Getting the adrenaline pumping
Written by Niki Birrell | 21 May 2014
It’s been a pretty good time for sport for me recently – me and Alex won gold at Garda Trentino Olympic Week in Italy, followed by Manchester City winning the Premier League and Lewis Hamilton the Spanish Grand Prix!
We hadn’t raced since Miami in January, and have had some really good training camps in Italy and Cowes since then, so Garda for us was about getting some good race practice in and really focusing on our decision-making and starting.
We got all nine races in, so got to practice nine starts, and we won six of the races, which was as much down to our decision making as our boat speed.
The racing was a lot closer than the results suggest. The Italians, Marco Gualandris and Marta Zanetti, and the Dutch, Vera Voorbach and Jan-Rein Van Esseveld, had some good speed.
It was really good practice for us to be put under that much pressure again.
We know all about the Italians as we’ve enjoyed a couple of really good training camps with them in Genoa and Trieste over the past few months. They won silver behind Alex and I at the IFDS Worlds in Ireland last year, and are improving a lot.
In the past we’ve pretty much kept everything in-house, training with able-bodied sailors using our second boat, and this approach definitely has its advantages.
But one of the downsides is you’re never 100% sure where you are in relation to the rest of the fleet. There have been times when we’ve thought we’ve made some good gains only to go racing and find we weren’t as quick as we thought.
By training with the Italians we know if we’re going as quick as them then we’re going to be somewhere near the front of the fleet.
We’ve balanced that with training in Cowes with two able-bodied sailors, Matt Rainback and Sarah Williams, which has really helped too.
Read the full blog from Niki here