Training, as simply as I can explain it

Most of you do other sports throughout the year. No matter where you go in sailing, or in any other sport, I recommend doing some complementary other sport. Your sailing can be helped by a lot of physical skills that sailing does little or nothing to develop. Not only do these other athletic traits help make you a better sailor, they make you a better human animal. If you want to really understand where I'm going with that thought, read "The Warrior Athlete" by Dan Millman. It's an excellent book.

In any case, I was pretty dumb about training until I started racing bikes seriously about 10 years ago. I sometimes trained a lot, sometimes got very fit, sometimes wasn't very fit, sometimes could hike harder than everybody, sometimes couldn't hike harder than anybody. Long story short, I got a little sick of sailing (25 years of being absolutely obsessed with it will do that to a person) and decided to explore bike racing a bit. In sailing, if you aren't fit, the game is harder than it could be. In cycling, if you're not fit, you're going to get last. Cycling is a high speed poker game where the ante is a relatively extraordinary level of fitness, and those of you who know me well won't be surprised to learn that I dove in an learned a whole lot about training - because I really don't like getting last.

You don't get stronger when you train, you get stronger when you rest. Resting all the time turns you into a fat sloth, though. The key is to train enough to initiate a training response, and then rest enough to allow that training response to happen. If you go hard every day, you will soon break yourself down. If you go hard for a couple of days and then take an easy day, you get stronger.

Monotonous training makes you plateau quickly. If you are trying to run a marathon and only go out and do long runs at moderate pace, you will make big gains for a while, and then soon enough all improvements will stop. You need to train long duration moderate pace sometimes, and short duration high intensity at other times. You need strength in order to prevent breaking yourself during run training. Doing one thing all the time breaks you down and makes you stale. Training different elements at varying intensities will make you faster, stronger, and fitter.

Sailing isn't usually enough training for sailing. If you go through a long block of a lot of sailing without doing any other training, you will get weaker and lose endurance, and develop small injuries.

Nutrition is really important to athletic performance. You're young and so you get away with it for now, but if you eat like crap and most of you do, you could be doing better than you are now, and soon enough crappy eating will catch up with you. Drink more water, eat less sugar, eat more vegetables.

Sleep is really important to athletic performance. People's sleep needs vary, and it's hard to get enough sleep when you have as many demands as a lot of you do, but try. If you're constantly fatigued, you need more sleep. You need to learn to recognize when you are not getting enough sleep, and make sleep a priority.

As promised, this is as simple as I can make it. These are the very biggest points, stripped down as much as they can be per my perspective. It's very easy to learn WAY WAY more than what I've talked about here, but if you take it no further than this, you now know much more than most people do about training.

Marking your settings

Yesterday, Ellie asked about jib trim markings and how to use them. Here are some thoughts about markings in general. Remember that anything I write is generally going to be aimed at getting you to think more. I'm not the type to give the exact answer and that's the way it is, do it or I'll be mad. I'd much rather show you how good sailors tend to think about those things, and help you generate your own ability to think about things in a similar way for yourself. I'm much more "teach a man to fish" than "give a man a fish." And by "man," I of course mean gender non-specific person as always.

We mark things for a few different reasons. One is to be able to replicate settings - they give us a reasonably exact breadcrumb trail to be able to get back to settings we found to be fast. They also allow us to gauge how much we are moving stuff - going "one stripe more" on jib halyard tension is much more exact than "adding a little halyard tension."

Some marks are what I'll call hard references. On the M32, we mark the daggerboards at the point two which we raise the windward board. We're not trying to learn about the shape of the daggerboard at that point or anything, we just want to know when it's up as much as we want it to be, so we mark that point and that's how high it gets raised. You should mark your centerboard so you know how high it is.

Other parts are settings references. Where you put your shroud pins is a good example of this. Also, where your jib halyard block is on the mast is another. The combination of those two will tell you your rake and tension settings, because if your shroud pins are at position "X" and your halyard is at position "3," there is a rake and tension combination that they will make.

This picture shows how you would mark your jib halyard. Make a set of marks like the pink ones, that cover the range of where your halyard block would be in different conditions. You need to know where your reference point is on the halyard block, and use the same reference point all the time.

Then there are trim references. Trim references are sort of kind of like training wheels. They are good to use, but eventually what you want to be able to do is look at the sail and be able to adjust it to make it look how you want it to look. I'm not saying that these trim references are wrong at all, and they are efficient to use even for very advanced sailors - for example I might know that if my jib lead is at position "C," I have to be careful about how tight I trim the jib in order to prevent stalling. Even if I can't see the jib leech to know when it's stalling, I can look at other clues to help me know where I am with the trim - how curled the foot is, how many stress wrinkles the clew has, etc. 

Here are some of the types of trim references you can use:

Having clew stripes like this allows you to know the trim axis of your jib sheet. If the jib sheet is lining up with the orange/yellow line, we know that we are trimming the foot quite hard and the leech not so much. If the sheet lines up with the red line, then we are trimming the leech very hard and the foot will be round. The main trim line should point to a spot on the jib luff that is slightly less than halfway up the luff from the tack. On a boat that doesn't have adjustable jib leads, your rake setting will be the only adjustment you can make to this. 

Stripes like this orange ones on the splash rail or deck allow you to see how far inboard your sheeting is. Windward sheeting, leeward sheeting, and rake/rig tension (to a smaller degree) will affect how your jib lines up with this set of marks. Windward sheeting has the biggest effect. Notice proper use of "affect" and "effect" in this caption. 

