NL For Gold

it goes on and on

Jonathan and Daniel — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:31:28 +0000

Well, it does suck that Dan is suffering from his periodic back troubles, but he has been to see a lot of physio, and i’ve been out every scheduled day. The breeze has been up, so training with other crews has been challenging, but there’s still lots of learning going on. I’ve been sailing a lot with Mark, and sometimes with Alehandro, who’s the Mexican crew and good friend, and yesterday with Dan for an hour then Mark for an hour. To switch in and out on the water is amazing for seeing differences in the crew, and when Mark steps into the boat to show us something, we’re learning just from seeing his natural movements that he’s not necessarily showing us at that time. It’s really good, and although Dan’s back blew out yesterday again, he then followed Mark and I around in the coach boat to see how more of an emphases is put in needed areas on our team. We’re taking notes people, and to have Mark on our side is a good thing, to say the least! Our first day out together it was blowing 15-20, with a good 10 boat fleet, and we won every line up and every race., against 2 of the boats who beat us the regatta. We were going sooo fast out there, and to the right places. Dan and I have really good speed, but heavy wind still needs work and it’s fantastic that we’re making progress even when Dan’s injured. Mark’s a wicked coach, and fresh out of the top ten, so there’s lots to learn. Fitness has been back to full on, with 2 days on and a day off. I caught myself wishing that I could go 3 days in a row, but that means i’m not pushing it hard enough on my 2 gym days, so the tempo has been turned up, but regretfully induced by espresso from time to time. Working out with other teams has been pretty helpful as well, because it’s important to be able to adapt and perform on the spot, and variety is known to many as the key to preventing injury. It’s scary to see some peoples routine that they’ll never add to or mix up. I was happy to see that I was a bit stronger than some of my friends who we all thought would be stronger than me, and no i’m not talking about Dan! I would anabolic steroids AND espresso if I wanted to be as strong as Dan. Lets hope his back is better by tomorrow or at the later Monday so we can start applying stuff we’ve recently learned to our boat!!

World Cup #1

Jonathan and Daniel — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 23:19:09 +0000

Miami is done! Our coach and other coaches are pleased with our performance, and we’re pretty happy too. To be honest, i’m pretty damn pissed off with my mistakes, because we should be the best, but this was an amazing event and fleet for learning. Due to the variety in skill throughout the fleet, we had the opportunity to learn how to pick ourselves up through the fleet when we came from behind, but also how to defend against the worlds best when we were in the front. When we break it down and look at the big picture, this is the second major event in a row where we came 2nd canadian by quite a margin, while almost coming first, and we are the only canadian 49er to get a personal best here and at the recent world championships. We are going to take off!! We have 2 weeks of some hard training coming up, and we know exactly what we’re going to work, finishing off everyday with races at 1pm with some of the fast euro teams, among others.

Medal Race

Jonathan and Daniel — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 14:29:18 +0000

A bit of a rough day yesterday. We went in to too much of a safety mode due to the wind and waves, which caught us out of our routines, and we were therefore punished. We made some mistakes, the worst and first being almost sinking 2 49ers, and hospitalizing four perfectly good human beings. Also, I wasn’t heads out enough, and attacking the shifts at times like after the gates. I would often let one boat make the first decision to take the shift, then get a lane after him and go, still taking advantage of the shift, but chasing the most of it. I should have taken in, relayed, and processed more information, sooner. It’s important to minimize risk in these things, but you’ll never win by being safe. The good news is we’re still well within the top ten, and we did have a very good series. We will have our work cut out for us in the medal race today because Jonas, who won the last Olympics, is only two points behind us. We’re going to sail our own race, just like the first one of the event!

The Final Four

Jonathan and Daniel — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:58:05 +0000

Today we were going good. It’s hard to get too punchy with the start line because we’re already on our back foot due to our OCS on the score board. That being said, there was a decent puff out to the right in 2 of the 3 races which meant it was good to start on port. In one race we actually went too far to the right and got punished on the way way back in, but in the others we found the sweet shift and linked the gusts up quite well. Outside of the very few, but still costly mistakes we made, we had a good day, and we’re now in front of Gordo by 1 point and in 5th overall! Yeah it’s good, and we only have 3 races in the final series left, but it seems like eternity because it’s so close. All we can do is what we are doing, and that’s work our asses off, stay calm, and process information as quick as possible while keeping this boat moving at maximum speed! The speed part is the most fun, but it’s all good!!

