Zurich - Holiday in Colonia de Sant Jordi (Mallorca)

Cabrera (National Park)

I was away in Mallorca over the last week – hence the absence of my blog.

My main reason for choosing this precise location was due to the existence of the BEST centre. I’d searched for swimming coaching holidays and I came across the BEST centre, run by two former Olympic swimmers. It holds various family and training holidays and has a ten-lane open-air 50m pool with viewing underneath so that you can see the strokes from all angles. And the weather would be warm and sunny and the pool temperature warm. Plus there was the sea and open water swimming options.

I had been thinking of doing one of their Masters’ training weeks (1 hour group training in the morning and 1 hour in the early evening), but was a bit worried about it being too much and feeling too stressed in a group. And, more importantly, these holidays weren’t taking place in early September and I didn’t really want to go any later since I’m off to St Petersburg at the end of September (it’s a hard life).

In the end, Steph decided to join me, and we ended up having three private lessons of one hour. By booking our hotel via the BEST centre, they allowed us to practice there as well in our free time.

We stayed half board at the Don Leon hotel (all options seemed to be half board), which included a 5-course meal in the evening with appetizers and main course served at your table. Each evening, there was a choice of two for each of the soup, appetizer and main meal courses, plus the option of a vegetarian or Mallorcan dish every day for the main meal if you pre-ordered. The food quality and service were both very good.

The first evening, I chose lamb, and then the following day I had a steak, and then every morning after that I was eagerly predicting chicken (my favorite). As the week wore on, each day it remained absent from the menu (other than once on the Spanish speciality, which you had to order). We did have duck (which was delicious), but I found it astonishing that we never did have any chicken (although the food was so good, I didn’t feel inclined to complain).

The BEST swim centre tended to be either busy with teams training or empty apart from one girl who seemed always to be there swimming up and down in the middle of the ten-lane pool doing either crawl or backstroke. I’m sure she could have been a motif in a movie…

There were photos up of all the Olympic swimmers who had trained at the centre. I had to ask Stephanie if she knew what the “dayer flimpics” were, and it turned out to be the deaf-lympics and not dea-flympics (written as deaflympics). Doh.

Our lessons were useful but tiring, so I’m still wondering whether the Masters swimming is really for me. They hold an open-water swimming festival at the end of May, which I’d quite like to attend but I think the water will still be too cold for me at that time of year.

There’s still a lot for me to improve on in my swimming, but the lessons were helpful for confirming that my recent change to my stroke timing had been the right thing to do, but needs a bit of tweaking and I still need to extend my arms more (among other things). To my surprise, the pool water was salty (yes, I unintentionally swallowed some!).

Leaflet design was a bit lacking in Mallorca. We went to a nature reserve for the day but the leaflet didn’t mention anything about the nature or what you did on the tour. Maps seemed to have forgotten to include the legends to explain the symbols, and the leaflet for the little train seemed to forget to mention that you had to pay and was a little ambiguous about where it stopped.

This all caused amusement rather than being a complaint as such. The weather was amazing, the sea was just the right temperature (you didn’t feel the need to squeal as you got in), the town was larger than I was expecting, and the hotel was great.