Hard Work - Clarke/Bjorn Sailing Team Blog

by Richard Clarke on 31 Mar 2012 Man this Olympic sailing is hard work, I guess it should be or everyone would have a collection of gold medals. Today was a classic training day, up at 8, out the door for the gym at 9 for a hard strength session. Max squats, weighted lunges, inverted rows and one armed bench press were a few of the tough ones today, all with max weight all to failure. It was the kind of workout that you couldn't wait to end, needed to sit down after each rep and drag yourself back to the bench/barbell for the next one.

After that it was off to the boat for a few hours of maintenance/rigging/tuning to prepare the boat for the days practice. Left the dock shortly after 1pm with legs that were hoping for a light wind day only to be greeted by 12-14 knots of max hiking conditions, Time to man up, bite down and work hard or risk not saiilng the boat to its maximum potential. It was also our first day to test ourselves after all the hard weeks spent training in Cadiz as the waters off Palma were filled with some of the best Star teams in the World.

The good news is that training works, us and Percy/Simpson (our UK training partners) were the fastest on the water today. Hiking works too as even with tired legs we worked harder than any other team out there. It always seems easier when you are quicker and the beer that much tastier when you hit the dock. Unfortunately it was a protein shake not beer but I still imagined it was a beer.

Of course our day was not finished as we then needed to hop in the car and speed through the streets of Palma to fetch our new sails from the shipping company before 7 or loose the chance to measure them in this weekend. We made it with about 20 minutes to spare!

So here I sit, 9:30 at night, craving my bed and excitedly thinking about tomorrow. We have one more hard gym session and 2 more training sessions on the water before racing starts Monday.

Took some close up photo's of the names on the boat today, we are working on a way to post them in our gallery section so you can zoom in and see your name.

Stay tuned, Richard.