360 Mental Prep' for the 2016 Sailing Season

, A hundred books and articles on boat preparation, winterisation, sails and rule interpreations and just a handful on mental preparation. Of course there are many tomes from general sports psycholgy. Does sailing differ in what sailors need ?

Perhaps there are some nuances which require some special prep, but I think that many concepts, lectures and books from all kinds of psychology and indeed philosophy are worth delving into, and often especially if they do not have the word SPORT in the title or on the front page.

Today I wanted to consider one aspect or approach to better mental preparation and understanding yourself and perhaps individuals in a team. I have been on a series of evening sessions on a course for stress management in the workplace -how managers can better understand the causes of negative stress and set action to lift the team morale, focus on defining challenges, encourage objective problem solving and help the individuals come to terms with what is causing them stress or why they are making negative contributions to the team effort.

Understanding Stress on the Race Course

Stress has different facits and different ways of exhibiting itself in the sport. Firstly it has to be said that a positive stress is a force for good - it can come out of a very negative situation, but in being able to resolve that situation under pressure ( a good recovery from an avoidable broach for example)  or admit the mistake and be able to learn from it, then you have been able to use the stress to progress your experience and ability.

Negative stress though is really what we have to address first so that we can turn challenging situations and conflicting emotions into positive stress in future, or avoid becoming stressed about racing.

Negative stress eats away at your own ability to perform and the team morale. One negative team member can set a bad atmosphere and as helm and leader on board, your own demeanor will often set the tone for the whole boat. There are different causes of negative stress and we want to look at some possible causes on boats.

Root Causes of Negative Stress in Sport

At the very root of these though is your outlook on sailing, and where competing fits in with the principles you live your life by.  For we amateurs, sailing should be a recreational activity - something that absorbs us and takes us away from other stresses in life. It should not be something which contributes a lot of take out stress you might say, nor should it be something we get stressed up about as we make our way to the club or marina on a wednesday night.

How does negative stress feel? Well of course it has both pyschological and physiological symptoms which really kind of resolve you could say, in our gut feeling. We have elevated levels of hormones and stress chemicals like cortisone, which lead to higher blood pressure, elevated heart rate, and often a hyper focus - we begin to ignore peripheral stimulus and become very focused on few stimuli and choose correspondingly few actions. We often behave aggressively. Alternatively we can go the other side of the ' flight or fight' and become withdrawn or freeze up in our ability to act and be sociable. 

Stress chemicals and the body's reaction to them can be quite appropriate in many sports such as sprinting perhaps and actaully help an athlete perform. Winch or pedestal gorillas (like I used to be) aside though, being in this fight or flight mode is detrimental to sailing performance over quite a low threshold. One problem is that the body often learns, like pavlovs dogs, to associate a situation with a stress reaction and this can become an ongoing unconscious problem for you.

I suffered pre race nerves terribly for several years myself, with a classic 'body in a state of alarm' and it began to become automatic when I got near a sailing club. It always reached a peak during the start sequence, where I was by that time either in a very aggressive fight mode, or a state of becoming stilted and frozen. I realised consciously that it was negative, and reckoned that I should just focus on my sailing skills and try to start without any hassle. That cured it by in large over the course of the first half of a season, although when helming I still get some of this and can loose focus on the timer completely and call for sheet on too soon.

I observe with my current owner I sail a Melges 24 with and many other helms that there is stress around the start and even getting out on the water.

You have to go back to ask yourself what life principles you are living to, and how that is coming out in the stress you encounter in the sport. If you are used to pushing at work and being successful, then you may be frustrated in your own and the team's abilities and results on the race course. Or you can be making up for a boring, unrewarding job by coming out to race such that racing is a substitute for competition and success in other areas of life.

Sailing appeals to me and I know other sailors too, because it is  a sport you have to really use your brain and body to master, that it often a complete escape from other stresses and distractions in life in beautful areas often, or at least from a very different perspective of your home town and coast. It is also tapping into an age old 'brotherhood' now including women at the highest levels it has to be said, but the wind and the points of sail were the same hundreds of years ago when folk first raised canvas or skins up a mast. There is a continuity of shared skills and language which has  feeling of tradition despite sailing on todays carbon appendaged regatta or round the world machines.

