Jonathan Lexington Sailing Coach
This piece is by Dr. Lex Bertrand, high-performance sailing coach who takes people to their edge.
SAILING, PERFORMING and WINNING
I WANT to tell you a story about Jonathon Lexington Sailing-Coach.
Jonathon Lexington Sailing-Coach lived near the sea, taught by the sea, thrived on the sea.
His aim was not to master the sea – he was too sensible to tackle that impossible challenge.
But he wanted to achieve as near to race perfection on the sea as possible.
Not himself, though. Rather, through his students.
His burning ambition was to teach them how to achieve things never seen before on the water.
To encourage them to race at levels beyond imagination.
To inculcate them with the notion that nothing is impossible.
Some people thought Jonathon Lexington Sailing-Coach was quite mad.
“Barmy,” they said. “Crazy as a loon. Show him the door and keep him out.”
Especially when he began insisting that his students sail backwards, upwind.
Without a rudder!
This had never been done before – except maybe by first-time students in a 14-footer caught by a 30-knot gust in close proximity to the Cerberus …
“Sailing backwards without a rudder is what it is all about,” Jonathon Lexington Sailing-Coach said.
“It sounds impossible”.
“It looks impossible”.
“It should, quite rightly, be impossible”.
“But I believe that it can be done.”
His point was proven one day when one of his students did precisely that. He sailed backwards upwind without a rudder.
“Now,” said Jonathon Lexington Sailing-Coach, “when you achieve the impossible, it shows that anything is achievable.
“There are, truly, no boundaries.”
And the day that his student, the one who sailed backwards, won a World Championship, Jonathon Lexington Sailing-Coach was vindicated.
Not by everyone, of course …
But by those with imagination, courage, and vision.
* * *
I USE this story – with all due respect to author Richard Bach – to illustrate what I am saying and where I am coming from.
I can relate to Mr Bach’s character in his famous 1970s novel, Jonathon Livingston Seagull.
For those who don’t know the book, Jonathon Livingston Seagull was precisely that – a seagull. But he was different from the remainder of the flock. He wanted to fly faster than any seagull had ever done before.
Jonathon Livingston Seagull was always pushing the boundaries.
So am I.
He took performance beyond all previously accepted limits.
So do I.
And he had his critics!
Say no more …
But at the end of the book, Jonathon Livingston Seagull finally receives his deserved accolades.
I don’t seek accolades, rather I simply want to gain the satisfaction of seeing people achieve at levels beyond contemporary expectation.
Of taking the sport of sailing to new and previously unimaginable heights.
You see, I ask them to step out of the framework of the norm, and jump into the realm of the astounding.
Yes, I do ask my students to sail backwards.
I’m very kind – I let them use the rudder for the first few times until they get the hang of it …
The concept of sailing backwards is anathema to many old salts. With the general configuration of a boat and its sails, it really should not be achievable.
And that is what I am saying. If you can achieve this, then you can achieve anything.
Arthur Brett has achieved this.
Arthur, a student of mine, can sail his Contender craft backwards, upwind, while out on the trapeze, without the rudder.
Why?
It enhances his already brilliant skills of being able to do things such as, for example, confound his opponents at the starting line by being able to move his boat sideways to windward and snare the best position.
It gives him the confidence to know that he can do anything at anytime in any situation in the boat.
It makes him feel that he is the true Master.
Picture, for example, the first race of the World Contender series in Kingston, Canada, in 2001.
There is congestion on the starting line, as all but one of the contestants jockey for position.
Why? Because traditional thinking is telling them to do so. The conditions indicate to them, in their mindset, that that is the only place to be. The handbook on racing would only confirm that opinion.
The one exception? Arthur Brett.
He takes a port tack, comes out on the other side of the fleet, finds a wind shift, and wins by nearly two minutes.
Is this luck? Or something else?
The simple fact is that he is the odd man out, daring to try the seemingly impossible.
The result vindicated the approach.
In the series, Arthur never finished lower than third, and had the title so wrapped up that he did not need to sail the last race.
I might point out here that Arthur achieved this remarkable feat after just an 18-month training program with me.
No doubt he had the talent to begin with – he was a world champion in sailboarding in his earlier years.
But it has to be remembered that he then took nearly a decade off, that he was in his late 30s when he got back to sailing, and his first outings at the World Contender titles saw him come only 13th and 8th.
We dared to be different and he won the title.
To prove the point, he won it again, 12 months later!
So, how different were we in our preparation?
As an example, conventional thinking would have had us working on boat speed in the last few weeks before the titles.
I haven’t got a problem with that. Boat speed is important.
But the boat speed came naturally, and continued to improve with Arthur’s tremendous ‘feel’ for the boat. He was always in the right place, at the right time, going the right way – and fast.
