*For April and May we decide to join the two updates together as May was a complete month off for us.*
Coming off Palma we left no time in between training; we had the fire to continue to push. Just about 16 days of training before the 4 day event, we were focused on building our speed and starting abilities. With all our new kit that finally arrived from Barcelona, we had ample gear to test as a variable to improve our speed. In terms of starting we focused a lot on two boat, 2 min practices. We tried to simulate holding our lane after the start, one of the most critical moments in the race. Unfortunately, we had a poor event due to several factors. The skills we picked up through the training we simply weren't able to apply them in a real race. A combination of the long, intense 3 month period of training started causing exhaustion. Coupled with not enough time practicing our new skills prior to the event lead many of our starts falling apart. During the training we noticed the improvements building up and the failed starts were simply due to small errors here and there, so we are not concerned about how the results of World Cup Hyeres turned out. Our speed had a major improvement and we know the skills we learned just weren't reflected in the racing.
May we had scheduled a two week break back in Canada, but due to our amount of time previously spent in Europe we were forced to stay for nearly a month while we waited on travel visas to be approved. This has given us ample time to recover and from the few days back on the water we are hungrier to improve. While our travel visas are not complete sorted out yet, we have arrived in Germany and are preparing for Kiel Week. With about 8 weeks left until the Aarhus World Championships, this is critical time to push and finalize our skills for the first crack at Olympic qualification. We will be updating more frequently now through our Facebook page as we lead up to the event, so be sure to follow along there as well as with our monthly blog posts.