Happy New Year from Team Black & Tidey Sailing!
We started off the new year by flying straight to Lanzarote Canaries Islands to start our January training block. Lanzarote is a great venue to train in as it’s well known for its wind, waves and sunshine. The majority of the Olympic fleet has also migrated south which is ideal for organising informal training races with other nations to keep our racing skills high. The British Sailing Team is also based on the island to help support our training both on the water and land training. Physical conditioning and recovery is a huge part of our pre season training.
The key areas we have been working on this month are 1. Boat handling 2. Downwind speed and we have definitely made huge progress in these areas. For the majority of our training time, it has been 15+ knots which has been perfect to sharpen up our boat handling around the race course. There has also been a lot of sea state which has made the downwinds challenging, great for pushing our skills! We have been using Bluetooth comms kits for live recording of onboard commands and problem solving so we can analyse with our coach once ashore.
We are very excited to share our new training partner relationship with the USA 49er FX Olympic team of ‘Roble & Shea sailing’. Steph Roble & Maggie Shea represented the United States at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. It has been a huge goal of ours to join forces with another experienced 49er FX team to push each other hard in training and work together to challenge to podium in Paris 2024. We are really looking forward to sharing this road to the games together.
A short reset at home for the last week of January and then we had back out for our February training block. We have the International Lanzarote regatta coming up which will be a great opportunity to see our progress in training and mark our current performance against the international fleet. Keep up to date on the racing via this link for live results and racing footage!
https://www.lanzarotesailingcenter.com/lanzarote_international_regatta/
We will also be posting weekly updates on our Instagram’s so watch out for more news during February.
