Orienteering in Switzerland

We are nearly at the end of our tour in Europe and I wanted to post some maps of all the orienteering I did while we were in Switzerland.
The first event was a double header sprint in 2 different town, all within about a 3 hour time frame. As usual the sprints were a very fast affair. The competition in Switzerland is fierce, not only are they fast, but you can't afford a single mistake. I only managed to get within the top 15 (12th to be precise) !!!

In beween I have also done some trainings with my local club OLC Kapreolo. Can't believe to what level they have brought a training session!!! No manual drawing of controls on to the map, it's all on pre printed maps.......quite incredible.....but still no sportident in trainig...hahaha....that will be the next level!

First we did a memory training on the southern part of the map to get to the start triangle, then just a bit of a normal event, total distance was about 5.5km

Some of the map details were removed between controls and nearly all paths were removed.  This was really difficult, in particular as there was a lot of green, brumbles, stinging nettles etc. So sticking to a straight line probably would have got you stuck in a green.

At the end of April we took part in the Swiss Middle Distance Championships in Locarno, the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. Beautiful weather greeted us, and a 1hr walk to the start including about 200m climb could be seen as a warm up or being an exhausting exercise (ie the walk to the start was longer than my course!!). I had a pretty solid race, but came unstuck at one control, lost about about 5 mins and that meant 16th only. Aldo was doing ok, but had to abandon his course after 90 mins as that's the max the you are allowed to be out, and unfortunately somehow managed to miss the finish and ended up on the walk back to the assembly area!!
On a very positive note, our expat Sibylle came 2nd in W45 which was a very surprising result for her! She hadn't done much training as she was working a lot, got involved in politics for the town council and was busy with monitoring their new house being constructed. Just shows that if you are a great map reader (which Sibylle is of course) and have a clear race you can top the field!
The next day we had the Swiss Sprint Champs, but they were literally washed out. The rain was just coming down quite heavy at times and in complete contrast to Saturday was also a bit on the cold side. As usual the sprint was lots of fun, running around the old town and the sea front with a couple of route choices.