50,000 Of You - Wow!

Wow!

This week the number of subscribers for the Feel For The Water blog went through the 50,000 barrier. As far as we know that makes this the most popular swimming blog on the web with over 100 new swimmers joining every day!

Thanks to each and every one of you for giving us a portion of your time every Friday, it's inspiring (and sometimes a little nerve racking) writing for such a growing and passionate audience every week. As we pass by this milestone we thought you might like to know a bit more about how Swim Smooth operates and where your email comes from every week :

Hello from sunny Perth this very morning! (click to enlarge)

- Although many of our coaches are English, we choose to base our coaching in Perth, Western Australia. If you've ever been here you'll understand why: It has an amazing climate, beautiful beaches and ocean, thousands of buff Aussie swimmers and 25 (yes twenty five) public 50m pools - all for a population of one million people!

- We run fifteen Swim Smooth squad sessions a week from our home base at Claremont Pool catering for around 300 swimmers. These cover the whole spectrum of abilities from absolute beginners, developing swimmers, world class age group triathletes and masters swimmers, all the way up to elite triathletes and open water swimmers. We work with all ages and ability levels of swimmer every day and we're very proud of our ability to develop and inspire each and every one.

- We conduct between ten and fifteen full video analysis and stroke correction sessions every week and have been doing so for the last ten years. If you've been on one of our highly sought after Stroke Correction Clinics you'll know we're world leaders in the use of video analysis to diagnose and correct issues with swimmer's strokes.

- We run year round open water sessions developing and refining our swimmers' open water skills. This is another area we're very passionate about.

- Swim Smooth constantly train and develop other coaches. This includes our work with the British Triathlon Federation operating Coach Education courses for them to train the next generation of triathlon coaches in the UK in the art of swim coaching.

- Many of our coaches have elite swimming and triathlon backgrounds and all are still training, racing and having fun in the water today. Our own head coach Paul Newsome was on the UK's World Class Triathlon program in the build up to the 2000 Olympics and is still racing at a very high level today, right now in marathon open water swimming.

Working with so many swimmers in such an in depth way has created an insightful and thorough program for swimmers of all ability levels. We don't know of any other group anywhere in the world that has immersed themselves in these experiences simultaneously for over ten years - we really do 'live swimming' (and don't we know it when the alarm goes off at 4:15am every morning for squad training!).

OK, that's enough about us, we'll be back next week with more tips to develop your swimming. Thanks again for reading - we have been beavering away on six exciting projects for 2012 which we can't wait to show you. These include one special female swimmer whose stroke we've been lovingly refining.

Enjoy your time in the water!

Paul, Adam, Linda, Francene, Sandy, Sally, Shelley, Ceinwen, Nic, Adam, Noel and Jon