Getting ready for JWOC...trainings, rocket man Ross and some tired legs

With JWOC only a week away the team has been training very well in the glorious Danish summer. We have been primarily training in the Tisvilde Hegn Forest which was only a few kilometres from where we were staying. The map itself was very different from the maps back home. Lots of inconsistent vegetation made running difficult at times and very little contour detail meant we were using our compasses a lot more. The map had hardly any hills and was dominated by small blocks of dark green which we tried to avoid in our route choices. This is very similar to the JWOC maps that we will be running on in a weeks time so will provide us with some valuable terrain experience.

Our trainings have focused on adjusting to the terrain, so they have been quite low intensity also giving us time to recover from the long flights. To do well at JWOC we will need to be aggressive in the terrain as this can easily push you off your line or slow you down. Technically we will need to focus on the usual so map contact, control flow and route choice. The team should be very well prepared for JWOC with the coastal parts of the forest very similar to the coastal areas in Woodhill forest.

Yesterday afternoon we got to witness Carsten and Ross race a 3km time trial at the track. We could see that both Carsten and Ross were pushing very hard which was reflected in their times. Ross smashed his PB posting a time of 9 minutes 4 seconds. This was motivating for all the team and hopefully we will be able to take this into our races at JWOC.