This camp was SO AWESOME. I knew it would be valuable from looking at the coaches' bios and the camp schedule. Chris Hauth (double Olympian for the German swim team, has won his AG in just about every triathlon he's done recently) and Wendy Ingraham. Morning swim and video sessions Saturday and Sunday, open water swim session Saturday afternoon, and two noon sessions of videotape review.

We started out getting to know Chris a little bit (Wendy arrived Sunday), introduced ourselves and talked about what races were coming up (there were about 10 of us in the camp). We did some warmup/stretching exercises, then headed to the pool. We did a quick warmup - 400 swim, 160 kick, 160 pull, 160 swim (we were swimming in a 40-yd pool). Then he had us do several repeats of 40 right-arm, 40 left-arm, 40 catch-up, 40 swim. The last drill set was a head-up drill, where we did a freestyle swim with our heads out of the water. You can really see where your hands are entering and if your form isn't good, it's really difficult to keep your head up.
Takeaways:

1. Hands should enter the water at 11:00 and 1:00. NO CROSSOVER at any point in the stroke.
   
2. Hands need to enter the water fairly flat, and farther out than I expected. Rather than "spearing" my hand in right above your head, just relax and let it enter farther out, where my arm is just barely bent. For me, the pinky-lead drill helped with this. Depending on how someone is entering the water, it may or may not help. If you enter thumb-first like I was doing, you lose power in that initial part of the stroke because you're not creating enough resistance. This is where the head-out drill helps.
   
3. Once my hand enters the water, stretch the stroke A BIT (not a long, sustained glide where you start to sink & lose power), then start the wrist bend and shoulder rotation to catch the water and pull through with a high elbow underwater. Once I begin the catch, commit. I.e., don't lollygag around with my hand resting out in the water. Commit to the catch and start pulling.
   
4. Pull STRAIGHT through with a high elbow. Keep it high and powerful throughout the stroke, keeping an even feel for the water.
   
5. When breathing, don't look to the back of the pool, don't look to the sky. Look to the side of the pool and slightly ahead, even. When I look back or up, my left arm swings wide to compensate, which sends my hip and right leg out. I also need to turn my neck more when breathing rather than trying to roll my entire upper body and neck as a unit (a bad Total Immersion habit). Wendy asked if I had neck problems because I wasn't twisting my neck much at all.
   
6. Wendy's first comment to me was that I was over-rotating my shoulders and should try to rotate more through the hips and less through the shoulders.
   
7. Pushing my head down in the water is not necessarily the answer to correcting body position (i.e., popping the hips out). For most people, the water level should hit somewhere between the hairline and eyebrows, with the eyes looking at about a 45 degree angle (not straight down at the pool bottom, not at the far pool wall.
   
8. Be sure to allow for extra shoulder rotation on the non-breathing side.
   

Open water session - talked about T1, getting out of the wetsuit, etc. Chris suggested not worrying so much about a high elbow on the recovery, because of the restricted range of shoulder motion when you're in a full wetsuit. He also talked about gliding more and taking longer strokes in a wetsuit than you would in a non-wetsuit swim.

Sunday, we did a similar warmup, then Wendy had us do several drills, including "doggy-paddling", where you do a freestyle stroke without bringing your hands out of the water, with your head above water. Very attractive looking, I'm sure. We also did the "zipper" drill, where you run your thumb up your side from your hip to your armpit on the recovery. Then the real fun began. We did Wendy's IM-prep swim, that is supposed to help simulate an IM swim. We did it twice through, she does it 4x through about twice a month. It involved a short, fast kick set, then fast 100s, then a 400 at the same pace as the 100s. Ouch. At the end of the 400 on the second set, we were supposed to sprint to the other end of the pool, jump out, run around the pool, and go down the slide (that was T1). We were all torched, but it was a blast.

On both days, we went over the video from earlier in the day. If you really want to improve your swim and have an opportunity to get some underwater video taping done (even above water, if that's the best you can get), DO IT. It is so valuable. It's just so hard to make little adjustments and things when you can't see it. Chris spent a ton of time going through everyone's videos, and it was really informative to watch not just your own video, but everyone else's as well. The difference in the video from the first day and the second day was really pretty dramatic in some cases. HUGE improvements. Definitely a first-class camp and I would recommend FreshAirSports' camps to anyone. Everything was really well organized, and we all got a lot of great information to take home. The coaching was phenomenal. Chris and Wendy are two really classy folks, who have an amazing amount of knowledge and experience to pass along. We had some really great Q&A sessions - having a small group really kept that informal, comfortable and un-intimidating. Huge bang for the buck.