Mastery in Sailing

How can we approach mastering sailing and racing our yachts, sports boats and dinghies?

What can we learn from philosophy and other sports which can help inform our own mind set on how we begin to learn and move towards mastery in our own sport?  Should we consider perfection and undisputable methods and goals to which we should aspire and comply to?

Most grand masters in sailing are not self professed. They are accomplished by matter of the races they have won, the overall ratings they have, the adulation from their peers and not least the audience they command.

Many sailors would however profess to be old masters at their art, and quite a few quietly consider themselves to be mastering the waves. Complacency is the first sign that someone is not a master nor that they are on the road to mastery.

The first concept then we grasp is that we are on a journey of both experience and discovery. It is no surprise that you often hear top sailors like Russel Coutts and Sir Ben Ainsley saying " We learned a lot today". In fact being on the continual, never ending learning curve has become a mantra of sailing professionals and their coaches the world over, and is almost a cliche. However it is a way of seeing yourself and your sailing which will never wear out.

Views of the Journey

Another wonderful term made to sound a little trite by its use in advertising,  is from a japanese concept " If perfection was achievable, it would be worthless" . Here we take the humbling thought that we can only strive towards perfection, but in fact never reach it. It seems from a distance perhaps a given goal, a peak to climb, a race to win while when  we approach than point in out achievements we just raise our brow to see the next step on the path to perfection.

In his book "  According to Uffa" , the great old Fox himself he proposes this through-the-looking glass view point.
" If you make three mistakes in a yacht race, then you may be rewarded with a third place. The boat ahead of you makes one less mistake. To win a race you can only make one mistake" or something very along those lines I paraphrase.  I dare say that if the Gods on mount Olympus could see down upon a race and analyse the boat which came in 10th place they could well see perhaps ten obvious mistakes which seperate them by a factor of nine steps from the boat which wins. The prestart positioning, the start , the first and second shift, going right for the layline, the rounding, und so vite und s[ vite

In think that is a very informative or even a kind of road-to-Domascus approach to deconstructing your sailing ....as long as you can like the Gods above recognise each mistake. Sailing isnt like running a marathon in that you don't make large gains in outset from focusing on small technique improvements. There is a sprint to consider first = the gains on being able to start well and achieve free air and a forward position versus the fleet's main body of boats is so determinant of being able to further build upon your sailing.

Another viewpoint which takes us back to consider the old adage of "practice makes perfect" is a darn good read inspired by martial arts and Zen Budhist philosophy, Mastery by George Leonard. In this light text he considers that the journey is long and characterised by long periods of practice on a plateau of performance before some quite unexpected gains as the learning curve suddenly hops an increment

10,000 hour "Rule" was a concept developed by Malcolm Gladwell from observations and studies of musicians and top atheletes. This is pretty aligned to George Leonard's very good summation of the japanese martial arts approach to mastery. However it has since been disputed, with other studies showing fewer, more variable hours and contrasting the difference between achieving fitness levels and actually mastering techniques. There is no doubt though that the more hours you put into a sport, the better your resulkts become. To paraphrase, the more you practice sailing, the luckier you get.

Break on Through to the Other Side...

My own philosophy follows indeed that you need to practice and you need to have bouts of training at a plateau level before you make progress. However I disagree to the kind of attrition concept of throwing enough hours at it to get each gain. Instead of the plateau leading to a surpising improvement in skills, you have to actively challenge yourself and seek new inspiration to come out of what can be in sailing in particular, a plateau which is a comfort zone.

I will introduce another concept which arose in the UK Military, with a claim it originated during the training and fighting the early Royal Marines Commando undertook. An officer's expression during training to lead men into the unknown with new commando tactics "  Experience that quality you attain the exact moment after you most needed it" . It means for the sailor that you expose yourself to something which is well outside your comfort zone and learn under intense pressure to either perform the task, such as a heavy weather gybe, or fail in that task and take the lesson with you further.

In athletic sports, there is a type of training which was the newest fad a few years ago- "disruption". Really it is a pretty old approach and can certainly be traced long back into the history of training soldiers. You allow routines to develope, a certain performance level achieved and then bang! You throw a new challenge or totally alter the routines, change the intensities, or introduced something way out of the box. Basically this psycholigically breaks the comfort zone or challenges the brain to work differently. Sometimes it is rather playful in fact rather than a stressful, high pressure change.

Physiologically I have not seen the evidence of how successful changing from say, standard intervals to speed-play (fartlek), and for the majority of amateur sailors sticking to a PT and gymn programme is about as far as you need to worry. But in the mind pushing yourself outside the comfort zone , or breaking with what can be a period of monotomy, pushes you out of where you are and can let you see where are going. In other words you either perhaps go beyond your boundaries , maybe  way beyond and then come back to a new level, or you get to have a perspective on your learning curve to date and where it is needing to go.

A very good disruption technique for sailing would be jumping into a new boat, or as a helm, taking a crew position on a big team boat with more than 10 crew. Alternatively it may mean sailing in very heavy weather, when racing is cancelled. Or taking the helm of a compatriots OD boat with their usual crew line up.  Another very good option would be doing a long delivery trip as skipper, or a long passage race if you are used to round the cans.

An excellent means of learning about racing as anew beginner or a seasoned racer, is to participate on the race committee. Laying marks at a national championship with a former world champion one day, I learned more about racing that I had perhaps in a whole season. Up there at the windward mark area, with a compass rigged under a windex, I could see there was a small variability followed by larger osciallations in the wind stregnth and direction. I could see that the top four or five boats usually had a pretty clear rounding, having at least half a boat lenght between them, whilst the rest of the fleet had a far more messy affaire at the top mark and offset.

