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.
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