Worlds

This week, I competed in the Radial Youth (U19) World Championship in Kingston, Ontario. If you read my update from last week, you know that I was really hoping to get a strong result at this regatta to redeem myself after my brutal performance at the Canadian Youth Nationals. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen: I finished the regatta in 64th of the 142 competitors, far from the top ten finish that I was hoping for. Still, I learned too many new things and developed too much over the course of this competition for me to consider it anything less than a positive learning experience. This being my first world championship, it was also just an incredibly cool environment. I made friends with fellow sailors from all around the world- Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Great Britain and Belgium just to name a few. It’s crazy to think that all of these different people are just like me, pursuing the same Olympic dream. But there’s only one gold medal given out every four years. Knowing how good these other sailors are and how hard they are working just gives me that much more energy, drive, and determination to apply to my own training.

I’m going to keep this update relatively short, because, honestly, my head needs a brake from sailing. I’m at the point that I don’t even have dreams when I’m sleeping anymore. My brain just continues to analyze my races. I’m no expert, but I would imagine that’s probably not healthy. I’m taking the next two weeks off to spend some time with my family and do things that don’t involve sailing before I get back into the training. This also gives me a chance to reflect on this past year as well as begin to plan what next year will look like as I transition into the Full Rig so that when I do get started I am focusing my energy in the right places.

Thanks for reading,