Teaching sailing is also a good way of stepping back and being able to deconstruct your own techniques in order to communicate to others and understand what mistakes they are making. Very often these are actually very amplified versions of our own mistakes, or they show the way to where we may be weak, often in tacks, gybes, or reacting to windshifts and changes in strength.

For the team as a whole, it may not mean sailing at all, but maybe a team building exercise- corporate style. One very applicable exervise is taking up an organised course in rock climbing and paying for instruction towards a team pitch up a local route or if possible to a mountain top. This helps develop the feeling of responsibility between each other, we actually being dependent on each others safe actions on board. Also it involves rope work, balance, stregnth and bravery. Knut Frostad's team on Kvernaer Innovation did this. Considering this as a very good type of exercise for a  newly formed team with some issues "gel-ing" or a long established team which are becoming a tad complacement, taking each other for granted and blaming each other or the helm intermittantly for any bad results,

Team dynamics are a bit tangenital to this blog, and I have made some observations on democracies vs dictatorships before, but obvioulsy once you are out of a single hander  and sail in a team, the way it functions and what goes right and wrong is part of your learning curve. My parting comment on this in context of this blog, is that you have to recognise when others in the team are not on an upwards learning curve and do something about that: this may need to include surgery if the motivation levels are to put it mildly " mis aligned " , and that may either be dumping people or moving yourself out of the boat.

Metrics - Milestones on Your Strategy

"Any road will take you there if you don't know where you are going"...perhaps this is becoming an over used proverb, but it rings true for me in sailing and working life. Ok, I admit I am a bit aimless in both right now, going with the flow! Hardly even plateauing , not even tredding water, just drifting. I would drown but I am striving to find the answer at least to what the next building block of my sailing career will be and how far forward it may take me.

Metrics are very available in sailing, especially in one design fleet sailing, where not only the finish line results provide you with metrics. Every stage of the race you can check the leeches of your competitors, see if they are going faster and higher than you, see how different boats fair off the start and at the marks, see how much faster some boats are on the run and so on and so on.....

Other metrics are more statistics which are really deadly dull, but useful. For example, number of badly executed tacks, time to tack, etc  Conservative start versus risk starts by number and result link to these.

From a base of metrics, you can define your ground zero: where you stand now. How good you are. Are you back of fleet, mid fleet or top 20% ??  You should be able to identify your weaknesses and also then quantify them: ten bad tacks up a long beat or 10 bad starts in a series may tell you that these are the two areas you must focus on!!

Going back to the Uffa Fox quote, if you know what mistakes you make AND how often in a race you make them, you can start to see how many places it is worth to train out those mistakes. You can diffrerentiate between occaisional foul ups, like bad hoists, and those mistakes you make most often.  Even if they are quite small mistakes, like falling off too far coming out of a tack, it is an area for improvement.

Learning to Learn, Improving to Improve Even More

Once again we come back to the modern cliche in proff' sailing, the humility to admiting we are all learning, every day.

I guess in a perfect heavenly world somewhere, the wind blows evenly and there is no tide, and no waves to hinder us> a helmsman and crew make a perfect tack which in no way can be surpased by its qaulity and achieved goals. However, the wind changes all the time, we get waves and tide, and wind sheer, and odd gusts....our crew maybe change about a little, some have bad days, some have good days, the sails maybe are a little newer or older than last time we sailed in this exact conditions...the competition are a little harder against us this time....so on , so on.

The point from metrics above, is that you can identify and quantify a weakness as something that has to be learned out; overcome; unblocked; surpassed. In just finding one fault to work upon, you have learnt that focus is important and that you can continue to learn.

I told my youth group back  a few years ago, that yes there are a few tricks in sailing, but in general we have to just polish away at our techniques and get better and better by practice and from instruction. Two brothers from the group have recently had a top third of fleet result at the 29er worlds at Pwhelli, with one race win, first time out at a World's!! I hope something rubbed off on them, and I know they have had pro coaches after me, but getting that mind set to learn to master small details and then open your mind to new learning, is a key part of my philosophy.

Summarising My Philosophy on The Zen of Sailing

I may seem to be contradicting myself from the last paragraph above, when considering the sections before this where I question the concept of mere repition and practice-makes-perfect.

I believe that mastery has no real short cuts, but does have some important increments in sailing, which are in some ways rights-of-passage, while in others are quite definable steps you have to climb in order to be able to perform at the next level. Practice is used then to gain this incremental gain, and then to consolidate it, hard wiring it often literally into your brain as a motor/sensory program. You then do need to practice it, but in fact what you are doing is consolidating that program, polishing it slightly but also exposing that to varying conditions.

At some point, like in being able to drive a car or ride a bike, you can do things on autopilot. This frees up the mind to concentrate on other things, like sail setting and tactics. However it also means that you can see the next challenge. This challenge may actually be within the self same technique you have just been able to automate. You may find for example, that other boats lose less way to windward through tacks. You may need to then be adjusting the speed at which you enter a tack, using roll in all conditions, sheeting in on the main sheet and trying to keep height when coming out the tack, which until this realisation, had been seemingly 'mastered'. 

Being able to understand that you are only some way along the learning curve is the great humility you need to be a better sailor. Time and time again I see mediocre boats, or those struggleing for a final break through in consistent wins, where there is just a plain lack of self admission that things could be done better. Time and time again I hear the boat set up being blamed or the crew being lambasted instead of a more realistic idenitification of faults, which are very often starts and wind strategy on the beat.

Overall I would say push yourself to keep on learning, to keep on polishing and then to find that new increment and step up to that challenge and force yourself to go beyond your boundaries in order to redefine them and make the critical leaps in performance something which you are not afraid to over come.