Competitor Prep and Tips Jamie Morgan

For me personally, the prep for the Na2onals started two days a5er Abersoch last year. At 94kg I finally come to the conclusion that I was just too far out of the ballpark to be as quick as I would like, in a range of condi2ons. Having briefly pondered the idea of geGng a phantom, my partner pointed out it may be healthier if I tried geGng fiHer and lose weight to sail a Solo, rather than maintain my lifestyle to stay big enough for a Phantom. I launched into a simple plan of a few ea2ng rules and took every opportunity to either run or cycle, even if that meant no sailing.

By the start of the season, I had managed to get down to my then goal of 82kg and since then I have hovered around there with a brief trip to 84kg when I had a month off exercise prior to the event in holland. Holland was tough with the big Saturday of 4 races in windy condi2ons which forced me into ac2on having ran out of energy in the last race and limped over the line. Since then, I have mostly be doing one of three things in different amounts; I either do 10k runs, turbo trainer sessions on the bike of around an hour and a half to 2 hours or sailing with one rest day per week. None of this is set in stone and is flexible around work, open mee2ngs and my 2-and-a-half-year-old. A typical week is rest day Monday, 10k Tuesday, turbo Wednesday, sail Thursday, run Friday, turbo Saturday and sail Sunday followed by a 10k if it’s been light winds. If I do the ac2vity from home, I also tend to do 100 sit ups a5erwards. In regards to the on the water, I started this year with a new boat which I changed some of the spec so it differed to my last boat, which I think has made some gains. I maybe don’t get as much 2me on the water as people may think, I try and sail Sundays in the club racing and the Thursday night racing is normally done with Anna in our Rs400, so very different to the Solo. The big thing that I think has made the most difference this year has been the camera mounted to the back of my boat. In the early part of this year, I recorded everything I had done, uploaded it to youtube, then Oliver davenport and i tend to watch them back and discuss what we are seeing over the phone in regards to our technique, what we’re doing in the boat and how we could improve this. I think there are a fair few people that think that we train together all the 2me, however in the last 2 years other than open events which we have both entered, we have only actually sailed on the same piece of water as each other 3 2mes and 1 of those was tes2ng different sails. We have found that we can make some significant gains by watching ourselves back and being ultra cri2cal of each other and this in some ways is beHer than just doing more sailing.

Hayling isn’t somewhere I have spent a lot of 2me sailing. I have done two Solo opens there, both fairly early in the year and spent 2 weeks there 9 years ago with the Moth worlds, where we had not much wind and the Moth is a very different boat to the Solo. So I will mostly be reading the guides, talking to people that sail there a bit and keeping half an eye on the locals.

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