Most other sports people train / practice for 80% of the time and race 20%

Rough guesses ... but why?

I quite enjoy taking myself off for a few hours but that may just be me (billy no mates). I didn't mean it to sound quite like that but you get my drift.

That might extend to 'a sausage roll please' at a cafe, but really nothing else- no email, no phone calls, no phatic discourse with work people.    

I know you're supposed to say things like 'being at one with nature', but actually I just mean 'switch off' and rest of the world can go F8ck itself for a few measly self-indulgent hours on a boat or a board.  

Some sports are training sports - where training is doing the sport. Others are competing sports.

E.g. Rowing is a training sport. When I was a club oarsman, we trained 20 hrs a week from Sept/Oct until July. Total time spent racing during the year? Two or three hours or so. 

I would guess that most tennis club members spend more time playing than practicing. Likewise many club rugby players run out a couple of evenings a week, and play at weekends. Ditto Sunday football.

At the higher levels, of course, more time is spent training than competing in all sports. 

I used to go to the gym 3 or 4 times a week to get my base fitness up which in turn improved my sailing as I was not getting as fatigued throughout a race. Now I simply do not have the time and prefer to spend that time enjoying sailing and racing as this is my hobby.

Were I serious about it and wanting to compete at a higher level then yes I would train because I would have to. 

 

The closer you want to get towards being competitive at olympic/international level, the more the balance needs to swing towards training.  Not that you reduce the racing, you just sail a hell of a lot more so the balance naturally shifts to training.

There's also no such thing as "cracking it" in my opinion.  You're never going to be 100% perfect in  execution of the techniques you've chosen, and also the techniques themselves are never going to be 100% optimal.

If it was possible to "crack it" then you wouldn't see any development in technique in simple boats like the laser.  And yet you do.  Year on year people are incrementally changing the way they sail and how fast they can go.  If you only do handicap racing at a club level or local opens etc, you might not get to see this side of things!  Believe me though, it is possible for your boat to go faster on every point of sail and in every condition than you have ever made it go.  It's as true for you as it is for Giles Scott.

In the Laser fleet (which has been in decline for quite some time now) it was getting a bit samey and not really inspiring to turn up to.

Soon I will have another D-Zero to race against as well.

true- but they can always hop into another fleet as a crew, or swap boats with a mate if they feel like it.  It's very few would worry overly about how a DNC might affect their series result - even then you can chalk up a discard and enjoy something different if the fancy takes you.

 

And that is a very good point. I can go out there on my own sail and sail and sail. Look at the telltales look at the sail, tack & gybe and mark round, it may feel good to me - but is it effective training?

 

 

 

 

Hey, I've never not gone out if I'm at the club and there's a sailing breeze (user defined!) because it's not what I wanted, but it does make training more difficult to structure, compared to other sports. You can't pick and choose which skills to work on often...

 

EDIT - If you could, I reckon people's motivation to train would be higher...

I guess it's the same reason my wife and her mates go to jump around in a gym studio punching thin air for an hour.... it's a competitive physical pastime, rather than a 'sport'.

 

As my wife (who I sail with) is trying to teach me, it's not always the case that better result = more fun! The mere act of racing can be fun too, apparently.

 

Back when I played Hockey a few years ago the team I played for were more in it for a the bit of exercise they got running round an astro for 70 minutes followed by the social afterwards down the local pub.

Sure we wanted to win but for most of the team it was more s social sporting activity than a competitive game.

Same goes for sailing. Yes I like do well and win races/series where I can but some of the best races I have had is where there has been a race long battle between several boats. At the finish I am not overly bothered if I come out on top of that pile but I have enjoyed the journey as it were.

If those people who knew they were never going to win a race suddenly stopped racing you local club would be a much quieter place to be.....

I imagine that Jon Emmett's 'How to be your own coach' would help (I haven't read it though). If you're by yourself the trick is to keep up the intensity of your training to try and mimic race conditions so you're not just cruising around. So, for example, pick a few buoys to sail round. Time your first lap, then try and beat that time on subsequent laps. Wind conditions might mean you can't but at least you're trying hard. Another way is to use a GPS. I know, for example, that I should be doing 6-6.5 knots upwind when full powered up. Try to keep that speed up for a long beat and you get used to what it feel like. When you're racing you'll know when you're going slowly and look for reasons why (not sitting out hard enough, pinching etc).

I 100% agree with you, and many of those who happily sail the 'wrong boat at the wrong location' are testament to that also.  I applaud them, really I do.  

