Sick day

It was sadly a long puke filled night for the junior team. We woke up to find all but three juniors sick and out for the count. Needless to say breakfast was quiet and caution was taken with what we ate. Later we found out that seven of the swedes were also affected. So the morning was spent talking to the hotel and moving to clean rooms.

Around 10:30 the three survivors and the giant decided to leave the sick to sleep and get in a bit of training. We went out to the map behind our hotel for some fun in the woods. We ran a course and stopped at each control to talk about what the possible route we saw to take were, which might be the best, and what features/techniques are good to use. Most of the forest was open and fast. However that being said it was easy enough to pick up a parallel feature or drift off track if you're contouring around. I found this type of training really useful. Getting to talk when actually seeing the terrain. Getting to run with other people around and trying to ignore them and then getting to have the giant around to help us figure out what we had done and to provide safety tips on how to plan a good route. We were out for around an hour.

By lunch there were still only four fully well. But chicken noodle soup and rice was dished out and people seemed to be a bit on the up.

By the time we headed over to visit with the Canadians we were up to five of us. So we went out and were told to walk around the sprint course the Canadians had just done. It would have been nice to get some speed and see how easily one could read things on the run, but even walking around to get a feel for things was better than nothing. The key in the sprint I think is going to be how well you're able to read ahead and how well you can switch from town to woods and maybe back.

We socialized with a few teams after walking the sprint. And then five of us were at dinner. Hopefully we will have a full table for breakfast again tomorrow!

- Alison Campbell

Wednesday JWOC training

For our Wednesday training in the spacious woods of Poland we did an easy training focusing in on following our route choices. So even though we were running much slower than race pace we were still supposed to run the routes that we would run in a race and not take the easy way out. As it being my first day of training here I found that the woods are quite open, even the green areas are not that thick or difficult to run through. Also you should not rely on rocks as an attack point; even though there are not very many of them they are very small and would be easy to just run by.

- Carl Underwood

Relay training

Today we did a 2 man relay in middle terrain. Andrew and I were on a team, and we both ran somewhat smoothly. I was trying to do these a little faster than race pace to try and get an interval like workout in during the training week. I made one mistake on each of my legs--the last control on the first and third legs and the first control on the second leg. The one on the first leg was just because the streamer was on the back of a tree and I ran right by it. The second leg one was a parallel error in the wrong reentrant, which would have been obvious had I been going slightly slower and reading he map. On the third leg the control was at the end of a clearing, but in the actual terrain the clearing went far further than it did on the map, so I ran to the end and had to come back to find the streamer. We also beat the Canadians. Just thought I'd throw that in here. The fact that they were taking it easy today is irrelevant.

As for the rest of our team, Giacomo ran with Zach and Ethan ran with a Canadian girl. It went pretty well for them too. Ethan ran the last leg faster than me and Andrew, but that made sense since I got lost. I think Giacomo and Zach did well enough too. But it was a good workout for all of us and it was nice to run fast. These woods were very open and you could run quite quickly almost everywhere. It was a little hilly, but not enough to really slow us down.

Later on we went with the Canadians to the beach where we played some ultimate frisbee and went swimming in the Baltic Sea. The water was quite nice and it was a good day all around.

-Nate Lyons

JWOC 2011: Poland!

The whole team has arrived in Wejherowo, Poland for a week of training and general timezone adjustment. Many of us have already been here training since the weekend, but we're finally getting organized enough to tell you about it. Team USA for 2011:

Men:

• Nate Lyons (ROC)
• Andrew Childs (GMOC)
• Carl Underwood (NEOC)
• Ethan Childs (GMOC)
• Giacomo Barbone (CSU)
• Zach Schroeder (USMAOC)

Women:

• Alison Campbell (DVOA)
• Meg Parson (NEOC)

You can read all sorts of interesting things about the team on their OUSA profile page. JWOC info can be found over on the JWOC site.

Over the next two weeks we'll have training reports and race reports from what's going on over here on this side of the world, so stay tuned!