba and 1 young man who is a Manitoba transplant that currently swims in Saskatoon. There were 9 girls and 2 boys. The camp was held from Aug 3 to Aug 7. A daily encapsulation was mostly like this: 10 am - 12 noon open water swimming, triathlon skills, body core work on the beach and athletic skills games, all at Denare Beach. The swimmers had a great deal of fun, many using abdominal exercise balls for the first time. Every swim at Denare was open water ranging from 100m to 1 km loops.

In the afternoon we went to the Flin Flon Aqua Centre. The PM workouts consisted of swimming skill development in all four strokes, turns and starts. We built on stroke/skill progressions starting in January and culminated the week with underwater videotaping. Each athlete had at least 2 strokes recorded on to DVD.

It wasn’t ALL hard work. We had a camp fire wiener & marshmallow roast. We ate smores too. I even learned to fish, well I caught my first fish, courtesy of the great parents in Flin Flon. Everyone had a great time, and there are plans to repeat this next year.

See some pictures below: