Whitehorse Rapids Speed Skating Club, along with the Yukon Amateur Speed Skating Association, held their second and final instructional camp session of the season on Jan. 11-13 at the Canada Games Centre.

The January Speed Skating Camp is open to all skating members at the club. Its purpose is to emphasize proper technique as well as training in an attempt to expand the knowledge and abilities of everybody who participates.

'I think the kids are doing really well,' said Phil Hoffman, the head coach at the camp. 'You can see it in the course of a few days, but what I am looking for is some of those things to hang on after for the next few weeks and months too. Even if it is just one little thing that they can pickup and remember.'

Coaches from Calgary's Olympic Oval also attended the three-day event, as part of a deal the club has with the facility.

The Olympic Oval is a covered speed skating oval, which is located at the University of Calgary. The Oval was first constructed for the 1988 Winter Olympics and because of the higher altitude, as well as an advanced climate control system, it has a reputation for being the 'fastest ice in the world.'

One of the Oval's missions includes working with other organizations for the pursuit of excellence in the sport of speed skating.

Hoffman said it is a big help having the coaches from Calgary attend.

'These guys have been involved with even some more elite kind of athletes that are at the Oval training, and so they have quite a knowledge base of how to do technique and just other training aspects in skating,' he said. 'We want to put them to good use. If we pay for them to come up here we want to maximize the bang for the buck.'

More than 30 skaters participated over the course of the three days, including a group based out of Anchorage, from the Alaska Speed Skating Club.

All skaters were divided up into two main categories; the Novice Group and the Intermediate/Advanced Group. Both groups alternated between ice time over the three days.

Novice skaters are generally skaters who have just recently taken up the sport in the last year or so and are still learning the basics of speed skating.

'The main goal for them is to keep it fun, keep it interesting and at the same time learn the basics of skating,' Hoffman said.

The intermediate and advanced skaters work on more technical aspects, such as improving their basic position, which is a term in the sport for when a skater gets really low while pushing off with full extensions of the athletes' legs.

Most of the drills involved working on improving strides, corners and relays.

The January camp is included with all memberships at the Whitehorse Rapids Speed Skating Club, while individuals in the group from Alaska had to pay $100.

Peter Haeussler, the head coach of the Alaska Speed Skating Club, said there are a lot of benefits to attending the camp in Whitehorse.

'Often speed skating is a little bit of an individual sport and so just from the stand point of team building, it gets people together,' he said. 'The other thing is just having a weekend that is just really focused towards skating. It is so easy to be scattered and I think to be focused at something for a while with really good coaches like these guys from Calgary is super beneficial.'

The group from Anchorage has been attending on and off for more than five years.

Haeussler said all of his skaters improve after coming to this type of event.

'Every skater you will see improves every time they do one of these things,' he said. 'Whether it's here in Whitehorse, or we occasionally have camps in Anchorage where we have some of the U.S. speed skating coaches come up and always through the course of one weekend I see a lot of improvement.'