So the first place to look for signs of negative stress is in your life principles, your ego and how you approach sailing as a sport. It can be like a guy I sailed with who was very nervous of starts, usually being way back, and then avoiding the slightest risk of collision as he sailed the course. He ended up giving up racing and reverted to just cruising and last I heard of him, he was a far happier man, finding new challenges and enjoying quality time with his family. More likely for you though, if you are experiencing negative stress and physiological symptoms then you want to try to learn assertiveness and treat sailing far more objectively, but you will need a set of tools to do this.

Stress and NATS

No, not the national championships. Stress leads often to Negative Automatic Thoughts. Situations we expose ourselves to or that occur outwith our control, can create this conflict with our life values as presented above, or challenge them thoroughly due to the nature of the fight or flight response. One outcome of feeling stressed is that we can develope negative automatic thought patterns. These can be based on our perception of ourselves in that situation - " I always mess up" " Why can't I be better" " My team do not follow me" .  We can often bring these NATs with us from other areas of our lives. If we are experiencing stress at work or in private life, then that can of course colour the way we think and feel about our sailing.

The trouble with NATs is that they are AUTOMATIC and self reinforcing.  NATs can recurr and stregnthen a stress response physiologically as our subconscious switches on our fight or flight response. As with most psycho-physiological processes in us, our bodies actually learn to react quicker and potentiially to a smaller stimulus. So it can become a horrible viscious circle where some stress leads to NATs which lead to more stress, which lead in turn to a heightened stress status next time we approach the situation such as a start or a mark rounding, or a cheeky competitor who challenges us in port-starboard situations. If we dont realise this and act upon it we may be locked into a difficult cycle.

Breaking the Wheel of Stress

We have to break this wheel before it breaks us, and in work or relationships it is important to seek help if stress starts to really adversely disrupt our lives.

The first method most general practictioners will recommend is to remove the source of stress, immediately. This can be a temporary measure of course. For the sailor this may mean deciding to take the team on a booze cruise on saturday and skip wednesday racing. Or getting someone else who is really competent to take over the helming for the next couple of races. Or sailing in the non spinnaker class. Or it may mean that you call T on the whole season if you feel that you simply aren't enjoying racing because of the stress you encounter.

The next step is to reappraise your philosphy to sailing when you are taking time out, and to set yourself simple goals to overcome challenges. Also to seek help, tips and instruction in how to achieve these skill oriented goals. For me the last year I have thought about the 'burn time - go' approach to starting as a stress reducer. If I or we are OCS sometimes then at least we have tried our technique to the limit. For another sailor it may be that we go back to basics, maybe sail a dinghy sometimes with an instructor or do some extra crew training nights and stay out of the heated end of the start line for a few races.

Also we need to arrest these NATs which will exacerbate our feeling of negative stress. Are they rational? usually not.....Are they constructive criticisms_? most often the opposite, they are exaggerated self doubt. Being simply aware that we are 1) stressed out a bit 2) Prone to NATs and a negative spiral from them, is enough to help us stop them in their tracks

Is Stress Always Negative?

As I mentioned above, there is positive stress. This is the excitement and anticipation of the challenge. In sport it does involve some fight-hormones but it is how we control the level by avoiding running away with our negative feelings that counts. A level of arousal which is manageable heightens our awareness, and prepares our bodies for physical action. When it spills over into bad feelings, a loss of control over our heart rate, and an overly 'blinkered' awareness of our surroundings then it has become negative stress. We should learn then to recognise the signs and symptoms of a stress level which is rising too quickly and will become negative stress.

We can also learn to recognise this in other people in our team, or competitors. Furthermore we can also begin to see ourselves from outside a little more.

Boats which win races on a regular basis often say , like many other sportsmen, that they hate to lose....at some point though they have been able to turn that frustration into a positive motivation to becoming better by learning, training and making fewer mistakes while competing. They have turned a negative stress into a positive "we will not fail" is really what they mean. Being at the back of the fleet is bad, we feel bad but we think of ways to learn to get better, rather than just blaming luck and going out again and failing over and over, which leads to a sense of fsilire. The same can be said to be true of always being in the top five, but never winning a race. If you sail with a negative emotional loading then you are unlikey to get better.

