There’s no training like no training…

It’s funny coming back after time out of the boat. The week after I finished my internship was full of self doubt, questioning if I’d made the right decision to come back to Olympic campaigning, how bad would I be when I got back out on the water, had the time away really helped me to fall back in love with sailing?

I knew the hardest thing for me was going to be managing my expectations. I love winning. I’ve always been very competitive and often it’s been to my detriment as I focus too much on the result and, as a consequence, but a lot of pressure on myself. Before my first camp back in January I spent quite a lot of time planning how I would go in with a mindset that was focused on learning rather than winning every tuning run and every training race (particularly as it felt unlikely that was going to be achievable at the start). Lots of times I did a pretty terrible job at it. The first camp we practiced starting I told my coach, Jonasz, I was going to work on my time and distance under no pressure. So naturally the first start I went and put myself under the lay line for the pin end fighting it out with 5 other boats…. classic. I spent the rest of the day trying to win the end (unsuccessfully) and ending up chipping Matilda’s bow in the process. ‘Goal accomplished’ I said to myself on the tow back in from sailing….

Following from this came a bit of an intervention from Jonasz pre Grand Prix. ‘You were so excited coming back to training to focus on the learning but I can see you're getting frustrated when the outcome isn’t what you want’. The classic actions speak louder than words. It was all lovely saying how I wanted to approach training but my behaviours weren’t consistent with my goals. So a new approach was needed. We discussed setting super strict process goals that I would be able to rate myself against everyday. Success was launching every day with the sole intention of focusing and making progress on these goals, the race results were irrelevant. Turns out (after only 5 races) I was a the top of the leaderboard. Whilst it felt pretty cool to shut down all those doubts from back in January, the cooler thing was I can honestly say at the end of the regatta I accomplished my goals and the real win was the amount I learnt in the process.

There’s a big season of racing ahead and this was a baby step, part of a year which will have much bigger events, but I feel like I’m learning about myself- how I perform best but also how I learn best, at every stage along the way