650 km in 28 hours of airtime!

I had 5 of the finest days in a row I ever experienced for cross country paragliding in the Alps! I participated in the Austrian National Championships and competed against a strongly skilled field flying huge tasks from Kössen through 4 days! Funnily some others flew 2-3x of our declared task distances breaking world records big time in the exact same area (325 km FAI triangle! in a 12 hours flight). Anyway I was still very happy to be in the comp and learned a lot from it! I was flying an Enzo1 for the first 2 and an Enzo2 for the second 2 tasks. A whole new world of glider control is opening to me right now...there is so much to learn! I came to goal every day (once 1 km short) and in the last task even challenged the pro pilots taking the lead and racing with them all the way up front. It was great fun! I finished 15th out of 120 which I am pretty happy about. Now that I have the best glider on the market for XC competition I need an upgrade of my harness and instrument setup. It really does make a big difference now I realized.
I was back home Monday night but Tuesday seemed to be the last good weather day of this session...8 in the morning I decided that I can't miss out and went straight to launch (even forgot about breakfast). After so many km's in central-Austria I also wanted to discover my area. Took-off at 9:40 which was the earliest for me so far to start a big distance flight. Conditions very really rough at some places so I had to change my planned route. In the late afternoon I ended up at 4767 meters of altitude in the Ötztal area near Sölden flying high above some of the highest peaks of Austria. What an incredible scenery! In this flight I broke 3 of my personal records: highest altitude ever (4767m), highest altitude gain from lowest point of the flight (2741m - probably a new Hungarian National Record too) and the longest distance along a triangle course so far (185km).

I am very excited to be able to fly an Ozone Enzo2 this season! I started to fly 2-liners in 2011 but didn't fly them much. Now I need to learn how to do it at a high level to be able to fly as fast as possible! I can already see that there are many secret tricks out there that probably only a very few people would share...Feels like somewhat similar to the times when I was learning Infinite Tumbling in 2006 and there were only 3 pilots out there that have mastered the trick. It was more of a learn-by-doing thing, nobody to get advice of. But this makes all of it even more interesting!

I learned (and worked) a lot during these days and to be honest I am really glad that finally some rain is coming so my body can finally recover. :-)

You can find all of my flights here at the XContest.org site.