More Starting

More Starting Drills


Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2001 00:31:24 -0500


We really need to work on our starting skills. Much of this work can
be done without a coach. It can be done with one or two buoys. It can
be done before practice or on off-practice days. It can be done if you
rig up early at weekend regattas. It can be done between races. It
takes WILL. If you don't have the Will, you won't have your Way (on the
starting line). The easiest way to win a race is to win the start and
don't look back. We will settle for being in the group that gets their
nose poked out and manages to get to the first shift. Rounding the
first mark in the top five is Money.

What starting drills?
#1 Ball Starts -nail them 99% of the time. Then put your crew in the
back and nail them 99% of the time. Then close your eyes and nail them
99% of the time. Then take your rudder out and nail them 98% of the
time. Then stand on your head and well, well then get your head
examined. I am not asking of you anything I have not done myself
(except the head examination). That always the case.

#2 Stop and Goes and other acceleration drills. Load and flatten.
Jump or pump. Sail fat and then squeeze. What ever you want to call,
you must avoid the leebow from below and the total wanker of getting
rolled from above. You will learn to get more agressive, including
moving boats out of your way (physically and verbally), or you will not
be mentioned in the same breath as top collegiate sailors. Holes are
fought for, they are not gifts from god that only the "lucky sailors"
get.

#3 Turning skills- pivots, circles, tacking into holes, this means
HELM, HELM, HELM. You never really know about helm until you take the
rudder out.

#4 There's more, but above is a good start (ha,ha).

----------------
Here are some ideas to improve your mental skills.

Games: Chess is the game choice. There are many similarities between
the game of chess and the tactics of sailing, particularly in team
racing. Good sailors are usually good chess players. Maybe you should
take time to challenge each other to a game now and then. By the way,
puzzle games like the ones I have at the boathouse are great for
developing the analytical mind.
That's why they are down there.

Concentration: Try this drill. Sit down between two stereo speakers on
two different systems (could be stereo and a walkman as long as volumes
are the same). Each speaker has something different playing. The
exercise is to affectively shut out one sound and concentrate on the
other and alternating between the two. Every 30 seconds try to switch
from one to the other. Can you pay attention to one without being
disracted by the other? One note on this: Don't use tapes that you
know the words to, the more foreign to you, the better the exercise.

Relaxation: Deep, full breaths with long exhales. Melt the tension
away. It's amazing how clensing this simple exercise can be. Try it
before starts.

Visualization: Starting well and getting to the first shift are what
will keep you in the top pack. Visualize this and make it happen.
Imagine yourself with a clear air, front row start and then with
complete faith and confidence go out and get it.

Attitude: The next race is the first race of the rest of my life.
Don't dwell on the past, bad or good. Take what you need from previous
experiences and leave the rest "on the cutting room floor".

Mental Education: You must have a complete understanding of how the
mind works. You must recognize your "mental symptoms". You must
diagnose and then you must treat. This requires reading up on the
subject. Fortunately, all of you were wise enough to purchase Brad's
bible, so you have that key information at hand. What's that you say?
You care so little about your regatta performance that you have failed
to be verse in the most important book for a collegiate Sailor?
Say it ain't so.

Sail, Race, and Win
How to Develop a Winning Attitude
By Eric Twiname, revised by Cathy Foster
Sheridan House Inc.

Reading assignment: 28 pages of bliss
Chapter 14- Mental Fitness
Chapter 15- Psychological Barriers To Winning
Chapter 16- Making The Least Out Of A Crisis
Chapter 17- Mental Preparation


Sneak Preview...

The Power of the Mind
The wonderful thing about your mind is that provided you go
about
things in the right way it will do a vast amount for you without you
even having to think about it. It does this all the time with mundane
activities like walking and driving the car. This is taken for
granted. If your subconscious mind went on strike you would be in dire
trouble. Every movement of every muscle would have to be consciously
thought out and supervised. You would take a long time to get anywhere.

Your subconscious mind is 90 percent of the whole, with only 10
percent representing the conscious part. Just as walking is done almost
entirely by the subconscious, so is sailing, much more so than you
think. Your conscious mind is simply incapable of attending to every
little movement of your body or tuning into each of the senses that is
providing you with information that is being drawn on. Even tactical
decisions are based largely on the subconscious. A situation develops
ahead and you need to make a response, and that response whether to tack
or luff or whatever, results from dipping into your store of experience
which lies in the subconscious and getting a quick answer. To think
through the alternative moves at the time would usually be disastrous.
There is so much to attend to during a race that quite often you
have to put your sailing of the boat on to automatic pilot while you
look
for the weather mark, see what the other boats are doing, or scan the
water upwind for gusts. When you do this you shift your conscious
attention entirely off sailing the boat, which is done subconsciously by
your automatic pilot skills. Only if something goes wrong, like a wave
taken badly or a sudden heel, does a mental alarm bell call your full
attention back to the job of sailing the boat.
Even when you are sailing with your attention and thoughts all
centered on getting the boat to go through the water as fast as it will,
much of your bodily movements and responses are bypassing the conscious
mind completely. We are automatons of our own making, and part of
making
your mind work more effectively on the water is raising those automatic
pilot skills- that part which the subconscious mind does for you- to as
near perfection as possible.
When your automatic skills are highly developed you
automatically sail your boat near-perfectly the whole time. The
conscious mind is then
free to attend to the tactical side of the race, looking out for
windshifts and generally being the master of the preceedings and not
merely a slavish servant to the jib luff. Much of the time will
certainly be spent with full attention on the jib or the waves ahead of
the bow- or wherever a particular sailor looks in the prevailing
conditions to enable them to get the most speed out of their boat. But
little will be lost when they must look away and, all else being equal,
it is their studying of the wind and the race as it develops that will
enable them to make the winning tactical decisions.
Beginners have no automatic pilot sailing skills; they have to
do
everythng consciously, and even heading up and bearing away have to be
thought out. Improvement is a process in which the subconscious learns
set responses that allow skills such as helming to become a natural,
easy and very automatic process. Once your responses do become
automatic in this way you face a problem: if these responses are only 70
percent perfect and you want to improve your racing, you must make the
effort to take these automatic skills out, examine them, and then raise
them to a higher level of perfection. That is how you improve.


-Eric Twiname



It's time to take it to another level.

-Coach