Instead, we worked on race-manoeuvre confrontation. That is, dealing with boats coming at you from all sorts of angles at all sorts of speeds causing you all sorts of stress, and thus reducing your boat speed as you confront the problem.
My idea is to subject the sailor to this situation so many times that, come race day, it is a confrontation that he can deal with automatically, without stress, and without losing focus on maintaining boat speed and concentrating on the race.
Thus, in these last weeks, I put him through gybing duel after gybing duel, in winds as high as 35 knots, with me competing hard for space in another boat.
But not another yacht. I was in an 18-foot runabout powered by a 115 horsepower motor!
Arthur will relate to people how, after returning from Canada, one of his first jobs was to repair the gunwales of his wooden Bonezzi-deigned hull.
“Because I had been sailing it so hard before, my boat was a bit of a mess,” he told everyone. “Especially where Lex ran over it with his power boat …”
The point was, when the race was on, no matter who came at him to contest his space, he was never fazed. In fact, in the weeks immediately prior to the worlds, there were never any collisions between us, because Arthur was always skilled enough to keep out of my way.
Yes, I will admit it, that in his training, Arthur got knocked around. He got washed up on the beach, he broke masts, he shattered booms.
That’s because I also realised he was struggling against opponents in big breezes.
So I had him out working in extreme conditions every day. People were amazed to see him out on the water, in the middle of winter, sometimes before dawn, sometimes two hours after sundown, with the waves crashing and the temperature at 10 degrees. But it prepared him for anything.
Then we discovered he had a weakness in dirty air.
That is, in lighter winds, if he was in someone’s dirty air, and they were below him, he could not stop himself from falling down on top of them.
We spent two months at it – he will tell you it was torture – but he learned how to climb out of dirty air of the boat below. Imagine how this helped him, just after the start of a race.
What else was required to help Arthur Brett achieve his ambition?
How about the purchase on the mainsheet?
Most Contender sailors use a ratio of 4:1. Arthur uses 3:1 and we have been experimenting with 2:1.
Going upwind, he prefers to hold the mainsheet and work it, giving him exceptional sail control, while all others take the traditional, easier course of cleating it.
That, of course, means an extra strength requirement, and thus he does a lot of gym work, building the upper body and doing barrel squats to ease the agony of the interminable crouching on the gunwale.
Another example of our approach was that he would tack with the vang – the rope/sheet that extends the upper edge of the mainsail - pulled on to its absolute maximum. This gave him top-end torque, but seemingly gave him no room to get under the boom.
He was able to develop a shoulder-dipping style to evade the boom.
The upside was that, in each tack, he was able to gain a full boat length on his opponents.
The downside was the lumps he got on his forehead from evading the boom!
With all this happening, he would capsize up to 40 times in a single training session out on the bay.
From the shore, and to the untrained eye, he would appear a novice.
In fact, he was the reverse. It was because he was not doing the conventional. He was pushing the boundaries.
It got to the point that some of the experienced sailors around the club were feeling that he was, in fact, getting too “cocky”.
A defining moment came one day when, in a fit of pique, he broke the tiller extension and it looked like all bets were off. It seemed our campaign was ending there and then.
I put it right to him: “Do you want to do this? You tell me.” I headed in-shore and let him think about it.
Ultimately, he came ashore, found me, looked me in the eye with a glare of unbelievable determination and said: “I am going to do this.”
So, this is what I do.
I challenge people.
I challenge belief systems.
I shake up the definition of “normal.”
I explore the concept of being different.
Of how overcoming challenges leads to high performance.
My coaching philosophy is simple: I want to develop and fast-track ultimate performance, where the athlete is total master of the sport, totally in control of his or her environment, and totally empowered to control his or her own destiny.
To do this, athletes need to accept that true high performance is both “scary” and “magical” at the same time.
That in a no-limits, quantum environment, anything is possible.
I challenge their belief systems so that concepts as diverse, mind-stretching and challenging as quantum thinking, the Chaos Theory, paradigm shifts and cognitive dissonance, are regarded as normal.
How, for example, is this for a challenge? Juggling three balls, while skipping at the same time, and balancing on a Swiss ball!
Can it be done?
It sounds like it cannot.
But wait. Jonathon Livingstone taught himself to fly at 217 miles per hour. That’s nearly 350 kmh.
He worked out how to go 5000 feet in the air, tuck his wings in close, and leave enough wing tip out, just like a falcon, for control. He then zoomed down toward the water surface at a frightening speed – one small mistake and he would have been a mess of feathers.
Just imagine you could actually juggle three balls, while skipping at the same time and balancing on a Swiss ball.
Why, then, you could do almost anything in life.
