JWOC Relay

The JWOC relay was an intense race in a slightly different way from the others that I had run this week. This time, I was running the first leg, which meant I began in the middle of the pack with no spacing. There was 2 meters of distance between me and the best runners. This puts a little more pressure onto you when you run.

When the gun signaled our start then the group stampeded to the start triangle. I let myself be passed by people who were going faster as I tried to read the map. In the future I believe that I will try to stay with part of the group and keep my pace up so that I run among more people out on the course. To the first control I was drawn off of the optimal route by a group with a different forking, and got my control about 10-20 sec slower then I would have if I had run up the marsh.

I learned that if you run the first leg of a relay, then it is very useful to be physically comparable to your competitors. When there is someone 20m ahead of you then you can save a ton of time if you know where they are going, and that you need to go to the same place so for 30 seconds you can relentlessly chase them down at a faster speed then you could if you were navigating. Unfortunately I did not have this advantage, and ended up not being able to chase any of my competitors down physically. Up to the spectator control my race was relatively clean navigationally, and I stayed ahead of people by not making mistakes. Through the chute I tried focusing on my upcoming legs and did not run so fast, which proved to be detrimental afterwards as I was passed by two faster runners. The mistake I made was when I did not slow down enough in the last part of the leg after the chute. The terrain became very technical and my plan was inadequate and so I lost a minute correcting my mistake. I ran with a couple others at this point, unfortunately leading, as a) I didn't trust them b) I was doing my own thing.

The final controls I was able to nail perfectly, and before the pre-go control I saved myself as I came up a steep hill by walking. Then I took a good route to the second last control but lost about 5 seconds to the go control by cutting straight up a bank and some vegetation. At the go-control there were two others with me and one of them put off a fresh 400m pace off to the finish passing me. If he had kept it up then he would have beat me who was trying to keep up with him without killing myself completely. Fortunately that only lasted about 50m, and so with about 100m left I sped up. Seeing/feeling him not speed up behind me gave me more energy and so I was able to keep the pace up all of the way to the tag off.

It was a good thing to know that my main limiting factor for this year's JWOC was my physical strength, and yet I was able to improve by roughly 25 spots in the long distance, and at least 35 spots in the middle distance from last year.