Putting In The Hours

Always great to get a note from Nikola and Luke letting us know of the travels both far and near, but this one comes from Barcelona.

While the rest of the season is packed with regattas the fall gives us a chance to get into training.

We first assess the areas that we need to work on most, then we spend countless hours on the water and on land perfecting these areas. Our team philosophy “turn your weaknesses into your biggest strengths”.

Our boat that we had used in Europe all season was in a container going to Florida since end of October, and thus we arranged a contra-deal with the Greeks – we use their boat in Barcelona in November and they use our other boat in Rio in December while we are in Florida.

A perfect trade, and a great way to see and test other sails and systems of their boat.

So this past month we set up training with the Greek team in Barcelona, an extremly accomplished and professional team – a team with a couple of Olympic Medals and more then a dozen World Champion titles between them, an impressive resume!

We structrued our days to work on an equal balance of boatspeed and fast paced boat handling.

Barcelona offered a variety of all conditions, in the mornings we would get a cool breeze coming from the city and typically the wind would die around noon and fill in from the Mediterranean for the afternoon.

This allowed us to do an early morning training session arriving at the club at 8 and hitting the water from 9-11:30/12, then coming in for lunch and going back out from 2:30-5:30.

Then with a evening of debreifs and hitting the gym we were often only getting back home around 9pm!

Talk about some long days 🙂