Day 2-3

See Mom I am wearing my sunscreen.
Okay, so Day 2 went a little better in some respects, although this experience is extremely humbling.

I have been working hard to improve my weaknesses, but with my limited budget, the improvements come slower than for the athletes who don't have to work and get to train full time with coaches and training partners. I am incredibly lucky to be here competing and learning as much as I can.

Once again, I struggled with starts. This is a major difficult problem for me. We actually had 4 starts in two races, because each race we had one recalled start before re-starting the race. Each time I had a good start in the start that was recalled, and hesitated in the start with the black flag up. My mantra for today is to turn the 'hesitater' off! I am not naturally a quick reflex type of person. Something weird happens during the starting sequence, and my mind say "Wait, stop, hold the phone, this is something new, let me stop and think about it!" and the wheels start turning. This is the exact opposite of how I should act on the starting line! Today my goal is to turn off the hesitater.

After a good morning discussion with coach Mark Littlejohn, I have a better understanding of why I hesitate and how to fix it. Basically, I have doubt about how far back from the line I am, and to eliminate the hesitating, I have to eliminate the doubt. I learned a tool that Marit uses for knowing how far back from the line you are when there are no line sights. It involves pre-race homework. You sit on the line near where you plan to start and use one arm to sight down the line at the pin, then turn and use the same arm to sight down the line at the boat. You should feel your arm turn 180 degrees. Then drift back a boat length and do it again, your arm should turn less than 180. Do this a couple times and you can get a sense of how far back you are at different angles. The next thing is to recognize the line sag phenomenon and how it works on a black flag - which is something I forgot about yesterday. Mark drew me a picture with a great explanation of the line sag shape, and now I know exactly where I was in that sag yesterday. I played the 'beat your neighbor' game well yesterday, but didn't realize that me and my neighbors were all well behind the line.

Here is the picture:

Happy to explain this better later, right now have to get ready to sail. Our start is at 1pm today. Still processing a lot of what I just learned about confidence and doubt and decision making. Focus today is on having confidence in what I know, and forget about what I don't know.