Heading to Lake Michigan
Written by Lucy Macgregor | 02 September 2011
We’ve had a two week break since the Test Event and we’re really looking forward to getting back into training properly again. On Sunday we fly to the States for a fortnight on Lake Michigan.
We’ll be training with our American rivals Sally Barkow for the first week at the Sheboygan US Sailing Center, and then heading on to the Chicago Match Race Center for an Open Grade 3 regatta against some American male match racing crews during the second week.
Obviously it is important to spend as much time training at the Olympic venue as possible in the build up to next summer, but having spent so much time there recently it will be nice to have a change of scenery for a couple of weeks before we really get into our full winter programme back in Weymouth.
We trained in Sheboygan before the Worlds last year; there is an excellent specialist match racing facility there, you can just charter Elliott 6ms and there has always been a good mix of sea states. As a town it is not the most exciting, which our coach says is a good thing! But the sailing is excellent.
Some people might find it strange that with the Olympics getting so close now we would chose to train with someone who could potentially be one of our main competitors at London 2012, but at this stage you need to be racing regularly against the top sailors in the world and Sally is one of the best.
We have a good relationship with Sally and her team and the training we have done together has always been very productive as we can push each other hard to a certain level without giving away any of our secrets. When we need to do a bit more in-house training and test a few bits and bobs out that is where the boys come in very useful.
We were really disappointed to finish seventh at the Test Event. You never expect to win a medal but we certainly hoped to, and that is definitely where we should be aiming at this stage of the campaign. There were a lot of could’ves and should’ves from the event, but if anything it has given us a bit of a kick and instead of feeling downhearted we are feeling quite confident as we know what things worked and where we can make plenty of gains. The things we had been working hard on in training we executed well, but it was simple things that let us down. The trick is pulling that all together when it counts. No-one has pulled away from the rest of the fleet and become the ones to beat next year, so the next 11 months is going to be equally important for everyone. We got what we deserved at the Test Event, but we now know the areas we need to improve on, and the hard work on that has already started.
It may not sound like a break to some people but during our two weeks’ off Kate and I, and our sister Nicky, all crewed RS200s at the RS Games at Weymouth and Portland. I sailed with Dave Evans, one of the Skandia Team GBR 49er sailors, and the event was really great fun. There were 160 boats in the RS200 fleet and the whole event felt like a massive reunion because there were so many people there who I knew from Youth and other types of sailing! I personally don’t feel I’ve done enough fleet racing recently and it can really help in your match race sailing, especially in the more shifty conditions, where you’re trying to pick shifts better. The skills are there but they just need polishing up so we will all be doing a bit more fleet racing this winter as we get ready for the ISAF Worlds in Perth in December.
We’ll keep you updated on our progress!