Novices swim course (5 weeks)
Your main coach for the course will be our senior Level 2 coach, Dr Mark Pharaoh. Mark has over 20 years triathlon coaching experience and a huge amount of experience in helping novice swimmers progress. Mark will be assisted by a number of our other coaches, including Level 2 coaches Jane Carter and Sue Cannaby.
The course will be run over five Sunday evenings from 18.30 - 19.30.
If you can't make any of the sessions, please can you let one of the coaches or the committee know beforehand if possible. We recommend that to get the best out of the course, you try and attend all the sessions.
Medical conditions and injuries
If you have any medical conditions or injuries that may affect your participation, or need to bring medication onto poolside (for example an asthma inhaler or epipen), please send an email to chair@covtri.co.uk before the start of the course. We will need to share the details with your course coaches, but otherwise, they will be kept strictly confidential.
Venue and arrival details:
The course is at the sports centre at King Henry VIII School, Warwick Rd, Coventry CV3 6AQ. The sports centre is accessed through a car park which has an electronic gate. The code for the car park gate is #6482.
The sports centre also has a door code, which is 6482.
Please arrive at least 10 minutes before the start of your session. Once you have got changed, you can come onto poolside through the changing rooms to wait for your session to start. One of the club coaches will be on poolside to greet you.
What should you bring?
Please bring your swimming costume, towel and goggles. We cannot lend goggles out, so please ensure bring yours, as you will need them to swim front crawl effectively.
We also recommend bringing flip flops as outdoor shoes cannot be worn on poolside.
It is preferable if you have a costume suitable for swimming in, rather than a leisure costume, so for the men, trunks or jammers, rather than baggy shorts and for the women, a single piece costume, rather than a two piece/bikini.
We also recommend that you bring a swim cap, particularly if you have long hair.
You do not need to bring any other swim equipment (pull buoy, kickboard etc). If these are needed in the session, they will be provided from the club storage cage. If you are given club equipment during a session, please ensure you return it to the storage cage at the end of the session.
What will the sessions involve?
There may up to 6 participants on the course, and you will all be swimming in one lane (lane 6, at the side of the pool closest to the windows). There will be other club members swimming our usual Sunday evening session in the other lanes.
In the first session, we will evaluate the swim skills you already have, and then go through a series of exercises (drills) in the water which we've designed to move swimmers from breaststroke (or non-swimming) into front crawl, as our courses are specifically aimed at triathlon swimming. We don't teach other swim strokes. You will all progress at different rates, so what we do with the group in the following sessions will depend on that.
You won't be swimming for the whole hour, and the coaches may ask you (or the whole group) to get out onto poolside to do some dry land drills.
What happens after the course has finished?
Your course fee includes membership for Coventry Triathletes up to the end of the calendar year, so once the course has finished, I will add this membership to your TeamUp profile. Once you have done this, you can use the TeamUp app to register for swimming sessions with the club, which are charged at £5 per session once the course has finished. You can buy a pack of 5 or 10 sessions, or pay as you go on the app. To start off with, we strongly recommend you continue to attend the 6.30pm session on Sundays only, as our coaches will be able to give you more time to help you progress in those sessions.