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Scotland's fastest ever swimmer and Commonwealth star Richie Schafers spent a fantastic 10 days in Bristol last month on a training camp with SwimPath's head coach Jez Birds and his United Bristol team.
It was an intensive stint, commencing with the annual UBSC Level 1 open meet and spanning into an eclectic mix of activities including swimming, weights, boxing, Pilates and rope climbing to name but a few!!

Richie posing with University of Bristol Women's Captain Amy Barton - both wearing Hammerhead Silver Armour

We asked Richie how he found the Hammerhead suit, still in its design stage, and he liked the fit, felt very buoyant and most importantly - really fast!

Check out his final set of the week (spot his times 2nd from the left at the bottom):

6x50 m freestyle - target: No Breathing (NB) and within 5% of PB (<23.0)

Here's how he faired:

We'll be hoping to see more of Richie at SwimPath in the future and so will be posting some snippets from the week as well as elements of his home regime (currently coached by Scotland Commonwealth Coach Chris Jones at the University of Edinburgh), including sets and sessions, the champions diet and some of Richie's thoughts and feelings about his training and plans for a spot on the Rio Olympic Team this year!

One of SwimPaths stars of the future and sponsored athlete Alysia Maestri (Bristol Henleaze and United Bristol Swimming Club) has sailed into 2016 much the same way that she finished 2015. After gaining a bronze medal at the summer championships last year and qualifying for her first senior short course nationals prior to Xmas, she has swam her way to 5 age group golds and to become treble junior champion at the recent County Championships held in Gloucester.

We caught up with Alysia in Gloucester to ask her about her current form, how she enjoys racing (particularly against some of the Counties big guns) and her plans and dreams for the rest of 2016 and beyond...

In the Christmas holidays, I went to Sheffield to swim in the winter nationals, although I didn't get a PB it was still a very good experience seeing GB swimmers swim and it felt great to be a part of such a high standard competition. Recently at the Gloucester Counties I swam in 5 races 50m, back, breast, free, fly and 100m IM. In my age group I came first in all of them! I also managed to get to the Championship finals (fastest 8 swimmers across all age groups) in 50m back  which I came 3rd; 50m freestyle (6th) and 50m Breast (5th), also getting junior champion in all of those three. Racing in the finals was such a thrilling experience racing against people like Annie brown (Swimpath's own pro swimmer and assistant coach), who also did very well (winning the 50 freestyle in a new County Record). I am looking forward to next weekend of Counties and then getting stuck in fully to the long course season and consolidating my place as a top 10 ranked swimmer by qualifying for the British Nationals this summer...

A great job done by Alysia and we can't wait to see what the rest of the season will bring!

Alysia is also one of our selected swimmers for phase 2 of the sponsorship package so look out for plenty more posts from her and her teammates as we chart their progress through this exciting Olympic season!

The new year of 2016 has arrived and the Olympic Games are coming fast. As soon as midnight arrived on New Years, the Olympics will have crossed swimmers minds all over the world.

Leading up to the Olympic trials my training group are doing a 7week training camp in Australia. Whilst it's Winter in the UK, it's sunny, hot Summer in Australia. Training through Winter in the UK increases the risks of illness and Vitamin D deficiency; this year we especially want to avoid illness as much as we can and maximise our training gains. The sun also helps keep people happy and happy swimmers are fast swimmers!

I've been in Australia at the Gold Coast for almost 2weeks now and waking up early in the morning for training is a lot easier when the sun is up.

The facilities out here in Australia are amazing. There are hundreds of Olympic sized swimming pools and the one we are training in has 12 lanes!

Swimming 10 sessions a week as well as 5 gym sessions takes up a lot of time and can be difficult to fit anything else in after quality rest time. However, it's very important to keep training fun and we still manage to fit fun activities in.

On one afternoon off training we decided to play on this inflatable.....

..... which turned out to be more of a work out than an afternoon of resting.

When training abroad it can sometimes be difficult to get the same nutrition in as you are used to at home. Out here the food is very similar to the UK and some are even better, for example, fish ....

I experimented cooking Red Snapper, which is a great protein source for recovery after training. It turned out to be very tasty, but for fish lovers only.