Hi Mary:

Actually this a pretty interesting thread. We got a fitness program as part of being on the US Sailing Team last year that really changed the way we went about preparing for sailing. Casy and I are Masters swimmers, but swimming really isn't related to sailing at all, and we have over the past year stepped away from swimming a bit and focused more on the US Team program. The program that Rob Slade (the guy who was the strength coach for Chessie Racing during the last Whitbread, before it became the Volvo Ocean Race) set up focused a lot on core strength, balance, and strength in muscle groups that are used on the boat.

Here's a laundry list of what they recommended for trapeze dinghies, including Tcats.

Core stuff: We do a variety of abdominal exercises. We do lots of crunches with a balance ball under our butts and our feet together so that we have to balance while doing them. We do medicine ball situps where we throw a medicine ball back and forth to each other as we "sit up". These develop quickness. We do back exercises to strengthn our backs.

We do a variety of stuff to develop our legs since you're using your legs to grind sheets from the wire. These include one legged squats, with the other leg on a balance ball, wall sits, lunges, leg extensions and curls.

We do several different rows to develop pulling muscles. We do the traditional bent over rows with free weights, inverted rows (like a pull up from lying horizontal) and one armed cable rows using a machine.

Pullups develop muscles needed to pull yourself up so that you can come in off the wire standing up. We also do dips, chair dips, and triceps pulldowns.

Other stuff we do includes free weight stuff including bench press with either bar, or dumbbells, shrugs, biceps curls. We also do shoulder strengthening exercises with shock cords and light weights.

The biggest eye opener to me was the indoor rower. Many gyms have these things and they are the most efficient method of crushing your butt that I know of. The rower is really great for sailing because it really works the muscle you use in sailing cats. You drive the sliding seat with your legs and pull with your upper body. And since you are using nearly all muscle group, including all the really large ones, you consume a ton of energy. The rower is a huge aerobic workout. We do at least a half hour on the rower. We like the rower so much that we got one for home, which we named Destiny, as in "I have a date with Destiny." We've incorporated interval training into our rowing workouts, such as we do in the pool.

The weight stuff is really good to do and the benefits are obvious within a few weeks, but the program that we were given is not manageable as soon as you go on the road for weeks at a time, or have a job and fundraising to do. It was like working two jobs to go to our regular job, do a three 1/2 hour workout, and then try to raise money. And coming back from regattas and just diving into the weight room is a recipe for problems. I started to develop an overuse injury to one of my shoulders last fall and was advised to substitute other exercises for dips and anything that put one's shoulder at extreme angles while supporting full body weight, since I'm older. As I understand it, as people age the circulation in the shoulder area becomes reduced compared to that of a 20 year old and it becomes easy to wear the joint. I've recently been very careful about my shoulders, and have started concentrating more on the rower since Tcat helms don't do the full-on, constant sail trimming that the crews perform. The rower rocks totally.

More info on the indoor rower can be found at www.concept2.com. Those things are amazing!

I had thought that I was at a disadvantage compared to the younger sailors that we are racing agains because of my age. I thought that my strength potential was prolly less. Then I learned that a long term study of elite swimmers and other masters athletes showed that as long as people remain injury free and stay fit, they do not lose muscle mass as early in life as was originally thought. Many of the athletes in the study were putting in as good or better times in their sport as they aged into their 50s and later. According to the study, muscle mass loss begins in early 60s for women athletes and late 60s for men, not in the 30s as was previously thought. I have to say that I have a long way to go to be an elite athlete, but the results gave me hope that a geezer in his late 40s can race competitively against anyone.

-Greg