Trained to succeed

Tuesday 1 April 2009, 21:00 GMT

By Riath Al-Samarrai

"It might seem surprising," said Joel Rewa-Morgan, the Ericsson physiotherapist. "But they wanted to get straight back into it."

His words seemed inconceivable. It's been barely four days since the Ericsson twins reached Rio de Janeiro at the front of the pack, the two quickest teams in a leg that measured 12,300 miles and lasted nearly seven weeks.

But extended rest has not been the top priority.

"I had to struggle to get them to chill out and take a couple of days to relax and recover," he added. "The guys are really keen. We had a one-two finish and everyone is keen to get in the gym and push on."

And so, with 27,000 miles elapsed from 37,000, the sailors feel a need to drag their painfully reduced bodies back into training and develop the fitness they hope will carry them to the finish.

"Actually," Joel said. "The guys haven't reduced that much."

Huh?

"We didn't do too badly," he continued. "One of our guys from the Nordic boat lost six kilos but most of that was in Taiwan. Most our guys had the same average of about two kilos.

"Some of the guys didn't lose anything."

In context, a straw poll average of sailors from other team showed a typical loss of roughly five kilos. In detail, it offers another glimpse into that area of the Ericsson campaign commonly abbreviated to "extensive preparation".

The team spent 18 months in Lanzarote and, aside from learning the tolerances of the boats and sails, Ericsson Racing Team also developed their athletes to finite detail, preparing their bodies to cope better with the renowned stresses of a long time at sea.

Specifically, it amounted to a one-year physical training programme, geared around high fitness and low body fat, complete with fitness tests every three months. "We gave a goal to the guys to be between 10% and 12% body fat because we knew they'd be around that mark or less during the race," Joel explains. "There is no point spending a year training at 16% body fat when you are going to drop to less than 10%.

"The rationale behind it is you train how you compete. Most the weight will be lost in the first leg so you will spend most of the eight months performing at a level that your body wasn't used to, giving you a transition period. Our guys went through that transition period a year in advance. By the time race day comes they are ready to go and their bodies don't freak out with wild fluctuations, meaning they can operate closer to their best."

The physical planning did not end there. An even more significant component of the team's training orientated around fitness.

"We knew these guys' fitness was going to go down in the race," Joel said.

Now, with five legs gone, he illustrated the point. "I'd say in terms of strength some of the guys are 15% to 20% down on what they were before the race. Cardio about the same. Flexibility even more.

"Fitness is so important in a race like this because the levels will drop and probably impact the performance."

His job between the stopover is minimise the decline in fitness.

"It's about damage control," he said. "We get them as good as we can because they won't be as fit as they were in Alicante. These guys need as much in the tank as they can get in a race like this.

"We knew fitness would be an issue: these guys live in a 70-foot world, there's only so much mileage you can do walking around. We got them to as high a level of fitness as possible before the race so we have enough left in the tank in the last few legs.

"These next two legs will be pretty full on, especially the Atlantic crossing. I am wary of the guys getting to Galway and being burnt out because those last few legs are worth a lot of points. If we are not on the ball and well rested then we could potentially burn out."

Tackling that problem began today when the sailors returned to the race village. Joel is hoping to put the two crews through roughly 10 hours of training before the April 11 restart, topping up the fitness levels before the next gruelling spell onboard.

"We'll have them in on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. We'll do a light jog in the morning, probably two kilometres. Then some team stretching and then some body weight exercises and a light jog to finish. About an hour.

"After the in-port race we'll have them in on Monday, ramping it up a bit. We'll change the intensity of the body weight exercises and Friday is an off day.

"Not a lot of time but whatever we can do will benefit them."

As a team, Ericsson do not appear to have left too many stones unturned.