So a question for you- does the more accurate and credible PY system of today, add to the essence of this concept; or does it, despite well meant intention, detract from it?  I think this is especially true in respect of the advanced tools around personal handicapping now at your (plural) disposal? 

It is incumbent upon us back of fleet chumps to disregard the poor spreadsheet result that devalues our on the water efforts- often in the face of growing statistical authenticity.  Whereas before we could simply say 'oh well, it's only handicap racing and I enjoyed it, what the heck...'

Sailing to my mind is far more about head and technique than sheer grunt. If that is accepted I would say it is nearly impossible to train effectively without a coach watching.

Now. Controversial I know but perhaps it also depends on the class sailed? I see the OP is L123456, a Laser possibly? If not racing to win why would you sail one at all? Whereas JimC, Canoe maybe a more interesting boat to simply sail for it's own sake.

only in unseaworthy craft and/or sailing without suitable risk awareness.

I grew up sailing without rescue cover when not racing, even then it was one rib for 20+ boats.  

Most of my current sailing is without rescue outside of the emergency services, so I guess you accept what you are used to.  

Ambitious club racers usually do not practice but they race a lot, Wednesdays, Sundays and opens.

Lots of interesting views and posts!  I really enjoy training, love to do lots of it when I can, and know people who prefer training (not just cruising or hooning, but training) to racing. But as others have said, it's normally much harder to actually get out to train in sailing than it is to get out to train in other sports.

If I make take issue with two points......

I sail my Laser because I love sailing my Laser, just as I sail my Canoe because I love sailing my Canoe. In fact the IC has been off the water for years whereas I'm either sailing the Laser or lending it to people who go on to buy their own Lasers.

The Laser is fantastic to train on; it gives you a lot of feedback in anything of a breeze.

 

You and "lots of top sailors" obviously know what spot on right feels like, not everybody does though.

Of course you appreciate the only reason to sail a Laser is to train to race comment was intended to tease.

Certainly agree totally with the muscle memory point, I would take it a little further and say that mental visualisation techniques really help as well. I remember when starting on my Laser with limited sailing time at my sea Club, after sailing I used to try to recall what went wrong and how to remedy. Next time on the water I could transfer those mental sensations into real actions (edit, sometimes ).   

I can save you the hassle- think ex-lapdancers a bit beyond their best and cheesy men splashing cash without their wife knowing (or probably caring, truth be told).  

A bit like the evening entertainment at a D-One event....

if its me on my i sail  for 6 hours with a 30 min break  just training on my own its well worth it 

on a sunday if we do race we do the 2 races in the morning have some food then back out for another 3 hours of boat handling and boat on boat practice 

Well that's not doing much to convince the rest of us that a MPS is as attainable as the class like to think it is ... 

i drive 1hour 30 mins every weekend to sail and practice

also for many people their club racing is their  'training' for their  percieved big events ( which might not be  viewed as such by others , who are more serious) ...

I do need to pull myself together though as I have to demonstrate the differences between Byte and Lightning for a young lady on Friday.

Be sure to get her consent first 

I can only agree that you can improve in cycling much faster than in sailing - but only until you reach a certain level. Then you start to need to do a few hundred kilometres a week in cycling to get better. The top Master in our club does 600+ quality ks a week, which would take him around 17 hours or so. 

Because sailing is a mid-sized sport with lots of different classes and many of us don't train much, I used to assume that when sailors moved into other sports we may get thrashed. Interestingly, the sailors and windsurfers I know who gave up sailing and went into cycling often did much BETTER at the bigger sport.

One mid-fleet club Laser sailor returned to his old sport of cycling and has since won a bunch of state championships in his age group. A good national level windsurfer (fast enough to get places but not wins IIRC) has been national masters champ on the bike a couple of times and has an amazing ability to go from winning track racing to getting 2nd out of 600+ mountainbikers before hopping on a time trial bike and getting 2nd from 60. Another windsurfer and another Laser sailor went into cycling and did well at the MTB 24 hour worlds; a good national-level Tasar/Mirror sailor got into cycling, then triathlon and qualified for the Worlds. One world-class sailor who was cruelly robbed of an Olympic spot got 5th in the Masters worlds on the bike.

So while dinghy sailors don't tend to train that much, when we do get into a sport where you have to train a lot AND IT'S LOGISTICALLY EASIER TO TRAIN A LOT, we seem to do as well or better than we do in sailing. That seems to me to say that our comparative lack of training is not because we are lazy, but because it's harder to go out and train on a boat and also that it's a sport where thinking is much more important than in some other sports.