I’m moving to Burlington, Vermont in a couple of months and looking for a masters team. Where do all of you Vermonters swim?
Welcome to Vermont. There are several masters groups in the Burlington area. One, which works out at St. Michael’s college, is associated with the Green Mountain Aquatics group. There are several masters groups at a chain of fitness clubs called The Edge. I know they have ones at their Williston and South Burlington locations, and might in Essex as well. The YMCA in Burlington has a loosely-organized masters group. You should also contact folks with Green Mountain Multisport, the local tri club. Various members meet for open water swims once the water warms up. Right now, you’d have to chop through the ice. PM me if you need more info.
The Sports and Fitness Edge (www.sfedge.com) has the most options. As the other poster wrote, there is OW swimming organized at North Beach in Burlington and Indian Brook in Essex. There are also weekly TTs, Crits, MTB races, and 5K trail races. TTs and Crits put on by GMBC (www.thegmbc.com) and MTB/5Ks put on by Catamount (www.catamountoutdoor.com)
Race VT (http://www.racevermont.com/) puts on a Tri series in Shelburne that has an event every month or so, and VT Sun in Middlebury (www.vermontsun.com/triathlon.html) does about the same.
Do you know where you’ll be living and working?
I believe that Spindog here runs a program somewhere around there. He will most likely post here when he sees this, or you can PM him later…
Thanks for the info guys.
I’ll be living in South Burlington off Shelburne Rd and working from home so I’ll be pretty close to the SB location of SF Edge. I tried to email the masters program at SMC a few weeks ago but got no response. I’ve been emailing the Edge, but was just trying to see if there were any other options.
I just moved to NH, but I have a few friends that live in SB right off Shelburne road (one is in the GMM Tri Club). If you want to PM me your e-mail address and I can connect you. That’s funny about the SMC program, the uncle of one of my good friends runs it, and I could never get a call back. The good part about the edge is that you can use the pool 7 days/week (along with the rest of the facility), whereas the masters program at SMC only gets you swimming (I do not think that there is a charge for the masters program at the Edge). Also, if you join the GMBC ($25 I think) you get a pretty good discount. I think that there is an even bigger discount with the GMM Tri group, but I think that they are “full” for the year (but I would contact them http://gmmtri.blogspot.com/).
Monty mentioned Spinney, I think that he lives out towards Montpelier, but hes also part of GMM Tri.
The info is a bit spotty on the Edge program too. It sounds like the Essex one has a free program for members, but it isn’t coached. The Williston & SB locations seem to have a coached program that’s a fee for both members and non-members, with the non-member price being a bit higher (http://sfedge.com/page.php?pid=151&pname=Edge%20Swim%20Club,).
I’ll definitely look into GMBC, but even if GMM isn’t full, I’m already on a team for the year - maybe next year…
Yeah, that’s different than the masters program at SB. That is a “class”. I think that the “program” is M/W/F in both the AM and PM (I would try to avoid them so I swam T/Th). I don’t think that its “formally” coached, but there is an “informal” coach. I think that the GMM Tri group usually meets at the Essex pool. I think that’s the best one, with SB close behind (SB is a bit too warm for me).
The TT series put on by GMBC has some really nice courses, and has been going on for a while. There are some pretty fast guys that show up.
OK that clears things up a bit. There is no masters listed for the SB club on the site. Hopefully they do one, but it just didn’t make the website.
The GMBC series sounds like it should be pretty cool. I’ll definitely try to make those at least a few times.