Techniques for Tackling Stress Levels

As mentioned you can of course decide that racing is just way too stressful for you and give up. Well that is no way for us really to proceed !  What other methods are there?

Life Matching / where does sailing fit into your life vision and principles? Can you put it into perspectiive?

Goal Setting/ What are your weaknesses, and how can you set small goals to work  around these?

Pre Race Relaxation and Meditation/ If stress from your job or just the drive through riush hour to the club is affecting your racing, then use the 'go to your happy place' with a relaxing 3 to 5 minute favourite music track and some slow, deep breathing. Try to get to the boat early and sit below or somewhere away from everyone and take those few minutes out and clear your mind of everything by thinking of your happy place and concentrating on the music.

Removal of Blocks of Stress Stimuli / you should identify what really stresses you out in detail. For many sailors like me it is the start.  For others it may be mark rounding or gybing or knowing the rules. Break it down into what causes you most stress and think of a way to remove as much of that block as you can. Proximity to other boats at the start in a usual clustered 'boat' end start? Go start at the other end, or start late and tack off to port. Worried about going over early? Try the burn time-go technique and add 5 seconds or so to  your 'sail to line' time just in case and see how it goes. Or as mentioned above, can the whole next race and go crew on someone elses boat who is better than you. 

Focus on positivity. Speak out loud and praise the crew when things go well, while accepting that ok, we did a little mistake there, we're not sailing with Russel Coutts here, lets learn from that, this is what went wrong team yeah, lets try to do it better next time, pracitice makes perfect......

Debreif yourself and your team. Sit down with your crew after the race, preferably on board out of ear shot of other boats and have an objective appraisal, starting with the positive things, and allowing for input in a 'round robin' discussion going round the cocpit or cabin, one crew member to the next in line. Write a private log or blogg these days, and then consider publishing the positives and sharing it on social media with your crew. Note points which you could improve on. Focus on the practical and not the way you felt.

Tackling NATs / write down your NATs ! List them. Let them roll. If you are more influenced by negative feelings than obvious verbalised thoughts, then try and describe them. In so doing we become aware of them, and suddenly they seem like you have found the skelf or thorn which was causing you pain, so now y ou can remove it.

Summary -

Good performance in sports is the net result of experience and that is no truer than in sailing. When we experience problems and challenges, then we can unduly load ourselves with stress and negative feelings and these can reinforce themselves with nasty little doubts and unhelpful thinking. We need to arrest this process, and use objectivity to improve while also recognising that some siutuations will be stressful, but in a positive way which increases our experience and makes us learn more.

Marginal Gains-Diminishing Returns and The Learning Curve in Sailing

Should we all be looking for marginal gains? Or is the average racing sailor clutching at straws when looking to make a series of small often unrelated improvements which some may say are just a case of diminishing returns ? So in other words - When does the learning curve become an exercise in diminishing returns, with only marginal gains to be had from minutae of tweaking?

I think we even have to step back a little here and think about what a sailing and racing learning curve is composed of and how it may appear:

What are the building blocks of our learning, and should we look to polish these all the time, each in their own case, or to deconstruct them and reassemble as a whole? 

What shape is the learning curve in sailing from junior oppi sailor to being Knighted Sir Ben Ainslee??

How is your own learning curve_?

Marginal Gains vs Diminishing Returns vs Clutching at Straws at the Impass

Well there is an odd little dilema there some sailors seem to have. They think that they are at a stage of 'marginal gains' and run around the boat tweaking things, and getting the crew to do small, sometimes odd changes to how things are trimmed and so on. A key characteristic of this type of often frustrated sailor, is that they most often resort to spending money on bits and pieces aka ' go faster gadgets'. 

