Volvo

Well it was back to the drawing board after we endured a tough three days on the racetrack at the 470 North American Championships.

The most important thing about becoming better athletes is learning from your mistakes to make the necessary changes, and put the right support systems in place, to avoid the same mistakes happening again.

Throughout each event we debrief our performance daily with our coach Joe [Glanfield, silver Olympic medallist] but it is in the immediate aftermath of an event where you can really take the opportunity to identify the big gain areas and what you need to do to make sure you are making the most of those available gains.

Right now we are on a steep learning curve; together we are growing as team and as individuals we are pushing the boundaries to become better at what we do.

470 Girls Skandia Team GBR image

As we continue to improve on both fronts, so the number of big gain areas get smaller and smaller until you reach the point where you are constantly working on tweaking and fine-tuning your performance to eke out that extra couple of percent that could make the biggest differences to results.

During our debrief sessions we are critical of our own and each other’s performances so we can become better sailors. Sometimes these sessions are hard and you walk away feeling a little beaten-up, mostly disappointed with yourself, but they are crucial to keeping the bigger picture in focus.

The North Americans did not pan out as we hoped but the good news is that, through debriefing, we have recognised a couple of simple things to work on that will have a big impact on our performance.

With less than a week to go until the start of the Miami Olympic Classes Regatta (on Monday 24th January) we are feeling really positive and looking forward to getting in some quality training so we approach the OCR in a position to achieve our goal.

Sarah Ayton

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