Back on the Water

I launched my new boat on Saturday! Apart from being pretty excited to finally put it on the water, I was also (in part) dreading being back on the water for the first time since the last day of my National Championship in early January this year. I sail a Laser Radial now and due to injury and work commitments I've been out of the boat for 10 months which will normally lead to a significant drop in skills and specific endurance, so knowing that it was going to be relatively windy wasn't exactly inspiring as I had visions of not only spending a lot of time upside down but being in quite bit of pain while sailing upwind. As it turned out skills and endurance don't seem to have been too badly affected by the break and if memory serves me correctly I might even have been better in some areas than when I last sailed the boat - go figure! To be fair I have spent some time in the gym over the past few weeks, but it was all rehab work and I can't hold any of it responsible for the level I was at on Saturday. Must be down to subliminal learning.....big thanks in that case to the NSW Youth team sailors I was coaching for three days straight before Saturday.!

Background info

It's not long after my return from Athens, competing in the 2004 Olympic Games as part of the Australian Olympic Sailing team and I've made a commitment to myself to change classes from the Yngling - the three person women's keelboat event to the Laser Radial which has recently been named as the equipment for the single-handed women's event for Beijing 2008.

Sailing in the Athens Olympics was the result of about half a lifetime of sailing. Some would say it was half a lifetime wasted, but then those people in my life have spent their lives being very responsible and making money and building careers and never taking chances that might lead to unsafe places. Of course some of those have good reason - they've already been in very unsafe and unsavoury places and are highly motivated to be as far from those places as quickly and humanly as possible. Others have always had very comfortable lives in the mainstream of growing up, being educated and living as they were expected to in order to fit in. For my part I've made some interesting choices that others say are brave and courageous. They were neither - I just did it to get where I wanted to go, and I was often a little uncomfortable, but mostly comforted by the fact I was heading where I wanted to, for no other reason than that I wanted to. Perhaps not particularly productive from the outside, but the experiences I've had cannot be bought and I feel rich.

The biggest thing I learned over the last four years: that if you want something enough, it will happen. You have to make it happen sometimes, but you can do it and it will happen. The second biggest thing I learned was that it's the talent of super persistence not super skills and ability that get's you where you want to go.