Yes sailors with top results are in the realms of looking for small tweaks to get that extra tenth of a knot or half a boat legnth on a rounding or a quarter of a bow on the start line, but many mediocre sailors seem to hit a wall and give up on advancing their own skills or the crew dynamic and instead, tweak like hell, and often end up selling up and buying a handicap boat with supposedly a 'bandit rating'. They have missed something in their entire outlook or some major part of their learning curve.

Steep, Abrupt Steps on the Learning Curve

To my mind the learning curve has some steep sections followed by practicing at that level for a while, before you move on to learn something  new, and in doing so move onto another steep section. In fact you could say that there are some parallel learning curves for different skill sets,  which have to really run parallel and in the right sequence at each stage in order for you to master that little steep bit of the overall curve of performance and ability.

These are what I can summate as > 

1) boat preparation and rigging, 

2) sail set-boat-balance-trim-course-steering ( the classic six of learning to sail and remembering to check under way) 

3)  the key four key manoevres- luffing, bearing away, tacking and gybing

4)  tactics & rules, 

5) wind and tide strategy

6) .......and also you can choose to take as either its own entity or as something which goes across all these :team work and the dynamics of the team.

Each block outlined above has of course dozens of sub components. However it can be difficult for the eager new sailor or developer racer to see the 'wood for the trees' if they consider their abilities, problems and challenges at a lower level and start focusing on getting really clued up on a very small detail, or on a detail which on its own will not create the synergy they were looking for as part of the whole picture of 1 to 6 above.

To exemplify: take the case of a sailor who reads a lot about sail making theory and technology, and spends time, effort and money with a sailmaker in getting new sails made for the boat. However within this 'block' there is also rigging, and of course it relates to trimming the sails which in turn relates to team work. The gain may have been greater in learning if the existing sails were being utilised with correct rig settings, and the trimming was matched correspondingly and then the crew work around say tacks or sail changes was made better.

Passing Go to Move On

In the early stages of your learning curve then, you must really focus in each and all of these key areas in order to be able to progress in terms of ability and performance in racing. Later on as you start to be more competent at all of these, then you may want to look at singeling out one particular area for a focused improvement, and eventually as an expert sailor you will be looking for marginal gains - small ways to improve which are either summative or even synergistic as a combination of small incremental improvements across several areas.

Take at the early stage of sailing my first boat which was a TASAR,  and my under estimation of the importance of rig set up. The boat when carrying an optimal crew weight, has a design wind of 9 knts. This means it is fully powered up, and in more wind you will be depowering by flattening the sails after this wind. I went out one day with a new crew in and get loaded up very suddenly, as I found out sailing her in force 6 gusting 7 one day which is up to 35 knts!  For the boat in that wind we were seven times over design wind, and I had not set the rig up for any major depowering and did not really bother to flatten the main much on the kicker/cunningham and outhaul. I could sail the boat competently if not competitively in light to medium winds, but made an idiot of myself with a new crew by not thinking rig tune was important as the wind built through the morning.

To say it another way, you cannot make up for very much if any of a gap in your necessary combined set of learning steps in these different skill and knowledge areas by using small tweaks  here and there...............If you are missing or lacking skills in just one building block, then this becomes the weakest link in your sail-game! 

Further up the learning curve, it may be one of these areas which requires special focus in order for you to enjoy a good increment in performance. Take my own example : 

My Own Next Steep Bit

My own next step is actually to really start to master wind and tide strategy, which is something perhaps I should have learned more on in sailing school way back when in fact, just at a lower level. You learn a bit underway of course- at sailing school on longer 'tours' you learn that one tack is favoured for getting round a headland > if you race on wednesday nights in a prevailing wind direction and there is a wind bend feature, you learn quite quickly that the side it is on pays, and that boats go over for it in a decided 'motorway' route once they are up the course a bit. But some things are not so easy to gather or to use much intuition with. For example the tide-wind vectors which are quite complex to understand and although I have read a good many examples in books, I struggle to visualise or be able to calculate them for a given sailing area ,time point and course.

Also with wind shifts, apart from the gusts here in the northern hemisphere invariably being veered and thus favouring starboard tack, but only on an otherwise unbiased or right biased course!! I do not really spot any given interval or rythm in other shifts and minor variations in wind stregnth. Also getting to define potential wind bends when the wind alters course big time, or I am new to a venue.

