Master The Note Taking Tools

Quick! - dig out your local knowledge notes for Kiel. Now find your tuning numbers from last year in Miami. How about the takeaways from the last time you worked on starting in 20 knots?

The problem with good notes, is that they're hard to keep organized, so remembering what you learned a year ago, or even a month ago can be difficult, and often times notebooks turn into black holes for gold nuggets.

For coaches, there's a bigger problem, which is that we don't know what's going into those notebooks, so we're not sure what's actually getting through to our athletes.

There is no question of the value of note taking in improving information retention (just ask Hamish Wilcox, coach of Olympic Gold Medalists Pete Burling and Blair Tuke), but our systems for note taking are out dated. Racing Alpha provides four features to bring your note taking game into the 21st century, and accelerate your learning curve.

Basic Best Practices

The number one piece of advice that we can give is that wether you’re taking notes in Racing Alpha or elsewhere, you should record your thoughts daily, as soon as you get off the water so that it’s fresh in your mind!

We recommend the following workflow:

1. Hit the dock, boat on dolly, sails down, start syncing your watch with your phone.

2. By the time the boat is de-rigged, and you’re back in dry clothes, your track will be waiting for you in Racing Alpha.

3. Click on the track journal, and start taking notes!

4. If you forgot to track that day, you can always visit the dashboard and create a journal entry, there as well.

Keep in mind that the best notes are short thoughts that use positive reinforcement when possible; instead of writing what went wrong, focus on what the solution is that you’re shooting for!

Here are the four tools that we think can make your notes even more effective.

1. Collaboration Tools

Instead of a black hole, your notes should be something that sparks discussion with teammates and coaches. In Racing Alpha, any journal entries that you make on Public tracks will be visible to any teammates and coaches in your Teams, while notes on Private tracks will be visible only to you.

On your Dashboard, you can check out journal entries made by teammates, and reply to them to share your thoughts. In addition, your coaches will be notified every time you make a journal entry, which can be a great tool for them to figure out what information you’re retaining, and what you might need to go over again.

2. Video and Photo Attachments

As a sailor, if you like taking notes by hand - go for it! Write in your notebook, snap a photo on your phone and upload that photo to your track journal for the day, maybe with a few typed, searchable keywords incase you want to search for the photo later.

As a coach, this is a great way to share your video and photos with athletes at the end of the day. Photos can be directly uploaded to the track journal, so that you can share leach profile shots, or key still frames from the day. Keep in mind that if you’re uploading from an iPhone photo, the images are often stored as HEIC format which isn’t currently supported, but you can convert to a JPEG, super easily by taking a screenshot of the photo before uploading.

For video sharing, you can share your videos or any public videos, simply by posting the link to a youtube video in a comment. Racing Alpha will automatically identify that you’ve posted a Youtube link, and display the embedded video for the sailors.

3. Gold Star Track Segments

Have a big tactical moment on the race course? File away those moments so that you don’t forget them! With your tracks, the Gold Star tool allows you to save portions of your day to your journal, so that you can recall those scenarios later. Try staring a section of track, and discussing it with a teammate or coach to analyze why it worked, or what could have been done differently.

4. Tags, #Hashtags and The Search Bar

Finally, the goal of the journal is to be a tool that you come back to over and over again. Next time the forecast calls for a windy day, you should be able to search back through your tracks to recall the fast settings you used last time you sailed in those conditions. The search bar currently allows you to search for terms, and tags, so when you file your notes, check the appropriate boxes (“Local Knowledge”, “Speed” or “Boat Handling”) or create your own searchable tags with the #hashtag.

One trick here is to keep thoughts separate in journal entries. For example, split:

“We sailed with a lot of downhaul and felt really fast. The right side paid because of pressure. #BoatSpeed #LocalKnowledge”

Into:

“We sailed with a lot of downhaul and felt really fast. #BoatSpeed #17knots”

“The right side paid because of pressure. #LocalKnowledge”

In the future we plan to build out the search bar to search for wind speeds, wind directions, venues, and more.

Do You Know When To Switch Your Focus?

How do you know when your improvement curve is slowing, and it's time to either switch your training methods, or switch your focus? After two years of looking for a tool that would create accurate maneuver loss metrics, and save me hours in debrief prep during boat handling training blocks, I gave up and built my own.

Let's rewind to 2017 when the mission to better assess sailor development, and the road to creating Racing Alpha really began...