TIGHT TIMES

Jonathan and Daniel — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:34:00 +0000

This event is full on! Even though we’re missing a few British boats, we’ve gained a few of the other top ten sailors on planet earth so the fleet is still pretty damn tough this year! We are still hanging in there and have better results than any of our previous Miami OCR’s. As we all know, with better results comes bigger expectations, so we’re always reaching for the top shelf. With that in mind, today was pretty average for us, but we managed to put some points on Billy, but Gordo put a few on us. There are some pretty new US teams that are good in this light to medium breeze, but I guess if you’re all American college sailors of the year, you’re going to be able to make a sailboat get around a race course! This is a real heads out regatta, and what that means is making the right calls and being able to link up the gusts that are spreading out. There are opportunities for gains all over the place, and some of them are not so obvious. If it wasn’t for our amazing boat speed, we would have been punished a lot worse for some of our decisions today. Overall, we’re racing pretty damn good, and it’s only going to get better.

The Opener

Jonathan and Daniel — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:30:54 +0000

We had a good consistent day, and we achieved all of our goals, but barely, and we still made some obvious and stupid mistakes. For the first time ever at Miami OCR we are leading Canada and we’re actually sitting in 3rd overall! We have to clean up some of our racing for tomorrow, and go at it hard again. We need to sharpen up and clean up some aspects of our game and continue to sail really fast in order to stay in front of some of the killers that are behind us, including 2008 Olympic gold medalist and a few of the boats that were in the top ten at the recent World’s.

LET IT FLOW

Jonathan and Daniel — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:47:18 +0000

This is the first World Cup event of our final stretch, the first for 2012, the golden year, and our last Miami Olympic Class Regatta as professionals. We’ll be having fun out there! People simply make better decisions when in good moods. No he moves have to be made tomorrow because we can’t win this thing on the first day. We never need to try and predict what the wind will do on our 7 minute beat, we’ll just take advantage of what we can see. We ain’t looking to squeeze water out of rocks. All we have to do is let ourselves go, and let the thousands of training hours take over. We trust our work. Tomorrow is about setting the pace for the event, and in one of the most overpowered boats in the whole world, setting the pace involves trying to keep that throttle wide open!!

HEADS UP

Jonathan and Daniel — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:30:34 +0000

We had a full, 4.5 hour session today. It was a bit long, but we had work to do. We started out with the 4 lap drill again…4 times. This drill is not a race, but we decided to incorporate hitting the shifts, and making the right decisions in addition to the main focus which is rounding the marks under pressure. Instead of knowing what roundings were coming up, we built our roundings based on what the wind and our competitors were doing, just as in race. The next course was a tasteful starting drill with a time and distance undertone. We need to be more confident in our time, because if we wait for the gun before we head up, then we’ll always be half a second late. Also, we were working on fully pulling that trigger at the very latest, 5 seconds before the start. When they’re good, they’re great. For dessert, we entered in the practice races with a decent fleet of 15-18 boats. We got a chance to put everything together, but we found that sometimes I get a bit too caught up with boat to boat stuff and neglect the big picture in the process. Whether it’s on the way up wind or not checking/re assessing our plan at T-1 minute, it needs more attention.

Karl Wells Article

Jonathan and Daniel — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:22:09 +0000

Karl Wells recently wrote an article about Jonathan and Daniel in the Evening Telegram. Check it out at www.KarlWells.com.

1st & last

Jonathan and Daniel — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:31:06 +0000

Today was our fourth day in a row of long, efficient training with our coach, Mark. We have been the first boat on the water and the last boat in, every single day, so far. We’ll continue this heavy work load until Thursday, when we’ll start throttling back on the time and leaving us wanting more everyday, but then we feel like caged animals! Even though we’re happy with our hard training, we are pretty exhausted by the end of it, and we sometimes catch ourselves making fatigued mistakes telling us our session is over, but that’s usually in the 4th hour! The wind has been high for Miami, and we’ve had the opportunity to work on boat handling as a good warm up for today and yesterday. The dreaded 4 lap drill has been on the menu, and that means we get the chance to do every top and bottom mark approach during those 4 laps. It gets hectic, but that’s part of the drill, to put some pressure on us and our boat while keeping everything smooth, controlled, but “hella” fast, as they say. Tomorrow is our 5th and final day before a day off. The winds will be up in morning, and so we’ll be at the boat a bit earlier for another long day of training that we die for.