The 13th Limerick Masters gala took place on the 1st and 2nd of March and was again a huge success. Almost 340 competitors took part in the gala and came from all parts of the Ireland, the UK  with one competitor from Switzerland and one from Russia. In all there were 50 clubs represented and in excess of 1200 dips. The oldest swimmer to participate was the veteran Vincent Cassidy from Cork Masters at only 80 years of age! Limerick Masters collected a fine tally of medals & records! The after gala dinner and prize giving was also an  enjoyable night in the [&hellip

The annual Swim Ireland AGM will take place in the Strand Hotel, Limerick on Saturday April 12th. As the event takes place in Limerick this year it is an ideal opportunity to participate in & make a meaningful contribution to the decision-making process, to be heard, learn more about the organisation and to meet fellow members. AGM: 09:45 Registration 10:00 start Congress: 13:50 Registration 14:00 start This year the Congress will take on a “debate workshop” format and it is intended that the topics selected will allow for lively discussion. Awards Night: 19:30 Reception 20:00 Dinner, Awards Ceremony and Entertainment [&hellip

For those of you who attended the Club gala you will have received the new Club hat brandishing our new Club logo. Thanks to John Reilly for organising the hats for everyone. If you haven’t yet received your hat you can contact John on jreilly66@hotmail.com. The cost of the hats is €5 and this will be added to your 2014/2015 subscription

In early February Swim Ireland ran a Munster Masters Freestyle Clinic. Breda Mcnamara, Mairead Coughlan & Andrea Newport attended the clinic which took place in UL. The clinic comprised of a morning of classroom sessions with the afternoon focus on the pool. The clinic looked at Core & Posture for Masters Swimmers. The quality of the 2 presenters was excellent, Catherine Hanratty from Lurgan & Jesus Perez NAC.   Catherine’s focus was mainly on posture in everyday life at home at work etc.. We had a great presentation of everyday bad habits and then did a practical session on some [&hellip

So you will have had plenty of time to let the body rejuvenate after the “exertion” in Limerick. The Tralee event is always a great day out. Sometimes the day runs into a very late night but don’t let that put you off – you can always sleep on the bus home! The gala offers a great range of Short Course events and with a 10 a.m. start you can still get a bit of a snooze. See http://www.kingdomswimmingclub.ie/MastersInformation.html for more information. Please send your entries to Paddy on  healy.ptk@gmail.com

Some devout swimmers took to the road to Cork in the middle of February to test the gala waters of the Douglas pool. Congratulations to Colm Carty, Gerard Corry, John Dempsey, Paul Kearney Snr  & John Ryan who attended the Sundays Well Gala. Speaking to one participant “he” gave the following report “I got a warning from Coach Dempsey over being tardy on my dive start off the blocks.  Too much chatting to those around me instead of visualizing my swim” he said!!  The Coach was right. But the chat up lines were good. Coach Dempsey also refused to stop [&hellip

In our third article we now move on to Endurance 3, i.e. Aerobic Capacity. Swims are hard with rest from 1 minute, with distance from 400m up. A good test set would be 6*400M max effort with a minute rest or more after each set. Sets such as this are helpful to long distance swimmers to improve their endurance over a long period. It can also break the monotony of continuous swimming and is very beneficial to swimmers who like to swim 200m fly. Heart rate should be 80% plus. The greatest challenge which is unique to swimmers is that [&hellip

Wednesday morning (Early – bird) swim training session will resume on Wed. 30th April & continue until Wed. 25th June; there will be nine (9) sessions & the fee will be €30 or pay as you go at €5 per session.  All of the swimmers who started this session have continued through the year which is an indication of how successful & enjoyable it is. Wednesday morning swim time is 07:00 to

Limerick Masters would like to welcome some new members to the Club. Jilly White & Meabh Scanlon have joined us and are both ex-members of Limerick Swimming. Tomas Fouhy has transferred to us from Mallow Swans, Natalia Pocelujko has joined us and is a former Polish swimmer. David Ward is back training with Limerick Masters having taken a “short” break. We also welcome Jason Boyle as an Associate, who is an ex-Shannon swimmer

The first entrant for the 2014 gala was our competitor from Russia Roman Tolstik. Roman explained to us that he comes from the Novosibirsk region of Siberia. To get to Limerick Roman took a four hour flight to Moscow followed by a four hour flight to London and then a modest hop to Shannon. Last year he participated in the British Masters and this year decided to go one step further. Roman specialises in backstroke and planned to have a go at the world record for the 50m backstroke in his age group but is was not to be on [&hellip