SKILL DRILLS
If all this talk of training has inspired you, Mark Hosegood offers some practical advice, “These 2 drills will be pretty good for your readership to go away and practice, they are something that whoever has come to my slalom clinics knows about as I bang on about them incessantly!
1: Find a buoy when out sailing and practice your start procedure and starts using it. Where most people slalom sail, there’s always something out there to line up on. This really helps getting your speed, distance and timing sense to be second nature and a natural thing to do.
2: Train Gybing! Go out and either gybe on a set time on your watch or give yourself a small area to stay in and do a bunch of gybes. In the end, like in F1, most of the overtaking happens on the corners, so go practice cornering!
If you invest 30 minutes of every session into these two simple exercises, there’s no way that you won’t get better in both gybing and starting and definitely have less stress about these two points, which when you’re in competition is one of the most important things there is! The tendency is when practicing slalom to tune and tune and tune to basically beat your mates in a drag race… that’s great, but there’s a lot more to slalom then going fast and that’s where the new ‘skool’ of top PWA slalom racers are coming into their own. Now the kit is so good, you don’t need (or now want) to be 110kgs+.”
