SKANDIA Team GBR is the British Sailing Team in the Olympic and Paralympic classes.

The team consists of the Performance Squad and Development and Transitional squads, which jointly total around 70 sailors. The sailors train and compete across 10 Olympic Classes: Finn, Laser Radial, Laser, 470 men and women, 49er, Star, NeilPryde RS:X men and women windsurfers and, new for London 2012, Women’s Olympic Classes Match Racing.

There are three Paralympic Classes: the Sonar, 2.4mR and SKUD18.

Great Britain is the world’s top Olympic classes sailing nation with the British Olympic team sailors topping the medal table at the past three Games in 2000, 2004 and 2008.

In a new Dorset Echo column, Skandia Team GBR members will be bringing an insight into the campaign for glory in 2012.

Here’s John Robertson, helm to the British Sonar Team who will be competing in the 2012 Paralympic Games, who describes autumnal training in rather warm weather.

WELL as they say in sport, ‘You have to put the hours in’ and that’s what we have been doing for all of the month.

We found that with all of the racing that we have been doing that our fitness and conditioning has been taking a hit so after a quick fitness test by our resident physiologist Ade Campbell we found we had a chance to make some really good gains over the winter (ie get fitter).

All of this involved planning every week to include: Sailing, weights, aerobic, core, physio, stretching, yoga, tea making, cleaning (boats/house/ourselves), oh and packing containers, I’ll get onto that later!

So now we have a plan, like Baldric said.

We planned to hit it really hard and being aware that we were going to be sailing at the same time as doing all the other stuff we knew that it was going to be tough and so it proved; we did the first week gradually getting up to speed then by the end of the week we were getting pretty tired and as it happened it’s been the windiest October for a while so we were all hanging by the time we had the Sunday off… Phew!

Now with the pattern set and the workouts streamlined it’s been a matter of ‘manning up’ and getting on with it, fortunately our bodies can remember what real hard training is like and soon enough you can feel the body changing and adapting to the training quite quickly and the only other issue of that is you have to rest properly and get to bed after dinner rather than watching Downton Abbey or X Factor.

Now we have the next few months to plan for with our World Champs in Port Charlotte, Florida in the new year so we had to pack a container with two of our boats.

This all sounds fine until you realise that the box is 40ft long and our ships are 23ft long each so yeah, slight issues with squeezing the babies in but after six hours at a nice industrial estate we managed to get the doors closed and send off the box to the states via Kent, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa… etc.

Fingers crossed that the customs officers in the States don’t keep the container like they usually do… wish I knew someone in the Mafia! Only kidding (but seriously if you do?) Nearly time for bed and dreaming of my first holiday in four years next week, off to Abu Dhabi for the F1 race so four days in the desert for me, trying to get Jenson’s autograph.

Big cheers, John