Hello! Sorry for my hiatus here, March was a super busy month and I just never managed to put aside the time for a blog update. So here is a catch-all March training update (in April….oops)!

March was mainly a training block for me. The first week and a bit I spent at home, and then it was off to Mexico for a training camp from March 11th to 18th at the International Sailing Academy (internationalsailingacademy.com) with Sarah Douglas (another CST radial sailor). For those who don’t know, ISA is a sailing training centre run by the national team radial coach Vaughn Harrison near Puerto Vallarta, and it is pretty much the greatest training setup ever. They have a house for you to stay in a few minutes walk down the beach from the sailing center, there is a lovely chef Petra who cooks super fresh, healthy breakfasts and dinners, and the sailing is such good quality.

The theme of the week was “fitness hell week”, with the idea of getting one good heavy hiking block in before heading to our next regatta, and it was killer! A typical day looked something like this:

7:15 am – wake up
7:30 – 8:30 am – yoga
8:45 am – breakfast
9:30 – 11 am – video de-brief from the previous day/brief for today
11:45 am – 3:30 pm – sailing!
4 pm – dinner/de-brief
5 – 6 pm – rest/down time
6 – 8 pm – gym
9 pm – snack, rest, and repeat

It was tough, tiring, and super productive. I actually love intense blocks like this when I get the chance to train with really good sailors. It is pretty satisfying to hit your bed at the end of the day having worked super hard. ISA is a great place to train in heavy wind and waves, a condition that requires pretty powerful movements in the boat, and is a technical focus for my training at the moment. It was also great prep for our next event, (which I am at now), in Spain!

At the moment I am competing in the Trofeo Princesa Sofia Regatta in Palma. We are on the island of Mallorca, which is off the east coast of Spain in the Mediterranean. It is so beautiful here, and the sailing is pretty awesome. We’ve had three days of training in big sea breezes and HUGE ocean swell, which was a combination of super fun, super scary, and super exhausting. Today was the first day of racing and, as always seems to be the case, the conditions were totally different. Light, shifty, offshore, and still with big swell from the ocean which was sideways. I haven’t looked at the results, but there were definitely some good moments (and some bad), and I have some specific things to work on for tomorrow (like not getting stuck in the middle of the course in the top 1/3 in dying breeze!). I will do a full Palma recap post at the end of the week, so stay tuned!