What is mental training, exactly?

Everything you adjust on your boat, you adjust outside your own head. Mental training is the work on what runs inside it: how you settle before a start, how you carry on after a mistake, how you decide under pressure, how you sit out eight hours of calm without losing yourself. It is training, not a conversation about feelings. You rehearse something the way you rehearse a tack, until it holds while you sleep.

It should do two things: move your development along faster than it would go on its own, and make sure that at the decisive moment you actually produce what you can produce in training. The second is the harder one. Almost every sailor can do more than they show on the course or in a tight berth. And what makes you better in a race makes you freer when cruising, and leaves room for enjoyment.