Swiss O Week - Day 4

Friday, 17 July 2026

Back at the previous event centre, this time we had a chairlift ride, followed by 1.5k downhill walk to the starts, followed by our courses, then another 2.5k downhill back to the arena. 

A slight frustration of this week has been that the organisers keep getting the distances and/or the elevation wrong. For example the day 3 options of walking downhill for 2.2km  or 200m/60m elevation walk back to the chairlift was in fact 3.8km downhill, while the uphill alternative was 1.5km and 160 metres climb. Today the walk back was advertised as 1.5k but was closer to 2.7. I'm not sure what's going wrong but something is!!

Anyway - the orienteering itself was fun - not as fun as the few days before it but still lovely to be up in the alpine meadows in the sun.  I had my cleanest race but wasn't rewarded with placings as it was probably the least technically challenging of the days so far. 

After we had all made it back to the arena we used our passes to take a different chairlift up another hill to enjoy more of the sunshine and view.

In the late afternoon Jon, Jett and I strolled down to our local gondola to go for a joy ride - we went back up to the day 1 arena which was so quiet compared to our last visit! The views were nice although it was definitely getting cloudy in anticipation of the late afternoon's thunderstorm.

Tomorrow we have a 'replacement' stage around our local forest because the forcast weather has made the planned stage too risky.  Which is a shame as it was going to involve 3 chairlifts to the arena then another to the start, followed by a sprint, a transition, then a forest downhill which I was looking forward to. Oh well  - a little forest sprint is better than nothing and we have the convenience of our accommodation almost being in the finish chute!