Marks like these on your spreaders will tell you the inboard/outboard position of your jib leech. The clew stripes (which are most affected by rake and rig tension, remember) and leeward and windward sheet tension will affect how your jib leech lines up with these stripes. If we had our jib sheet lined up with the yellow/orange clew stripe in the picture above, the jib leech would line up with a far outboard spreader stripe like the yellow one pictured here. If we lined up the jib sheet with the red clew stripe, the jib leech would move inboard, to the blue line maybe. Having your jib leech further inboard can help your pointing, but it makes the boat harder to sail (especially in chop) and can hurt boat speed. Fast sailing is all about balancing different things. 

Marking the vang is helpful. Mark it like this, in the purchase system, instead of on the tail. On I420s and Z420s, you have two tails and they move around relative to one another, so marking the tails is useless. 

The last picture I'll put up today is this one. You could use a sticker like this for your jib halyard markings, and you can also use it for your outhaul. Marking the outhaul is good. 

The point of using all these marks isn't to become robots and set things to specified marks and away we go. Instead, they help us quantify different settings. "Outhaul at position 4" is more exact than saying "medium outhaul." If you were really really overpowered and you had your shroud pins at position 3, so try moving them down to position 5 next time and see if that works better. If position 5 gives you great speed but your pointing is bad, then you can try position 4. Just remember that your jib halyard and shroud pin positions are always interconnected - you can't think of one without referencing the other. 

Unless you have your marks exactly calibrated to another boat's marks, they are only really useful when sailing your boat - to talk about your jib leech lining up with your third spreader mark is useless if the other boat's third spreader mark isn't precisely where yours is.  About the best you can do in that situation is if the other boat is going better and you all think that their jib leech is positioned more inboard than yours, you might try to set your jib so that the leech lines up one mark farther in on your spreader. If you are going to tune with another boat a lot, it is worth calibrating all of your marks to be exactly precisely the same. That allows you to move one variable at a time, to an amount and to a position that both boats know, and if it works for one boat then the other one can replicate it quickly and try it. 

The rest of goal setting

Last time we talked about specificity of goals, which is the "S" in the SMART goal setting principle, and we also went through strengths and weaknesses versus limiters, neutrals, and enablers. Right into the rest...

Measurable: This is one of the hardest things to achieve with sailing goals, simply because sailing is so relative. By that I mean if you beat other people, you take that as a positive sign, and if you lose to other people that's a negative. The problem is what if the other guy has the flu or is tired from a brutal workout week or is just off? Or if the other guy (and by guy of course I mean gender non-specific other person, as ever) is just peaking and smashing it? Cycling, running, swimming - these are all super easy to measure. I want my 10k time to get to x, I want my threshold watts/kg to be x, I want my 200 free time to be x - these are measurable in the absolute, totally non-dependent on other people.

Although still relative, there are a few ways you can kind of measure things in the absolute. Keeping tabs on when you are "plus boats" or "minus boats" is a great one. If you have been struggling upwind but caning it downwind, a good goal would be to improve the upwind. Is it speed or positioning or shift strategy that's hurting you? Evaluate each element, and work on the ones that need most help. Then play a game to have the best first top mark position you can, do what you do on the run, and then gain boats (or at least not lose them, also because hey maybe you're in the lead and no one to pass) on the second beat. A leg when you are "plus boats" is any leg when you've passed more people than have passed you. A "minus boats" leg is the opposite. This works well because you are judging yourself versus an aggregate of boats, which should smooth out any spikes from individuals who are on particularly good or bad days.

Improving lineups against known partners is also a good way to measure. Be as open and honest with each other as you can be about how you are feeling, the level of sails you're using that day - everything. Taking out a freshie sail and beating up on people using bed sheets tells you nothing.

Achievable: Pretty straightforward here. If you are currently struggling to win in your local events, making the Worlds Team this year is going to be a big stretch. Becoming a more consistent and relevant player in your local events is more realistically achievable. On the other hand, some of you will be realistically trying to win a nationals. Your goals should stretch you, but they shouldn't be so far out that they're hard to take seriously, or will just depress you because they're unrealistic given where you're starting from. Challenge yourself but give yourself a chance. The pleasure of meeting an appropriately challenging goal is big.

Relevant: This really has a lot to do with limiters, neutrals, and enablers. If something isn't a limiter, improving it needn't be a goal. On the other hand, if a weakness IS a limiter, then improvement in that venue is a relevant goal.

Trackable: Intermediate steps help guide you on the path to the greater goal. If you want to improve hiking fitness, then the amount of time you can hold a wall sit is a good milepost for that. You should see incremental gains in your ability to do each of your exercises. If you are seeing backwards progress, then that is time to evaluate. Are you overtired and pounding yourself into the ground? Are you staying out too late at night and not getting good sleep? How is your nutrition going? Your world should be full of little touchstones to help keep you aware of your progress towards your goal. Pay attention to them.

A last point about goal setting is that until you write them down, commit to them, and share them with other people, they aren't real. Opening your notebook and seeing your goal in print makes you accountable to it. Having your parents ask you how you are progressing toward a goal you've shared with them makes you accountable to it.

Soon enough I will talk about my goals for the 2016-2017 SG team. I am still working on them, which isn't easy given the number of variables involved, but I have a good handle on the rough outline.