sandrazürcher

Training was wonderful up there. There is something so magical about the Engadin, every day is an adventure and every trip is beautiful. Samantha Saeger, a US-WOC Team friend of mine is spending the summer in Switzerland with me. She was a coach at JWOC for the US-Junior team and needed a way to spend the 6 weeks between JWOC and WOC in Europe. I am happy to have her here in Switzerland and to have such a worthy training partner. We had a great time up in the mountains.


But let me go back about 1 month first. At the end of June I had my final exams for the Masters program in Elite Sports that I am taking. We had 11 exams in one week (!) and it was a tough time for me. I spend about a month doing nothing else but studying. I was able to get a training in most days, but my energy was already spend studying. After the exams were over I had a hard time relaxing. I had been stressed for so long that it just didn't go away so quickly. About at the time of the Swiss WOC selection races I hit a big low. Suddenly all the air was out and I was useless. So, you can imagine my orienteering wasn't all that great. I just couldn't concentrate, made lots of mistake, and had no power or energy in my legs.

After the selection races, I also went to JWOC as a coach. I only arrived on the 1st day of JWOC, but helped out as much as I could. The 6 hour start window for the long distance race was challenging, but only because the race was at 2000m and it was raining buckets almost all day. We totally froze, as did most of the runners.

Two days after the long distance I woke up with a cold. This cold followed me for another 10 days. It's hard to recover when you are coaching. Directly after JWOC we went to Silvaplana, recovering at altitude takes longer as well. This was definitely a bummer, and I didn't feel good for the first week of training up there. After the cold finally passed, I could start enjoying my training some more.


Samantha and I were lucky to have the Swiss team up there in the Engadin. Not only could we take part in several orienteering training sessions with them (Thanks to Thomas Bührer are in order), we also had fun meeting them for some runs and spend the day building a dam (see pictures).




Here are two of our trainings:
Middle distance race in Ftan: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_93aH6irRG74/Sm67uhoF9uI/AAAAAAAAAF8/iPor6Xihgmc/s1600-h/Middle_Ftan.DE.jpg
O-interval training in S-chanf: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_93aH6irRG74/Sm6716pwNDI/AAAAAAAAAGE/aAFEumuV_pg/s1600-h/O-Intervalle_S-chanf.PoBe.jpg


Now we are home in Neuchatel for a week. We will take part in the first 3 days of the Swiss O week starting on Sunday as a last WOC preparation and then it's time to go to Hungary.

I am looking forward to WOC. I feel a little under prepared not having been able to do a lot of O training this year because of school, but I am hoping all my experience will help along the way. :-)

You can see more photos of our time in the Engadin in the photos section of this blog (coming soon). Enjoy!