Recently it has been a busy few weeks for Annie, Kate and I in the run up to our World Championships taking place in Perth over the first two weeks of December. After the announcement of our selection to the 2012 Olympic Team there was no rest, one week training in Weymouth followed by winning an event in St Quay, France. Then a week off before heading to Weymouth again then here we are now in Spain, just south of Barcelona training with the Russian team. We had a short break after the Pre-Olympic event in Weymouth in August but now we are very much into full swing until the Olympics next year and time seems to be going far too quickly!

This period before Christmas is quite a tricky one to know what to do in terms of training. Having the World Championships in the usual ‘off season’ time confuses things a bit so we are training with the end goal of the Olympics in mind while of course trying also to prepare as well as possible for the Worlds. Then after racing in Miami in January we will have our last few months training where we are able to make the last big (and hopefully important) gains before it is Games time already.

Since we only race against one other team at a time in Match Racing, the training can also often be quite intense and this week has certainly been no exception. We have a good relationship with the Russian team having trained with them quite a lot in the past but (and they won’t mind me saying this) it is always an amusing time as it is often quite surreal one way or another. As an example last time we trained with them in Weymouth, we meet up on the first day and there is the helm, middle, bow then not too surprisingly a spare crew but more surprisingly they have no coach but a Doctor with them! We then see them the following week in St Quay and there is not one but two coaches added to the group. Last week we then turned up in a very small town in Spain to train with the girls again and the party has grown even more to include another spare crew, a fitness instructor, the very important Mum to help cook and an umpire! For two teams of usually six sailors we now have fifteen people from six different Nationalities, it just shows how differently you can about the same task of trying to win a gold medal in London 2012!

Annie, Kate and are really excited about the next eight months, excited and also a bit nervous of how much we want to get done in what seems like so little time. We have fantastic support now though from so many different areas whether its family, sponsors, everyone locally or the rest of SkandiaTeam GBR and we really hope and believe we can deliver to everyone next year in a simply once in a lifetime opportunity. Watch this space!

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