TRAINING
The difficulties faced by UK slalom racers include those of finding suitable training partners near to home as well as the longish and coldish winter that we have. Putting the hours in sailing out and back on slalom gear on your own does not automatically translate to a better performance on the race course. In an ideal world you would put the hours in sailing with sailors of a similar or better level, testing and optimising your equipment and practicing aspects of racing. The sailor who lives closest and who is of a similar standard to me is Leigh Kingaby, who was third in the BSA last year, and he helps me run the Hayling Slalom Club in the summer months. Unfortunately for me, he has been training in Tenerife for the last few months so I have been sailing on my own in the winter. When we sail together we test equipment, and practice mark rounding and starts. I always try to have an aim when I go on the water, however long my session is going to be.
Winter does seem to go on forever in the UK and it is not at all easy tuning up for a forthcoming season when the air temperature is 6 degrees. I try to keep in shape and this winter I have been doing yoga and only occasional weights. In 2015 and 2016 I had back problems at the start of the season when I started to race again after a quiet winter.
“ There is always a danger in slalom of getting drawn in by emotion.. ”
Since taking up yoga in the latter half of last year I have had no problems and I only wish that I’d started working on my flexibility twenty years ago. Each year I try to get away in January or February for ten days to tune up my new equipment. This year we went as a family to Lanzarote so I could join in with the Point7 team training being run by Mark Hosegood. It was an invaluable week as it gave me the opportunity to go through the rigging of my new sails with Andrea Cucci, the sail designer behind Point7. Slalom sails are very technical pieces of kit and rigging them right is vital if you want to be competitive on the race course. Each manufacturer has a different design philosophy and Andrea went through it with me several times until I was happy that I had a decent feel for the Point 7 tuning process. Aside from the tuning, Mark did some helpful video analysis and I also left with some good ideas on to how to improve my gybes.