One World Diary

Mark Chisnell the America's Cup campaign's tough training regime

OneWorld's eco-program recently involved a beach clean-up in Seattle

So it's good-bye to the land of the flat-white, and hello to the land of the no-foam-latte. Another OneWorld Challenge Auckland session is finished and it's time to head up to Seattle for a break from the Southern Hemisphere weather - which has remained as bad as ever, and apparently got worse after we left with a low pressure bomb that blasted the Gulf with 100 knot winds.

I think we're all glad of the holiday, a time to rest some pretty tired bodies, and get ready for what lies ahead. I'm sure you've read about an America's Cup crew's daily schedule a thousand times before, so I won't bore you with the details, but it rarely comes in much under 12 hours.

And for me, the hardest part of all this is usually just getting up - I'm not to be mistaken for a morning person. And that means a real love-hate relationship with the gym. I hate the idea when the alarm goes off, but once I get there it doesn't take long to get into it. Let's face it, if kicking a ball round Viccy Park with 30 of your mates is work, life can't be that bad - even if you had to get up at 5.30 am for the privilege.

Our trainer, Scott Crawford, works hard to keep it interesting, and we've invented some new games along the way. I suspect some of these won't survive the 'injury-free' training regime that we will return to after the break, and pool rugby's probably at the top of the at-risk list. There are no excess rules, just two teams, each defending an end-zone - put the ball down on the edge of the opponents end of the pool and you score a point. That's about it, though punching, kicking and drowning are discouraged by peer group pressure.

There's no offside or forward pass rule, which would make the game a little more like gridiron than rugby - if we could get organised with a forward line to protect the passer. But since we can't, and since there's nothing to discourage the rolling maul (except the imminent possibility of drowning whichever unfortunate happened to get caught in possession) the game's a real hybrid - we call it Thugby. God only knows what the people in the rest of the gym think of it all.

We mix up the pool work-outs with other aerobic sessions, football and touch rugby during the lighter summer mornings, and basketball in the winter at a local gym. There's also been a weekly boxing session - non-contact, I hasten to add. No one's got any great style (except the bloke in charge), but since we're just encouraged to beat seven parts of hell out of a bag that doesn't really seem to matter.

For the big guys weight training is the core of the work-outs, the grinders are pushing some serious metal around. Some of the power boys are now bench-pressing 70kgs on each arm - a weight known (I like to think affectionately) as the 'Chissy', since it happens to match my body weight ...

Since we're on a short break now, with sailing to resume in Auckland at the beginning of July, the organised gym sessions are over - though Scott's parting email to us all did include a home training regime - very thoughtful of the bloke. But we did organise some get-togethers in Seattle, where the Yacht Club held a reception for the team, and we got to invite many of the people that are supporting us, both morally and financially.

We also did a beach clean-up down at Shilshole, with the help of Seattle Yacht Club Juniors and some local Lincoln car dealers. We'd offered our services to the Seattle Parks Department that run the place and they were very organised in putting us to work.

The group I was in were assigned to cutting down some non-indigenous trees that have rooted along the shore-line. This is an earlier stage in the same process that we were part of in New Zealand, where we were planting the replacement native species. Though it did seem a little strange to be cutting down trees in one country and planting them in another. No prizes for guessing which was more fun, and there was a satisfyingly large pile of logs at the end of it.