JWOC Long

On Monday we had the long distance race. Thankfully the weather wasn't too hot, a cool 23 degrees, which was lucky for the athletes due to the length of the courses. For the men there was 15k and for the women 10k. We were told that this is the longest JWOC race ever due to the fast nature of the terrain. The area was mostly open with patches of dense vegitation and 2m contours which made for tricky vague navigation in places.

 Because of my start time I was by myself at breakfast and in quarentine which probably wasn't the best for pressure which was building right up to when I had to leave for the start. To get there there was a warm up map which had the pre start marked on it, a nice bit of navigation to get you into the race. I made it with plenty of time to go and spent the few minutes before my start trying to stay cool and covering myself in water.

 The course itself was challenging and overall I didn't feel I was prepared. I wasn't pleased with my result but Alastair and Niamh performed much better and should be happy with their positions. The first race of JWOC is always going to be tough and some people can cope better with that than others. Hopefully now that we have the experience we can return and achieve the top results that we all want.