After the 2016 Olympics, I had seen the top level in Rio, and I knew it was within reach. The key to success: boat handling mastery. With new talent entering the class and veterans slated to return, the process began to build the best tacks and gybes possible. My belief was that by focusing on these two, super simple fundamentals, we could create a modest advantage against even the top teams in the fleet, and that this boat handling edge would allow us to take advantage of smaller shifts than the competition, play more conservative downwind strategies around the lay lines in the corners of the course, and be more aggressive tactically near the marks. Translation: mastery of the fundamentals = high end performance opportunities down the road.

Using the foundation we had laid in 2015 and 2016, I began building a series of Role Sheets for maneuvers, refining the details that went into top tier maneuvers, but pretty quickly realized that to make the final 10% of gains - those last few refinements which would allow us to go from top-10 to best-in-the-world, we needed to be able to test some of these details in a quantitative way.

49erFX Overpowered Tacking Role Sheet

I set out on a mission to find software that would allow me to measure maneuver losses, only to find that nothing really existed that could do what I needed. So I rolled up my sleeves using a tool called GPS Action Replay (GPSAR), and started working on a process for evaluating maneuvers. The end result after a month of daily testing and tweaks was this spreadsheet, which required me to use GPSAR to manually set a wind direction, select the maneuver entry, record a number of data points, select the tack exit, record more data points, select the whole tack, record more data points, and then input those data points into formulas to calculate losses and potential calculation error. Each day, after hitting the dock, I would collect the GPS tracker, download the tracks, put the tracker on the charger, and dig in for 1-2 hours of processing to get data for ~10 tacks per day. Not efficient time, but ultimately a very effective process!

We designed experiments, first trying to figure out what the optimal tacking and gybing techniques looked like, and then focusing on how to recreate those techniques as consistently as possible. We realized that while the individual data points for each maneuver were sometimes unreliable, if we used many data points together over a long period of time, we could see trends. We could compare one set of 10 tacks to another set of 10 to compare technique. We could look at improvement over time to see if we were moving the needle in the right direction. A few times, we hit plateaus, but using data from the rest of the fleet, we knew that we were not quite there yet, so we switched our training methodologies, and kept hammering away.

Finally, we made the breakthrough. We narrowed in on 4 factors that moved the needle, and once we found them, we focused relentlessly on being able to repeat them. By the Europeans in May of 2019, we knew we had a weapon.

Racing Alpha has been the evolution of this process. The manual tagging tool allows for this exact same calculation that I used in my original spreadsheet with only the need to select the entry point and end point of the maneuver. Using this process, you can tag 10 tacks in a minute or two, and compress my 2 hour process into 2 minutes!

The next evolution is in making the automated tagging process more accurate. Every time you add a manual maneuver tag, Racing Alpha gets a little bit better at figuring out how to identify your maneuvers next time. Right now, the automated maneuver identification is good enough to show long term trends in improvement in a meaningful way. Using the Reports tab, Lucy Wilmot and Erika Reineke have been tracking their improvements over time. The negative percentages in the bottom right corner of the graph legends mean that they are moving the needle in the right direction - minimizing their maneuver losses over time.

October training progress

November training progress

As they progress, these improvements will get smaller and smaller until their technique plateaus. At this point, the trick will be using the Expected Tacking Loss metric, to see if we’ve achieved those world class target that we’re after. If we have - hooray! If not, we’ll switch up the training technique, until we figure out how to bust out of the plateau!

There are a lot of factors outside of your control on the race course, but in the words of Hamish Wilcox, coach for Pete Burling and Blair Tuke:

“Boat handling definitely sits in the mental skills area as a ‘tick-off’. You know, it's something that you can just tackle and achieve. And you don't really have to have any special skills to do it. It’s amazing how many sailors aren't that great at boat handling. And yet it is one of the controllables one of the things that you can actually just achieve through determination and perseverance.”

49er Squad Gybing Improvements

In October, the US Sailing Team 49er Squad logged 31 hours in Long Beach and team Henken/Barrows made big strides in the gybing department. Back in September, we identified two gybing techniques - one which prioritizes hitting a high exit angle to get the kite to “pop” quickly while sacrificing speed, and another technique which elongates the turn in the middle of the maneuver, allowing speed to drop, but ultimately causing the kite to fill sooner, and speed to reaccelerate more quickly.

The “question mark” - fast turn - gybe.

The “VMG” - slow turn - gybe.