And some of my students have got very, very close to doing this. I’m convinced one day it will happen.
You see, the aim of most competitive athletes and their coaches in sailing is success through skills, speed and fitness.
I believe we should be striving for athletes to be able to achieve things that are impossible. To fast-track this approach, to transcend all that has gone before.
In this environment, I want to be able to do several things, involving all training/competition components, in four major areas:
1. Redefine High Performance
Is high performance winning one Olympic Gold Medal?
Is high performance winning multiple medals and achieving Olympic/World title “legend” status?
Is high performance achieving Master status, being a Don Bradman, Walter Lindrum or Tiger Woods and totally dominating a sport?
I am thinking of, talking about, pushing for, believing in, and feeling that it is possible to achieve something that even transcends all these!
2. Redefine Training
Training should become non-linear and non-cause-and-effect in a challenging, no-limits, quantum environment. A combination of open-environment and closed-environment training situations.
The will allow the athlete to be looked upon as always being ‘faster than anyone’ and having that apparent hallmark of all champions – ‘being lucky to be in the right place at the right time, every time.’
It is important to realise that traditional methods of improving boat speed, such as crosswind two-boat tuning, are not neglected, but that other concepts are introduced. For example, as we did with Arthur Brett, setting up deep in someone's wind shadow, and being able to sail out to weather and gybe around their bow. The challenge being not just to be able to do it, but to be able to do it without fear or hesitation, and in the shortest possible time.
The use of a powerboat to choreograph situations is critical to this training. The powerboat must be used as another yacht, in a competitive environment.
This is an example of where right hemisphere processing must be trained and developed, and accepted as normal.
3. Shatter the Comfort Zone
This is no place for an easy day on the training track. The athletes must be put through exhilarating, perhaps even frightening experiences, to test their mettle and prepare them for anything. For example, the boat being towed at high speed, while sailing, through crashing waves, with the athlete on board, eyes closed …
Or sailing without the rudder. At night. With me “seeing” them with an infrared video camera.
4. Give Them Challenges
The athletes must be bombarded with seemingly impossible exercises and routines to stretch the boundaries. The skipping/juggling scenario is one, as is sailing backwards upwind without a rudder.
How about dancing with the boat? And I mean what I say, dancing “with” the boat, not “in” the boat.
Or gaining 100 metres upwind on each tack?
I believe I have proved the point with the success of Arthur Brett. In fact, my approach has been confirmed with Arthur successfully defending his title in January 2002 on Port Phillip Bay.
The intriguing point here is that a different set of circumstances – and therefore a different approach – came into play.
Whereas the year before, in Canada, he was so far in front he did not have to contest the final race, at Melbourne, he was two points in arrears of his principal opponent, three-time world champion Andrea Bonezzi of Italy.
This time, he not only had to finish in front of Andrea, but also keep him well down the field, out of a place.
“You have to sail him down,” I said.
And sail him down, he did.
After an opening psychological gambit of unsettling Andrea’s usual habit of being the last to go out on the water to sail the final race, Arthur sailed the meanest, toughest race I have ever witnessed in years of competition.
While the others sailed merrily off, Arthur and Andrea went hard at it, down the back of the field, like two gladiators.
Arthur did not give him an inch. He stifled him. He covered every move of Andrea, frustrating him at every turn, limiting his air and his freedom, so much so that experienced observers would not have been surprised if Andrea had have tossed it in before the first leg was finished.
But he hung in there, making Arthur only more determined – even resisting the temptation to race away and try and work his way through the field, knowing that Andrea, with his own not inconsiderable skills, might find his own way to the front and turn the tables.
At the end of the day, Arthur returned to shore a worthy double champion, having displayed extraordinary skill, daring, and originality, in two vastly different scenarios.
But what about the thousands of other potential sailing champions? Are there any more Arthur Bretts out there?
And how did I get into all of this?
In the 90’s I was Sports Science Coordinator and National and Olympic Coach for the Australian Yachting Federation, and Coaching Coordinator for the Victorian Institute of Sport High Performance Sailing Program.
From 2001 I have been working as a consultant to the VIS.
Also I currently coach Olympic and International Sailing classes , and am, as I have outlined, coach of current dual World Contender Champion, Arthur Brett.
One of my enjoyable roles was as a consultant to the Italian Olympic Sailing team at the Sydney Olympiad, working with Head Coach Valentin Mankin.
I wouldn’t be where I am today without Peter Spence, Dr. Noel Blundell, Roger Flynn and Dr. Nick Marsh.
Sailing has been my life.
Striving to make the apparently unachievable happen has always been my passion.
If Jonathon Livingston Seagull can do it, so can Jonathon Lexington Sailing-Coach.
We would like to thank Lex for allowing us to publish his work here.
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