WUOC Long

Day 3 of WUOC featured the long. The weather was perfect for running - cloudy and a bit cool. The terrain was mostly open woods in an area with patches of gnarly green and occasional open areas, surrounded by a large network of trails. All of this was in an area with steep hills with lots of reentrants leading to an unfortunate amount of climb on the courses. 

Control on warm-up map

The American line-up consisted of Jacob Grant, James O'Keefe, Hans Sitarz, and Charles Whitaker for the men and Tori Borish, Alison Campbell, and McKenzie Hudgins for the women.

The best performance of the day was Alison Campbell's 52nd place for the women. She was trying to not push herself too hard today so her legs would be feeling strong for later runs this week. Her goal was a solid, clean race, and that's exactly what she had! The plan of focusing on being clean instead of fast served her well today as she picked energy conserving routes, which in this steep terrain often turned out to be the best choice. 

Alison racing Canadian Tori in the finish shoot

Tori Borish was the next fastest woman, also with a goal of a clean, solid race, which she mostly managed except for a couple minutes lost while fighting through some dense vegetation that she probably should have avoided. McKenzie also had a solid run, and although she didn't quite make her goal of under 2 hours, she was only a few minutes off and reasonably happy with her run. The men ranged from feeling ok about their runs to remembering why they liked shorter distances better, especially in such physical terrain. The men's course was 12.4 km with 680 meters of climb, and the first half of their course was the same as the first 70% of the women's course, but they then had an additional long loop including two long legs. The main sentiment post race is that the race was long, but a good eye-opener to orienteering at the elite level.

Since today was a long day for everyone and the weather wasn't meant to be great, most athletes not racing the long stayed at the dorms to rest up. Among these was Giacomo, who is still resting his legs so he'll be able to run the middle on Friday. Since this is World University Champs, all of us athletes are still students, and unfortunately that sometimes doesn't stop even during the summer, as was evidenced by Giacomo spending the day writing his thesis. Thankfully, he now has a chance to take a bit of a break from that and he and the West Point students are off at the movie theater 5-10 minutes away from our accommodation. This is also the reason that I can't provide more details about each of the guys' individual races since they are not around for questioning.

Random anecdote of the day: the laundry adventure. The only washing machine in our building is in the basement, and you have to go get a key and insert that in the washing machine to use it. James went downstairs to put laundry in, and being used to the US where we actually have driers, when he found dry clothes waiting inside an unused machine, he naturally assumed the clothes had already been washed and dried. James therefore took the Japanese team's laundry out of the washing machine and put our team's laundry in. However, it turns out that the Japanese team had put laundry in the machine but not turned in on yet. They approached some of us at dinner, very apologetic that we had used their laundry machine. We therefore wrote them an apology letter using the calligraphy set James had brought with him. No wonder his suitcase was so big... but everything has gotten put to good use!

On to the sprint tomorrow in the zoo!

Summary of WUOC Long

Women:

1. Sund Goril Ronning (Norway) 68:06

2. Aebi Bettina (Switzerland) 72:29
3. Knapová Jana (Czech Republic) 72:52
18. Emily Kemp (Canada) 78:05
52. Alison Campbell (USA) 92:07
63. Tori Borish (USA) 100:10
75. Tori Owen (Canada) 110:08
83. McKenzie Hudgins (USA) 126:10

Men:
1. Frederic Tranchand (France) 79:14
2. Matthias Kyburz (Switzerland) 81:03
3. Andreas Kyburz (Switzerland) 82:30
66. Eric Kemp (Canada) 109:12
69. Graeme Rennie (Canada) 111:56
84. James O'Keefe (USA) 139:47
85. Charles Whitaker (USA) 142:17
86. Hans Sitarz (USA) 152:44
87. Jacob Grant (USA) 164:54