The Inaugural SEC Training Camp - Lanzarote, March 2025

It had taken me 3 years to build up to organising this camp, as I wanted it to be a unique and bespoke camp catering for everyone’s needs in the same way that I endeavour to run the rest of the business.

To me this didn’t mean a hotel with buffet restaurants serving half decent stuff when they want to serve it, and it didn’t mean everyone living apart and catering for themselves.  I wanted to secure some accommodation that would allow us to immerse ourselves in triathlon for a week or so, become a tight knit group, provide healthy, homemade food, and well thought out camp that allowed the participants to simply sleep, eat, train, repeat.

Myself and Danny have been to Lanza a few times, and we feel that we know Costa Teguise as a location and the island well enough now to put something together.  We intended to go out for a month anyway, and would run the camp in the middle of that stay.

The first challenge was to find the right accommodation – ideally to house everyone in one place.  Actually, the biggest challenge here was not the number of people in the house, but the sleeping arrangements.  Most big houses had double beds in all of the rooms, which for my purpose effectively reduced the occupancy by 50%.  We eventually found a 10-person villa with just 2 double beds – one for me and Ann, and I had a sneaking suspicion that Mark and Lucy Colman would come, taking up the other, but then leaving 6 single beds - i just needed the right mixture of men and women to share those 3 rooms now.  Who knew this would be so complicated!!  The rest of the accommodation was perfect – big indoor and outdoor spaces, loads of room to spread out.The second challenge was convincing Ann that she wanted to spend a week of her life shopping and cooking for us all….in fairness she jumped at it pretty quickly, thinking she would have plenty of time to soak up some sun in between looking after us…..we will see how that worked out!!

Now we had the bones of a plan, it was time to see if anyone actually wanted to come…let alone the right mix and total numbers.  I stuck an initial post on our internal Facebook group and within a couple of days we were oversubscribed – I’m absolutely amazed!!  The big house was full almost immediately and a few days later we had enough to fill the smaller house that me and Dan would rent for the other 3 weeks that we were there, and another athlete who was happy to book her own accommodation and join us for everything!  Wow 14 people investing in a week of torture – outstanding!This all pretty much happened in July 2024 and we all cracked on with race season, summer holidays, qualifying for World Championship races and off season. There were a couple of ins and outs due to personal circumstances, but in the end as me and Dan headed to the island in early March, there would end up being 13 of us out there, including the head chef.

As I mentioned, my biggest desire for this was to create a stress free, hassle free, immersive experience of the island for everyone, so the day after myself and Dan landed, I set about doing the training camp activities as they would be done on the camp itself, to check routes, timings, load etc.  The group was of a fairly diverse nature of abilities, the majority had a least 1 140.6 in their locker, but one person was stepping up to 140.6 this year and one person was stepping up to 70.3 this year, and Dan was training for his first pro race of the season in Texas in May.  So, I had to be sure that especially for the bike sessions, there were sufficient options to keep everyone suitably stretched but not broken – I had been clear from the early days that this was not a big group ride with loads of coffee stops type camp!!

One of the joys of Costa Teguise is that it is home to the Barcelo swimming pool, a huge 10 wide lane, 50m open air pool heated to a decent temperature.  Its open from 7am till 8pm and if you want to, you can book lanes out for you own use.  You can use video cameras, snorkels, flippers, anything you want without any issues.  So I booked 2 lanes for our sole use each time swimming was on the plan, and split the group in 2 based largely on CSS times.

I made sure to ride all of the bike routes that we would do, including some shorter versions if needed, so that when I shared the Garmin files, there were no “Garmin weird directions” that I find often happened when you just plot a route.

The same with the runs – all run routes were from my actual runs, including a trip into PDC to run our long run on the Ironman Course.  Partly because some of the group are doing the race this year, and equally for a change of scene!

Within our select group of athletes, Ann had some interesting “preferences” to deal with – gluten free, dairy free and pescatarian, so before we headed out we constructed a little survey to get a feel for what all athletes would like to see on the menu for breakfast, lunch, snacks and drinks.  Armed with this, and the food intolerances, I did some supermarket recces to see what was on offer!  It turns out that between Mercadona, Lidl, the Spar and an ex-pat UK Brand store, the gluten free, diary free and meat free options were very much alive and kicking!!

The final piece of the planning jigsaw was the logistics!  I wanted to be able to collect athletes from the airport and take them back again, transport us all to and from Barcelo, and have transport available in case of mechanicals on the bike sessions.  Me and Dan had already hired a cheap and cheerful Opel Corsa for our own use, and we topped that up with a 9-seater Peugeot for general use during the week.

So SEC arrival day finally came on Thursday 20th March, and we were expecting 4 flights to arrive between 12:30 and 16:15.  Myself and Dan had planned how to make the airport runs happen…but failed to factor in some nonsense in Portugal’s airspace making 3 out of the 4 flights late!!  Anyhow, we made it work, with only 1 issue – Bike Box Allen Tri-fit Bike Boxes are enormous……to the point where they just won’t go in a normal hatchback car, so one athlete had to get a taxi for this journey – not what we wanted, but the best we could do in the circumstances.  Sadly, the late arrivals meant that half of the group didn’t get to do the intended short bike check that evening, but I stuck that in the “Act of God” category and moved on!!

Ann had joined me and Dan a few days before everyone else to get her head around the catering, had arranged “welcome packs” at the 2 satellite houses and had spent the first of many £100s of pounds in Lidl and Spar at the main house to get us going!

