JWOC Trials

Masterton hosted the JWOC Trails and the second round of the New Zealand Orienteering Super Series last weekend. This consisted of a middle and sprint on the Saturday and long on the Sunday.

This weekend was another opportunity for me to work on my mental space for racing so I would be taking these races at maximum intensity. This comes at a good time with only 2 weeks until New Zealand Champs. As JWOC coach for this year it was also of interest to me to stay up to date with the progress of the tops juniors who I will be travelling with to Norway later in the year.

The middle distance was raced on a map called Riverside and you can see my GPS below. The high visibility made the navigation relatively easy but there were a few tight control sites where mistakes could happen. I had a messy start by managing to lose the tape to the start triangle – rookie as! – while I was reading the map and also found myself too far left at number one. Number 2 was a bit confusing for a number of people as it was hard to interpret the trees on the spur before the control. I stopped a number of times to double check as I ran across the open land and found myself too far left. 3 was also and tricky because of the micro route choices not visible from the map. The grass on the steep slope was very slippery and finding the good sheep tracks was beneficial but I paid too much attention to my running speed and found myself too high, losing about 10 seconds. From here I had an almost perfect run and was picking up the obvious features to help me simplify my navigation well.

Controls 8 to 14 were by far my favourite part of the course. The contour shapes were more subtle and hard to see from a distance so it was important to reference off the distinctive trees and stony ground where possible as these were more visible. It was important to keep your navigation ahead of your running because relocating in this area could cause issues with so many similar features.

I pushed hard to the end but had a small problem getting the stitch again like last weekend so I was a bit worried about where this might be leading as I have had periods of reoccurring stitches in the past.

I was happy to finish just faster than the JWOC trialists who had the following results:

In the afternoon we had the sprint race at Rathkeale College. I thought this was a good sprint race but the forested area could have been avoided as it was much harder to run through than shown, even on some of the small tracks. The race had many twist and turns and small gaps between the buildings which needed to be seen in advance. I got caught out a few times where I was navigating by feel a bit too much and didn’t see the gaps straight away.

My GPS here shows my route and you can see that I made a few hasty decisions near the end when I was thinking about running harder instead of staying focused on the navigation. I prioritised safety in the sense of minimising risks on the bigger route choices which paid off but I am most disappointed about not applying this approach for number 11. Here the forest was shown as slow run with some denser patches, and so it would have been much less risky to run around most of the vegetation and use the path to approach the control from behind. I didn’t manage to beat all of the JWOC trialist this time around and was 17 seconds down on race winner Tommy Hayes, and 14 seconds down on Cameron Tier.

These were the results of the trialists:

The Long distance for me was a mix of up and down with 1 very dumb error costing me the win and my pride as overall I placed worse in these races than I did when I was trailing for JWOC in 2011. The race started very well for me. I was focused and felt strong. Even with a significant error at 6, I had built a substantial lead throughout the most challenging part of the course. I had caught Duncan at 13 so knew I was up 4 minutes on him but after taking a sub-optimal rout choice to 14 I was back behind him. A mistake entering 15 and again leaving 15 cost me 20 seconds each, but more crucially it had cost me my good mental state. I got frustrated really quickly as I felt like I deserved to be ahead of Duncan. The big mistake came as I simplified the leg to 16 too much and veered to the left into the wrong group of trees. This cost me 4 and a half minutes. And at the finish I was just over a minute down on the lead. The thing that frustrates me the most is that I could have simply followed Duncan to the finish and won by 3 minutes! A number of others also made a similar error including Shamus who finished 3^rd overall.

I think the course was pretty fun and made the most of what the area had to offer.

Here are the results of the trialists: