Tenerife camp 2026 — what training abroad with the crew actually does

In April 2026, nineteen people from The PT Box flew out to Tenerife for our second overseas training camp. We were based at Survive Top Training for six days. We trained twice a day — strength work in the mornings, conditioning in the afternoons. We ate properly. We slept properly. We came home different people, individually and as a crew.

If you've never done a training trip like this, it's hard to describe what it does. So here's the honest write-up. (The recap reels are on the camp page if you want the visual version.)

Why we run it

The camp exists for one main reason — it accelerates everything the regular Dublin sessions are slowly building. When you train alongside the same crew for a year, you get strong, you get fit, you get to know each other a bit. When you spend a week with that same crew training twice a day, eating together, sharing accommodation, trying new things together in a place none of you have been before — that bonds the group at a depth that no number of Tuesday-evening sessions in Dublin can quite reach.

It's also the most concentrated training stimulus most of our members will experience all year. Two sessions a day for six days, run by experienced coaches in a properly equipped facility, with no work and no commuting eating into the recovery time. You make six months of progress in a week.

But mostly, the reason it exists is the crew. The training is the structure. The crew is the point.

The shape of a day at Survive

Mornings started early. Up by seven, breakfast at half-seven, in the training facility by nine. The first session was usually strength work — heavy compound lifts, technical coaching, the kind of work that requires fresh muscles and a quiet head. Each person was programmed for their own level. There was no "do what the rest of the room is doing" — the coaches had everyone on their own load.

Mid-morning we'd finish, eat properly, recover. The Spanish food was a real part of the trip — proper meals, proper portions, none of the diet-culture nonsense some camps lean into. You're meant to eat to train. You eat to train.

Afternoon sessions were conditioning. Mixed-modal stuff — sled work, kettlebells, runs in the sun, partner workouts that forced you to lean on someone you didn't know that well yet. By day three the room was as tight as a five-year crew. By day six the room was a unit.

Evenings were quieter than people expected. Some pints, but not many. Most people were tired enough by 9pm that the conversation drifted into the kind of honest talk that doesn't usually happen in a Dublin pub at the weekend. You learn a lot about who you train next to when you've spent ten hours a day in their company for a week.

What changes when you do this

A few specific things shift after a trip like this, and they outlast the tan:

The training back home gets harder. Once you've been through six days of double sessions, a single Tuesday session feels manageable in a way it didn't before. People came back to Dublin and started pushing PRs almost immediately. The fitness ceiling moves up, even if you didn't realise it was the ceiling.

The crew has a shared reference. "Remember when we were on the sled track and Aoife absolutely buried us?" becomes shorthand. Every session for the next year has a thread to that week. The crew that goes through a hard week together has a permanent shorthand that takes years of normal training to build.

People learn that they can do more than they think. This is the real one. Most of the people on the trip were not athletes. They were professionals from Dublin city centre who train two or three times a week. By the end of the week, every one of them had done something physically harder than they'd ever done. That belief carries forward. It changes how they show up to work, to family stuff, to the rest of life. You can't undo learning that you're more capable than you thought.

Who actually goes

Tenerife isn't a trip for elite athletes. It's a trip for the regular crew. The people on the trip ranged from absolute beginners who'd been training six months to people who'd been training for a decade. The coaches scaled the sessions so everyone was working hard relative to themselves. Nobody got left behind. Nobody got bored.

That's the same model the regular Dublin sessions run on, just at higher density. (What a session at the PT Box actually looks like covers the structure if you've never been to one.)

If you're worried about being "not fit enough" to come on a trip like this — that worry's nearly always misplaced. The people who think they're not fit enough are usually the ones who get the most out of it.

2027

We're already getting questions about the 2027 camp. It will run. Probably similar set-up — six days, twice a day, somewhere warm with a serious training facility. We'll open it up to the crew first, and a small number of new starters who've been training with us for at least a few months.

If you want to be on that next trip, the way in is the same way everyone else gets there — through the door, into the regular Dublin sessions, building the habit, becoming part of the crew. The trip is downstream of the everyday work. The everyday work is what we open for.

For more on what that everyday work looks like: the inner-city Dublin training community and why training after work hits different.

Drop us a line when you're ready to start. Tenerife's not the destination — it's a side effect of doing the regular work consistently for long enough.