Life on the road as a professional athlete.

Charlotte in Action for Team GBR

Here is an except from the diary of Anna Dobson, currently the best Scottish Laser Radial Olympic athlete who is still battling for selection for the one place available for a sailor from Great Britain to compete at the 2012 Olympics.  It describes her winter training last year - up to sail for Gold 2011 where she won selection to the team for the pre Olympic event at Weymouth.  This gives some insight into the level of commitment it takes to make the step by step small improvements  necessary to become one of the very best.

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GRAN CANARIA TRAINING CAMPS

2011 started off with a bang. The fireworks had only just fizzled out and I was on an early morning flight to Gran Canaria for my first training camp of the year. The climate in Gran Canaria is fantastic, usually a balmy 23 degrees and a huge variety of wind and wave conditions, which makes a perfect venue for winter training camps when the sea temperature in the UK hovers around an icy 8 degrees.

We sailed from the Real Club Nautico de Gran Canaria which is a beautiful club which has hosted many World and National Championships over the years. They have enormous wood paneled walls along all the staircases which have the names of all the champions from that club and those who have won regattas the regattas hosted there. It made for some really good coffee time reading picking out all the people you knew or had read about on the boards. The club had a full size gym too which meant keeping up with the gym programs easy. We even witnessed the 60 yr old + weekly Bench Off competition which I thought was an exclusively a Finn boy game but I was amazed to see some of the old men benching high into the 80kilos.

The camp was 10 days and mainly light winds. The venue has attracted a great deal of teams which provides a great opportunity to join up in the afternoons and do some long races after we have done our own exercises in our respective groups. I like training like this as you are always relating the small things your working on into the big picture of the race.

Back in the UK the next thing on the agenda was BOOTCAMP! I wanted to do a month period of high intensity training in the gym with all the specialists. I’ve recently had some lower back pain so it provided a good opportunity to investigate and work on the problem without the irritation sailing can cause to the injury. It was also a good opportunity to just beast myself in the gym and really maximize the gains at the beginning of the season so I can maintain later on in the year when the focus is definitely on the sailing. After fitness tests at either end of the bootcamp period it looks like I’ve definitely got stronger which was the key area I wanted to improve on. A usual day would include a weights session in the morning and then a core session or boxing session. I would then go home for a couple hours and try to do some admin but would invariably fall asleep and wake up ready to do the afternoon cardio pyramid session. I was a bit annoyed with myself for continually falling asleep at lunch time and I though it was just from the tedium of admin but in actual fact that is exactly what the rowers and cyclists do. They train hard early morning and then go to sleep for 3 hours until their next session in the afternoon to maximize their recovery. I couldn’t believe it when I fessed up to the physiologist that I was sleeping at lunch time that he highly recommended it!

After I finished a month of bootcamp I was feeling really confident with the gains I’d made and a having a whole month off sailing I was absolutely mad for yachting! I did two weeks of training with a couple of local sailors doing some boat handling exercises to brush up on that and lots and lots of time on distance starting work which put the foundations down for my next big training camp in Gran Canaria.

My second trip to Gran Canaria was a two week camp starting on the 21st March. This time I joined two of the top radial girls from Belgium and Czech Rep and a training group of Belgian youth boys. In all we had 12 in the group which was a perfect size for lots of race practice and starting practice. My coach, Tom came out for the second week which was brilliant to go through some of the decision making protocols with him which we’ll use in the upcoming regattas. The best part of the camp was I really noticed the progress I’d made strength wise in the breezy conditions, which is a huge boost and makes motivation easy for the next block of strength sessions as I can see the progress and I know the program is working.

Next on the agenda is a week long cycling camp in Palma with two of the 470 girls and another laser sailor - the fight for the Queen of the mountains is going to be a tough fight I think this year! After that I stay out in Palma for another week of laser sailing with the British team and also a small training regatta out there. Everything is building up to European spring leg of the World cup series at Princess Sophia regatta in Palm Mallorca at the beginning of April and then onto Hyeres Semaine in the south of France at the end of April. These two regattas will act as a mini peak for me to see where I’m at after the winter training program and assess what I need to work on before the first major peak of the year at Sail for Gold regatta in June which is the qualification for the Pre-Olympic Test Event is August.

Fingers crossed everything goes well for heron in. So far this winter has been great fun and I can’t wait for the regatta season to start!"

(Charlotte Dobson, March 2011.)