Thinking About It All- Mastery Again and the Plateau

The key elements of sailing are then a bit like building blocks, but at some points along the learning curve you have to see them as joined-up-writing and be able to practice and race at the level you are competent to. This is then the plateau stage as the proponents of training long periods without apparent gain advocate.  What this means is mentally preparing yourself to not become frustrated with your current level of learning, your current technique level, your crew's ability and most of all for racers, your current level of results. 

With results as a top bench mark, you should be looking for consistency and not be frustrated by say mid fleet results, or if you are a bit better then only occaisional wins with a steady top 10 result. Being aware that you are on a plain is supposed to be a joy. You can drop your shoulders and lose some of that aggression and frustration on the race course and within the crew dynamic. 

Communicate to your crew that this is a time for practice and enjoying sailing at the level you are at, and just doing your best without trying to bust a gut so to speak. This "time" could be a whole season, a series over many weeks, or a championship week. You should feel that in the previous stage of the learning curve you have introduced some new knowledge and skills, and now it is the time to practice these before aquiring new skills such that we walk before we try to run. 

Dropping your shoulders and just sailing as well as you can does not mean that you are stagnating. Mentally you are getting used to being calm and making often more modest and sensible decisions, while you and your crew's motor functions (motor-neurone, balance, timing and coordination in the team) are all actually improving and being increasingly 'hard wired' as in other sports. This is why the plateau is important in martial arts for example. 

A bit like the belt system in Karate, ok, we are a pretty good yellow belt, we practice a while at yellow level, then we do some decisive, intense training to reach the green belt test. 

Further to this not being a time of stagnation, as we sail more and more by second nature, we have more time to have the 'head out of the boat'. This in itself can improve or consolidate results over a season. Also it means that we can start to note the areas which we would like to look at at the next phase of steeper learning, once we have mastered our current level. If we choose to look at one and all of these small items in a season, then we miss the point of plateauing. We break the mechanic of programming in a basic level of required competence. 

However it is clear that dropping our shoulders and being more objective IN THE BOAT is also a side effect of plateauing. So we are more likely to be able to spot mistakes which can be easily corrected without disrupting the plateau flow. Accepting our little lot in the world on this plateau, we also demand of ourselves that we do this level right more and more of the time. Practice makes perfect eventually, but also you can consider that repetition irons out mistakes for a base level, which then becomes the foundation or launch pad for taking the next, steep learning section of the curve.

For a team with inconsistent results, taking this mental approach also allows for this kind of failure mode analysis- what goes wrong, how often and perhaps why. It can be that the helm in particular, has been pushing too hard - taking manoevres too fast, being too gung-ho on the start line, not paying attention to positioning and right of way boats......then the helm needs to be jacked down a notch and realise that they should sail to what they can do and not reach for the area they can't.

Raising Your Game Means Opening Your Mind 

A plateau time may feel a little bland at points, but you get a lot out of it : the motor abilities and 'auto pilot' effect is very strong for the whole team in particular. But as mentioned you also get food for thought in what areas are weak. 

Further to this though, you need to be open to new learning and new input. As the season reaches an end, a wry sailor may mention buying new sails in the spring and ask for tips from a sail maker if they can sail with them an evening for example. Or there may be winter courses in warmer climes, or courses to look at into the coming year. As I blogged on before you may want to look at sailing dinghies, or crewing on another boat as a way of breaking your familiarity and opening you up to new learning experiences. You may want to do some quite different crew team building. 

Going back to the food-for-thought from your plateau time, it is really important to scrutinise these, group them under the main headings and prioritise or make a sequence of these.

Goal setting for the new steep bit of the curve then should comprise both analysis of your weaknesses from the season and any external input, and also some going out and looking at the blue sky - what is available. Much of all of this means above all one thing which boat owners can struggle with - swallowing your pride. It may take the owner of a 40 foot regatta machine to go back to sailing a wayfairer at a sailing school in order for them to make that next step up the curve in their ability and results.