Visualizing Your Laser to Victory

The Ouija-board effect can win you races. Just place your hands on your Laser and ask, “Who is going to win this race?” Well, your Laser may not end up pointing at you or your opponent, but the principals of the Ouija-board effect can improve your Laser sailing skills and straighten out your head.

Ouija boards work because, when we visualize things, our brains send small impulses to our muscles and what we imagine begins to actually happen at a very subtle level. The Ouija board marker floats along over the Ouija board with little resistance as our tiny muscle impulses move it where we want, or where we fear it will go.

Research shows that this applies to sporting type muscle activities as well as fortune telling ones. Individuals who “practice” shooting baskets by sitting and visualizing successful shots can initially improve as much as those actually shooting the ball at a real basket.

This same concept works when steering a car or boat. You go where you look. As your eyes focus on a particular spot, or a particular boat’s gelcoat, your steering will tend to drift toward that same spot. This also works with goals.

Setting a goal will pull your attention and effort toward the direction of the goal; picture your brain impulses tweaking your self-image and your emotional and cognitive comfort level toward the goal you’ve set. In this case visualizing the goal makes it real, establishes the idea as reasonable and begins to prepare you for the activity of accomplishing it.

If you want to win races, what do you visualize? Should you picture yourself first across the line, or your acceptance speech at the awards ceremony? How about crossing the entire fleet on port tack toward a huge right shift?

Use visualization to:

·         Gain skill at boat handling maneuvers

·         Gain comfort managing your positioning, timing and strategy during a race

·         Gain experience with boat on boat tactics

·         Gain understanding of the rules of racing

·         Establish your complete buy-in of seasonal goals

·         Get comfortable finishing with a higher echelon of boats

Visualizing winning is important, but only one aspect to work on and less important than visualizing doing each maneuver really well. And visualizing the common maneuvers is more helpful than imagining homerun type moves.

I like to work my way through the sequence of actions needed to improve any particular maneuver (tacks, jibes, acceleration, etc.). I focus my time on maneuvers that make me most uncomfortable or that I have had the least time to practice. Then I picture my successful management of each aspect of the race (starts, mark roundings, hitting the wind shifts, etc.) But I always leave time to just live for a moment in the world where I am as accomplished as I could reasonably hope to be this season.

It’s important to visualize details of a maneuver or aspect of the race. The details helps to create a real picture and cause your muscles and expectations to twitch in the exact way you want. Early on in my Laser sailing, I spent one March continually picturing, very slowly, each choreographed move of a roll tack. When I first launched the Laser in April, my tacks were way ahead of where I had been the previous October.

A few years back I decided to concentrate my pre-season virtual practice on heavy air jibes. I pictured hundreds of sequences of steering down, tweaking the sheet having the sail flip over my head as I leaned out to the other side and thrilling as the forward pump of the sail pushed the boat forward. I was both more comfortable and smoother during the first day’s practice than I had ever been jibing a dingy.

I find that as the season gets closer I start sailing races in my head. I work to get at the line and hold my position against a fleet of Lasers; I work with the waves and wind to hold my lane against a competitor below me; I get involved in messy mark roundings and I have tacking duels that require roll tack after roll tack. By the time the first regatta comes around I have almost gotten myself back into the awareness and thinking that I need to have as second nature in the midst of a regatta.

It’s important to bring all the aspects of a race into your visualizations. I play with wind shifts, waves, lulls all over the course, etc. At first it takes me days to finish a race as I constantly restart it to bring in an aspect I’ve let slip – I forget to keep an eye on the boats to windward of me to see if they are reacting to a shift, etc. – let’s start over.

When you get to picturing your ultimate success for the season it is crucial to picture reasonable achievement. If you stretch your imagined accomplishments too great for a given time frame or our starting point, your unconscious self will tend to reject the image as impossible. So, make the image doable. A stretch is good, but keep it realistic for the time and effort you plan to invest.

None of this is magic and won’t come to be without time in your boat. But sitting in your easy chair waiting for the weather to warm up a bit you can get in a lot of practice by twitching your muscles and tweaking your head. Can you picture it?