Not a big, national era, just a little era-of mine.
As I prepare for the Albacore Canadian Championships taking place in Hamilton, Ontario, I have had a chance to reflect on what I have learned from my two years of preparation and then competition at the Masters Laser Worlds. As much as I was excited about racing at the World level, I was curious to see how an effort like that would affect me as a person, and how the ultimate outcome would affect my character.
I have always been a firm believer in sports competition. It provides an excellent opportunity to see what you are made of without risking dire consequences. It is, after all, just a sport, but it also by its nature demands that you make it more than a sport. In the middle of competition, indeed, it sometimes feels like the consequences are significant.
Competition helps you to die to habits, or characteristics that need to be forsaken. When it was clear to me that physical fitness was a critical component to success sailing a laser, I improved my diet. I also made a habit of gym time and made sure I got the rest I needed to recover. I became interested in all things healthy, and am now much healthier for it. I think I understand better what it means to be a bit strange, and be comfortable in it. I remember so well racing in Brockville, where I left the dock before the rest of the competition and felt the mockery that attends being such a ‘keener.' I cringed, but at the same time, I knew what I was about, and realized that day, that I actually liked sailing not only for the competition, but for the pure experience of it.
Competition allowed me to experience the affection of others. When I made it clear that winning the Worlds was important to me, my friends, love ones and-most importantly-those who would pay a price for the commitment, had a chance to say, "how can I help?" Some proactively found ways to make emotional room for my effort. It was a revelation to me that I could be allowed to pursue something so selfish and that there were people who would unquestioningly support me for the sole reason that it was important to me.
And there is something satisfying in being able to say that you are pretty good at something. When you compete, you get a chance to say that, eventually. Before that, you have as many-probably more-opportunities to say the exact opposite. In fact, I expect there will still be times when I will look pretty pathetic to myself and think I can't sail worth a damn. It was wonderfully telling when I saw Tom Slingsby's status bar on his Facebook page a day before the end of the Senior Worlds, "Tom Slingsby," it said, "can't sail for shit." Here is a guy that could sail backwards faster than most of us sail forward, and he's feeling that he can't sail at all! It was laughable, but at the same time, it showed me that the pursuit of excellence is relative. In terms of the actual, personal experience, my commitment to win the Worlds in the Grandmaster Radial division wasn't much different-relatively speaking-from Slingsby's effort to be Senior World Champion. We hurt, we succeeded, we were pushed and prodded by the same metaphorical winds. Of course there was a difference in scale, but not in the scale of our experience. I cried like a baby when I had to phone my girlfriend and tell her that, with my 22, I had lost all hope of winning. I can't imagine Tom Slingsby crying any harder. My head swam with delight when I won the Ontario Radial Championship without having to sail the last race. Not a huge achievement, but it was MY achievement and meant a lot. I think, as much as some minor championship might mean to a David Wright, or a Tom Slingsby.
Competition provides focus. It demands that goals be set, and as soon as you set a goal, you become accountable to the goal, and you begin to see the world around you differently. There is tremendous power in goal setting that way, but your goal has to be chosen with care. In hindsight, I realize the goal I set was very strong for my preparation, but weak during the actual competition. It got me to the Worlds in top shape and prepared to win, but didn't help me win the actual competition. (The goal was to be able to say with conviction, on the last day of the Worlds, that I had done everything possible to win.) I needed to confess that I actually wanted to win the Worlds, but I was afraid to do so. I had been told that results goals were not a good idea. I see the logic, but at the end of the day, they are actually the most honest goal. They have a place in the process.
In an odd twist, I realize that I am not sure what exactly I want winning to say about me. On the surface, there is a certain amount of affirmation I am looking for. Winning is affirming. But, then I watch very good sailors sail, and look at the time and money they spend sailing, I wonder if it really is just a matter of time and money, and not of some essential element of a winner's DNA. There is a very good sailor in the Albacore fleet named Barney Harris. I don't think I have ever seen someone with such dominant boat speed in a class. He is so much faster than everyone else, he looks like he from another planet. How does he do it? He does virtually nothing else but think about sailing, tuning, and developing that boat. And if I had the same resources, would I be as good? I don't know, but the point is, there is nothing special about the guy, except that he has spent more time doing what will make him successful in that boat. In other words, we are potentially the same as him, but will never really know.
I see this played out at different levels of our fleet. I see guys who spend less time sailing than I do, and guess what? They are not as good. And they will never be as good as long as I sail more. I look at the guys ahead of me. They have sailed more than me and have more resources than I do, and so it makes perfect sense that they are ahead, no? If I had the same resources and time, I would be there, too, right? My point is, they should be ahead, ergo, they are no different than me, ergo, when I am ahead, it does not make me better than the guys behind me, it just says I spend more time and money sailing than those guys.
And the word "better" is such a sticky word. What do I mean by better? Is there a moral component to competition? I would say absolutely not. I heard Chris Cook talk about some of the very good sailors in the Fin class that are also, in his opinion, not very nice guys. Certainly there is no border you cross on the way up a fleet that requires that you be a "good guy" before you continue to the top. There are major assholes at the top of every fleet, but also guys you would give your right arm to help. So, "better" is not a measure of your moral character.
What about better in terms of raw, innate talent? Good question. There are guys that have natural talent that don't need as much time in a boat as I do to make it go fast. But if that ability is gifted to them, then again, there is nothing special about their ability to win against me. They did nothing exceptional beyond be born into the right gene pool. Hardly an endorsement for them as "better."
So "better" must mean something else. But what, exactly? I think it means nothing outside of my own worldview and my personal experience. I want to feel "better" than the other guy and I don't really care what the "better" is. I don't care if there is any basis for the feeling in logic. I am looking for the feeling that is described by the word "better." I don't actually want to be better, I want the feeling of "better," regardless of whether I am better or not.
It's a pretty good feeling. When I win, the feeling is actually pretty fantastic. It is enough, and I think I can now disconnect the feeling with the moral judgment implied by the word "better."
I have drifted a bit, but not really, because these thoughts, I believe, are the thoughts we should be thinking about sailing. If not, why sail? When there is so much more that sailing can deliver than the experience, why not obtain it. Why not examine the truths that sailing in competition reveals. Why not dig deep, go long and spend forever finding and enjoying what the competitive experience offers up to us.
The Worlds will not be my last worlds, because one of the keenest and most painful lessons of the worlds was this: You can't teach experience. Experience can only be gained by experience, with time, being there. This was my first Worlds. What hurt me most was my lack of experience in worlds competition. I now have it-fully, deeply, tragically experienced. I will not let this experience go to waste.
Rob Koci races in both the Laser Full-Rig and Laser Radial fleets around District 3. Currently, Rob is the District 3 secretary and maintains a frequently updated race diary on D3Laser.com. Rob's home port is St. James Town Sailing Club in Toronto, Ontario.
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