Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Ethan's take on the JWOC Long race

Ethan:

The JWOC long was a race I was both dreading and looking forward to. I didn't have to wake up early because of my late start, but this also meant a lot of sitting around with nothing to do for a few hours. Finally the time came for me to warm-up, and the warm-up was just dandy,but it didn't have much climb. The course was much different, having virtually no areas where running was easy (or physically possible for me despite my training), unless you wanted to add considerably more distance, and even then it hardly was easy. This course was designed for people who were very, very, VERY strong runners. For example, the Swiss did extremely well because that's all they can run anyway: hills. The hills were also steep enough that running up was unrealistic (in my case), and they There were also usually at least three options for long legs, so picking the best one was extremely difficult as welt-I'm not sure if I picked the optimal route even once. were steep enough going down that you couldn't go top speed and had to exert energy to slow yourself town. I'm really interested to look at the routes for the top runners, because it feel they will be very different from my own, and if they aren't, it says a lot about how much more I need to prepare.

1 comment:

Mary Jo said...

I like your analysis, Ethan. It is realistic and opens up some possibilities for what to focus on in the future. We followed the TracTrac which had shadowing to show the "shady" side of the hills, but even with that, I could not appreciate the steepness until I saw Dave Yee's photos. That terrain is indeed difficult to run up and to run down. Now, on to the Middle.