Discussion: WUOC

All,
Just letting you know that the US team is all here...we had the opening ceremony this afternoon in the beautiful city centre of kosice. The long event is tomorrow--karst topography, though much different than anything in the states. Thanks to all for supporting/cheering us on and thinking of us! Time for a team meeting, but thought you deserved a quick hello!

Chelsea and the rest of the team: Good luck on the long event! It looks like a challenging race:

13.9 k, 485 m, 25 controls for the men
8.5 k, 290 m, 18 controls for the women

Event website: http://www.wuoc2006.sk/

There was a World Cup near Kosice many years ago; I remember the terrain as being absolutely great. Open woods, small & big depressions everywhere! I hope you guys all enjoy the woods and the event.

Everyone on the American team made it through the long course today with no DQs (a feat in itself considering that 10 teams had at least one disqualification... presumably mispunches). The best times posted were by Brendan Shields for the men and Viktoria Brautigam for the women, with Chelsea Cunningham close behind. Viktoria and Chelsea even surpassed two Norwegians.

Overall the competition was very fast, with a winning time for the men of 72:31 on a 13.9 km course and a winning time for the women of 53:22 on an 8.5 km course. Both winners were from the Czech Republic.

Tomorrow is the middle distance race. Go USA and Canada!

i think most of the dsq's were actually due to twisted ankles or knees as there were lost of rocks hiding in the grass in the many stony ground areas. The finish area was scattered with bandaged up people. The forests were very fast but I found it frustrating that the hidden rocks were slowing me down and I had a couple of close encounters. I had trouble reading the map and looking down for rocks at the same time, a little trainning in this type of suface would have helped a lot. It reminds me of Fallen Timber in Alberta where the grass is long and, as the name suggests, there are fallen trees hiding in the grass.

Maps and photos from today's race at:


http://worldofo.com/news/ownnews/wuoclong.html

It looks like Cliff Cave County Park!

In Spring, 2005, SLOC hosted a Middle Distance A-Day at Cliff Cave with its preponderance of sinkholes and trails (no tall grass or hidden rocks though :) ). This Slovakian terrain is simmilar, but on a much larger scale in terms of both breadth and depth. Quite a unique challenge, especially with the bad footing.

Very good runs today in the Sprint by Patrick Goeres from Canada and Viktoria Brautigam from the US.

It's amazing how fast these races are at the international level... Patrick was only 1:48:04 behind the winner, yet finished in 47th place out of 76 competitors. Viktoria was just 2:43:06 back, finishing in 44th place out of 61 women.

Info, maps, and photos from the sprint and middle distance races can be found at http://worldofo.com/news/ownnews/wuocsprint.html.

A word on the terrain/difficulty etc.

Long: Karst terrain but big features and good visibility, so navigation was easy as long as you got it right. If you end up in the wrong depression, however, a lot of time can be lost.
Runnability was excellent if you didn't mind some stony ground underfoot at times. Winning speed was unsurprising.
Lots of fun!!!

Middle: Check out the maps on worldofo. The uphill part was pretty straightforward. 11 was the first difficult control - the map seemed strange here, perhaps becasue of the green...
Afterwards it was almost all downhill and superfast. And lots of fun!!! Control 17 across the slope a good few people found tricky - it looked simple but there were no big features. I aimed off way too high. Control 18 the better route was probably to the left.
Otherwise the course was straightforward, the difficulty coming from the high speed. And lots of good orienteers did make mistakes...

Sprint: Cross-country race. Verging on boring. Fastest runner wins. Hence an unknown brit in 4th. And Neil in 64th for the third time that week!
Although I was well sick that morning, and not much better afterwards...


After repeated experiments, I have concluded that, regardless of terrain, I lose about 11 seconds for every minute an elite runner runs, when neither of us is making mistakes.
That's 18% more or less.

18% down does not qualify for finals, so even a mistake-free run will not get me through. So I have to get faster...