If you might ever be in charge of organizing a weekend clinic for your tri club, you should read this.
Every couple of years our club invites a celebrity guest coach to come to Saskatoon Saskatchewan (Canada) to put on a weekend triathlon clinic. This year I was the organizer.
I knew that Simon Lessing had recently retired and gone into coaching full time so I sent him an email thru his website http://www.bouldercoaching.com/ and asked if he was interested. He was, said his run coaching partner (Darren De Reuck) would come as well and quoted a fee which fit our budget for a clinic of approximately 32 participants.
He also volunteered (his suggestion) to do a home stay to help keep our travel costs down and to maximize the time he would spend with local triathletes.
Our clinic consisted of 2 swim sessions, 2 indoor track sessions, 2 bike trainer sessions (too snowy and cold here for riding outdoors) 3 talk sessions and a saturday evening social which featured a talk by Simon about his triathlon life and lots of mingling with the participants. Our particapnts consisted of a mixture of veteran triathletes, newbies and everywhere in between.
The feedback I have received from the participants has been 100% positive with the word “awesome” being the most commonly used word. The other sentiment expressed over and over is how much the participants appreciated the personal attention they got from each of Simon and Darren and how approachable they were, both in terms of coaching assistance and general social interaction. Simon and Darren are cool guys with active senses of humour and everyone at the clinic enjoyed hanging out with them for the weekend.
One of our discussion sessions went way over the time limit but no one, not the coaches and certainly not the participants wanted it to end.
Simon and Darren stayed at our house (my reward for doing the organizing work, getting to spend a little extra time with a 5 time world Champ) and were great guests, lots of fun to be around and made their own beds.
As the organizer of the event, I felt a lot of pressure. Had the clinic not gone well I would have felt terrible. But thanks to the great job done by Simon and Darren I feel great.
I know this sounds like an infomercial, but, I’ve never met Simon or Darren before and posting this is not part of any deal I have with them (I don’t have any deal with them except the deal to have them come here and put on the clinic). I’m posting this in part to say thanks to them and to offer some good advice to local organizers.
If you are thinking about having a guest coach come to your community to put on a triathlon clinic, you should check out Simon and Darren at Boulder Coaching. I did and it worked out great.