Last weekend we had our little local winter regatta, Frozen Assets. It certainly lived up to its name this year! It’s a small event, usually just our local fleet and maybe some from Vancouver, but pretty fun and a good opportunity to get some start-line work in. This year they decided to race the laser standards and radials together, which was a interesting decision. On the one hand I really enjoyed having a larger fleet than we would rather have had and it was nice to have fast boats to chase down because I am normally quite a bit faster than the other local radials, but I also find it really frustrating to race full-rigs in certain conditions. If there is enough wind for me to be hiking a little bit, then our speeds are pretty similar and it is great racing, but if the wind lightens up at all then I am quite a bit slower in the radial, especially in maneuvers like tacking, which is so frustrating! I can have much better strategy than the boys, but if they throw in a couple big tacks (or even worse, a couple big gybes) I can’t catch them. We had a couple races like that, and a couple with good wind, so it was a mixed bag of a weekend.

This week we had another round of fitness testing and got our new work-out programming. I shaved 2 seconds off my rowing machine split time, and didn’t even need the puke bucket! Going forward for the next three weeks I’ve got two days a week weight-training, three days a week on my road bike (usually inside on the trainer this time of year), and I’ve now built myself a hiking bench. My plan is to accumulate 10 minutes every day, until I can do that straight through without stopping. Then I’ll up the time, and maybe add some bungee to work on sheeting as well. I brought it out for the first time this evening while watching the women’s curling at the Olympics, and only got just over 2 minutes without stopping, so I had to take lots of breaks. My parents also gave it a try! Here’s a picture of my mom giving indoor laser sailing a go (with a little help from dad):