The maneuver loss for each tells a pretty convincing, and intuitive story of a 10 meter loss for the fast turn, “question mark” gybe, while a smaller 8 meter loss for the slow, “VMG” gybe. If you slow the turn down, and the kite is able to fill closer to the dead-downwind angle, the gybe is ultimately faster. But what about in tactical situations, where you’re trying to escape the “jump” as the front boat, or trying to attack and jump the boat in front of you?

The theory for many teams, is that a faster turn will lose less lateral distance, thus putting you in a better spot tactically in either situation. But looking at the data this is clearly not the case! Looking 12 seconds beyond the start of each gybe, the boat has returned to full speed in both cases, but in the fast turn (the track to the left), so much speed was lost in the middle of the gybe, and it took so much time to get back to full speed, that the final position is almost dead-downwind of the starting position (left of the parallel lines). In contrast, the slow turn gybe (the right-hand track) puts the boat nicely bow out on port, in a position where they would be bow ahead of a boat turning quickly, making them more likely to jump, or defend against the jump depending whether they were the leading or chasing boat.

The takeaway here: slow that turn down, and allow the kite to fill on a low angle before making up-turn.

In October, the 49er squad spent a lot of time racing around a short course, working on boat handling execution, and the improvement numbers from their maneuvers tell the story:

Using the Racing Alpha Reports (Dashboard>Reports), long term trends in boat handling maneuvers can be analyzed to answer the question: “Is our training moving the needle?” In this case, we’re clearly on the right track!

Understanding the Numbers

Each of the data points in this graph represents relative maneuver loss on a give day. In other words, the smaller the number, the less distance you lost on average in each maneuver that day. You’ll notice a lot of negative numbers here, and that’s because our metric is currently optimized to reflect “relative loss”. In other words, -5 meters of loss doesn’t actually mean you gained 5 meters, but it IS 5 meters better than a 0m maneuver. We plan to recalibrate our algorithms to reflect the actual loss on the race course, but for now, you should look at this as a way to measure trends over time. The downward slope of each trajectory (quantified by the negative numbers next to the colored dots on the right side of the legend) are indicative of progress over time. As the team went through the month of October, they lost less and less distance per maneuver on average.

If you have questions about how this is calculated, or why we have chosen to report relative loss metrics at this point in time, we’re happy to discuss it more, so don’t hesitate to reach out!

Positive 29er Alpha During COVID-19

For Racing Alpha sailors, Hoel Meynard and Kelly Holthus, two Cal Yacht Club practice regattas in October rounded out preparation for the winter season in Miami, Florida.

On Saturday of the first event, Kelly and Hoel put on a clinic for the rest of the fleet, with a killer high mode and consistent tactics characterized by starting to windward of the fleet and controlling access to the escape routes on right side of the course. Sunday morning, their speed was the focus of our debrief, highlighting their tight groove (as measured by looking at standard deviation of course over ground - COG), and their willingness to use a higher, slower mode to maximize VMG (on average, their speed was .3knots slower than the boats sailing a low/fast mode, but course was almost 3 degrees higher).

Note: As of 11/19/2020, the StdDev calculation actually displays the Average + StdDev, but by the end of the month, this will be fixed!

On Sunday, the rest of the fleet caught on to the high mode, and the Janov brothers rallied, but it was a little too late in the series to overtake Kelly and Hoel.

Two weekends later, it was Kelly and Hoel’s turn to learn from their Skiff Squad teammates. Both days started out light and lumpy, and speed was a challenge! Again, the high mode paid, but this time, the groove on that high mode had to be wider to keep the boat moving, again with slower speeds and higher angles paying off.

This time, Skiff Squad alum, Quinn Wilson sailing with Jordan Janov pushed the limits the most, and the results followed suit.

These training events were a dry run for the winter racing in Miami, Florida, and as the first Skiff Squad team to make the trek east since the COVID-19 pandemic began eight months ago, Kelly and Hoel lined up with the 2Niner fleet to test their progress. In eight races, the duo quickly adapted to the Biscayne Bay conditions, remarking that they were, “Just like the training in California,” and bested the fleet of 14 teams.

The only metric that EVERYONE knows how to interpret are the results at the end of a regatta, but we believe that by building a system of more granular evaluation metrics, we can shift the focus away from results to instead focus on the details. This process oriented approach develops a steeper learning curve in between competitions, and in the long run creates a more stable racing psychology when teams build confidence in the details!