sandrazürcher

About me

My parents are both Swiss, born and raised in the hills of Switzerland, with cows and goats all around. So why am I also an American, well I guess the whole family is now, but I was the first, I was born in the USA! My father was working hard on his post doctoral research in Bozeman, Montana when I was born. My parent eventually moved to the US for good (or so we thought) in 1985, but I spend my first 4 years in Switzerland between Le Blessony and Greifensee, meaning that apparently I spoke both French and German (I can only speak German now). My parents met on the Swiss national junior orienteering team and thankfully orienteering stayed in our family. It wasn't long after February 18th, 1981 before I had a map in my hands.

My childhood in the US was of normal understanding, and not much happened until 1998. This was the year that I took a trip for orienteering to Finland for the Fin 5-days and Sweden for O-Ringen with about 15 other US junior orienteers. This trip changed my life! I made some of the closest friends I have today on that trip, and to some extend those juniors now are what represent the US national orienteering team. This basically formed what drives my existence now. After that trip, the next year I went to the Junior World Orienteering Champs (JWOC) for the first time in Bulgaria, in the same year I competed at the World Orienteering Champs (WOC) in Scotland. I travelled with the friends I had made the year before from Bulgaria to Sweden on train, visiting Wien, Zürich, Paris, Amsterdam, and finally Stockholm, then flew to Switzerland to take part in the Swiss 6 days with my family and then travelled to Scotland for WOC. I spend almost 2 months travelling around Europe, orienteering almost everyday! Since then I have competed in 2 JWOC's (Bulgaria '99, and Czech Republic '00), 5 World Cup's blocks (Finland '01, Denmark '04, England '05, Italy '05, France '06) and all the World cup races in 2007, and 6 WOC's (Scotland, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, Denmark, Ukraine).

In 2002 I decided to do something that I never thought I would really do, but my family always told me to do, I moved to Switzerland for an "exchange year." The goal was to prepare for the 2003 World Championships in Switzerland. I knew that I would be welcomed by my family in Switzerland, what I didn't realize was that I would also be welcomed by a much larger family, orienteering! I really loved my experience in Switzerland and enjoyed living in my *motherland*, of course, Marc Lauenstein made my experience that much better too. I had already met Marc during his exchange year in the US in 1999-2000. We had been in email contact since then. When I told him I was looking for an apartment in Bern, he was happy to inform me that he just happened to have space where he was living. One thing led to another and well… the rest is history. To make a long story short, I never really moved back to the US, granted I finished my bachelors degree in Exercise Science at the University of New Hampshire in 2004, but this was more a 9 month "visit" to the US, I had full intentions on living in Switzerland.

Orienteering and life! Almost one in the same I guess. Since I have moved to Switzerland I have put my full attention to orienteering, with the goal of breaking into the top 20 in the world. I am fortunate to have a successful orienteer as my partner, we both enjoy our lives of training, travelling and racing. It would be nice if we could do more of it together though!

My work

I work as an exercise physiologist at the Swiss Federal Institute for Sport, in Magglingen Switzerland. I work in the Performance Sports Department and have the great luck to actually work with orienteers themselves. Our latest work has been on uphill running capacity of orienteers, and sport specific performance testing. It's an exciting profession!