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Ella Frost

2020 Sports Ambassador

Ella is 12 years old and lives in East Yorkshire. Ella has always enjoyed horse riding and was always a good runner at school, qualifying for county level competition from a young age.

Ella began competing with Pony Club Tetrathlon from the age of 9 which involved a two-day competition of swimming, running, pellet pistol shooting and equestrian cross country jumping, within given age categories at various venues around the U.K.

Despite a rather poor swim performance at the beginning, Ella managed to gain success based on her strong run, ride and shoot. Eventually, her Pony Club instructor advised that she should investigate Yorkshire Pentathlon Club for further support, training and development.

At the age of 10, Ella started regular training with Pentathlon Club in all five sporting disciplines for Tetrathlon, including two additional sports – fencing and laser shooting specific for Pentathlon. She also started to compete for Yorkshire Pentathlon Club in Biathlon, Triathlon, Tetrathlon and Pentathlon. Ella was swim training, but only once per week at her local pool as the Pentathlon Club did not have a pool. Her swim time in 2017 was 0.575 metres per second (m/s) but she was barely competitive in this aspect of competition and we soon realized that she could no longer rely on her other events to compensate for her poor swim. This was disappointing as Ella loved swimming and could not understand why she was not competitive compared to her peers.

By recommendation, we contacted The Carol Saunders Swim School (CSSS) which held local swim sessions in our area. Ella joined CSSS and increased her swim sessions to twice per week and in 2018 her swim time improved dramatically to 0.875 m/s. This was enough to make her swim competitive within her age group and we were so pleased! This year, Ella has been continuing to work hard with CSSS by concentrating on lane swimming and technique and we are delighted that her current swim time averages 1.0 m/s. She now does three swim sessions per week when time allows (minimum two) but most importantly, Ella has confidence in all of her swimming races because she knows she is good enough to compete. This is a huge achievement and would not have been possible without CSSS!

Ella has benefitted from some additional 121 sessions with Swim Coach, Pawel who is helping her to improve her technique and he will also help her to prepare for 2020 when the competition and level of difficulty increases as she moves up into the Juniors Group for Pony Club Tetrathlon.

With regards to the future, we are not yet sure where this will lead Ella. She tells us that she wants to be in the Olympics (she is not sure how/which discipline) and at the moment, we are just concentrating on giving her the support and encouragement that she needs in order to pursue this dream. There is a long way to go and this will require lots of hard work, determination, training support and some good luck! We will see what happens.