Orienteering in Schweizerische (Switzerland)

Cameron de L’Isle, July 2016

As many of you will know, JWOC is around the corner and the JWOC team for 2016 has all met up for training in Davos, Switzerland. As someone who has never orienteered or even traveled outside of Australasia, it has been a very new experience running in Europe. For JWOC in Switzerland there are two main terrain types we have looked at, highly detailed plateau areas (being used for the middle/relay) and huge, tricky slopes (mainly the long distance race). 

Strangely enough this terrain felt quite similar to Woodhill (except with lower visibility and denser vegetation for the white). It is important to have a strong compass and good exit direction just like Woodhill and to simplify contour features. For instance, for leg number 10 (which I executed poorly), a good plan would be to simplify the leg down to "compass, wall, spur, single rock, lower knoll". You must also be 100% focused the whole time in order to maintain constant map contact, something I struggled with between 8-13 especially. That being said, it is also very enjoyable to run through the forests as they are quite green and beautiful.

After this training, we switched to a terrain more relevant for the long distance. This map was extremely steep at the beginning (it was at 1:7500 scale!).
On first impressions, this type of terrain appears quite tricky and different. My approach so far has been to use larger features such as spurs, clearings and streams as stepping stones, trying to keep strong map contact. This sort of terrain also has large amounts of obstacles such as fallen trees and unmapped denser patches of vegetation. It can be quite hard therefore to run straight on your compass unlike in most New Zealand terrains. This makes keeping careful map contact vital as it can be easy to drift off the compass and find yourself confused on a similar parallel feature (like me at the clearings at no19 above). It is also much more important to plan your legs in advance in Switzerland so as to avoid unnecessary climb or to take advantage of faster track running options, especially where the white forest is quite slow.

As I write this, we are preparing for the Swiss relay championships tomorrow which will be a chance to put what has been learnt so far into practice - against some of the best in the world.

Next >