The first evening was the template for each subsequent evening:

1) Tea about 7pm, 13 people, cooked for 20, all food eaten!!  Ann made 2 choices of main course and at least 2 deserts each day, which were all highly nutritious, calorific and much appreciated

2) Once we were full, we had a short debrief from the day’s activities and some discussion about the following day’s plans.  We would discuss timings, logistics (where necessary) routes and things to watch out for

3) Bedtime started at 9pm for most as usually needed to be up around 7am

Below is a summary of the sessions we completed during the week:

Day	Session 1	Session 2	Session 3
Thursday (arrival day)	60 min bike check
Friday	1 hour easy run	4 hour bike – endurance 100km, 1300m	1 hour easy swim (inc videoing)
Saturday	1 hour swim with efforts	2.5 hour bike – hill reps 65km, 1100m	1 hour easy run
Sunday	4 hour bike – endurance 100km, 1400m
Monday (Recovery Day)	1.5 hour mixed swim	1 hour run with efforts
Tuesday	6 hour bike – endurance 150km, 2200m
Wednesday	2 hour easy run on the IM course	1.5 hour mixed swim
Thursday	3.5 hour ride – endurance 80km, 1300m	30 min run off easy pace	1 hour easy swim
Friday (departure day)	1 hour easy run

Below is a snapshot of the nutrition!

Breakfast always featured:Eggs, toast, cereals, granola, Greek yoghurt, fruit, coffee, and occasionally pastries

Lunch always included:Bread, meats, cheeses, Spanish omelette, tuna, smoked salmon, couscous, salad, crisps

Always available snacks:Chocolate, biscuits, crisps, ice cream, flapjack, tray bakes

Evening Meals

Day	Mains	Desserts
Thursday (arrival day)	Chilli / Rice / Bread Veg Chilli / Rice / Bread	Chocolate Cake Vegan Chocolate Cake
Friday	Sausage Cassoulet Fish Pie	Date, Walnut and Honey Cake
Saturday	Chicken Pasta Quorn Pasta	Carrot Cake
Sunday	Paprika Pork Fish Pie	Chocolate Guinness Cake
Monday	Spag Bol Veg Spag Bol	Bakewell Tart
Tuesday	Chicken & Quorn Fajitas	Tirimasu Scones (inc gluten free)
Wednesday	Beef Lasagna Butternut Squash Lasagna	Apple Crumble Chocolate Birthday Cake
Thursday	Pizza – in Costa Teguise	Crepes – in Costa Teguise

Extra-Curricular Activities

Bike Maintenance (Paul, Gary, Bex) – headset tightening, disc brake calliper alignment, gear cable adjustment

Self Care (Lucy) – massage, cupping, preventative advice

Trip to the bar for alcohol-free lager 😊

Final Thoughts

I am absolutely delighted that we made this happen, even if it did take a while tobring it to life, and I am equally delighted and that some of our athletes wanted to be part of it!

The banter, discussion, support and motivation that the group gave each other was beyond my expectations.  Some people knew one or two other people before they came, but nobody knew everyone and some knew nobody, but by the end I genuinely felt as though the team had a really strong bond that would be reignited at races and maybe future camps

Having Ann doing the catering and Dan around to help with pretty much everything and anything as well as doing his own training made it an even more inclusive experience.

Watching athletes conquering a challenging environment, especially on the bike with the relentless wind, climbing and descending was fantastic to see – everyone has gone home better equipped to handle their bike (there will be no indoor rides on windy UK days now!!)

I guess the real test of success is whether we would do it again, and whether people would come……so a couple of weeks after returning home, next years is booked, and 10 people are confirmed……I’ll take that!!

A few comments post camp from the team:

The delivery of what to expect for each activity was spot on, only finding out the day before worked well for me so I couldn’t over thing anything.

I like the fact there was options of shorter rides for people depending on their current volume and training loads.

Ann went above and beyond with catering for everyone’s requirements, all the meals were spot on, the desserts were an added bonus 😋. I never went without and never felt hungry at all.

It’s definitely given me a bit more confidence in being in the bars and hopefully I’ll be more confident descending soon 😬.

I thought the inaugural Training Camp was a resounding success, which met my expectations and overdelivered on what was promised.

Good balance, variety and a  calibre of athletes to train with as a group. The Coach chat about the next day’s training was concise, detailed and set expectations accordingly. Having routes available to be downloaded meant that if athletes wanted to train on their own or became detached from a group, they could get back to base under their own steam

Food - 10/10 👌🏼 we’ve been spoilt rotten and you all really went above and beyond to cater for all. I can’t fault anything!!! I would have like to have helped though!

All the thinking was done for us, 0 stress. Think this is one of the biggest positives for me, tell me what to do and when🙂.

Although the volume was high, at no point did I feel too tired or fatigued to do any of the sessions. Training, eating and resting were very well planned!

⁠⁠It was good to be given the freedom to ride how we like, with options to push on or be more social. Great experience pre-race to really test the course.

Genuinely, it’s been one of the best weeks away I’ve ever had. The only thing that could have made it better would be to make it longer, I didn’t want it to end and I’m gutted it’s over! 1000% would like to come again!!

I enjoyed trying the different stuff in the pool and video analysis certainly helped me understand where I can improve as I’ve never had that before. Enjoyed trying out the drills, clearly swimming is where I can improve most a few minutes here or there!

I won’t lie I was really nervous heading out and as we set off on the bikes Friday morning as a big group, I had a real moment of imposter syndrome. However, this was short lived and I got my head around the fact that we are all here for ourselves and speed/power is irrelevant it’s your own effort, that’s what matters.

The camp had a real group feel and the sound of laughter was amazing

You would have thought this was your 10th camp. The organisation and planning were your typical high standard and I wouldn’t have expected anything less

Had the most amazing a week got so much out of it. Thank you for running it. Was so well organised and perfect I really don’t think you could have made any improvements