Day 5. Sprint training, euro lounge and an unconventional experience of Zurich.

After planning to wake up to do the sprint at around 10 (that's late enough right!?), we stumbled out of bed later than expected. By the time we had had breakfast,  been through the complicated process of creating three equally forked sprint courses, put our shoes on and headed out the door it was nearly 1pm.

Standing at the start line ready to sprint off we decided to aim for a sub 20min sprint as we assumed the sprint was not much more than 4km. Thirty minutes later Tim dove off the end of the pier into the lake to punch the last control. The course turned out to be a bit longer than expected at just over 7,5km. Michael was neck and neck with Tim heading into the last control but the map had changed so his route choice ended in a dead end. Roark was a good 30 seconds back as he lost some time through the gardens in the last section.

After Roark and Michael caught up with Tim again they found him chatting to a life guard. As it turns out you were not only not allowed to dive of the pier but you were also not allowed to film in the public swimming area. This was a problem as Tim had run with his go pro. We decided that we wanted to be able to take pictures so we headed just down the road to the place we'd swum the night before. After a refreshing swim and some go pro selfies we played a bit of soccer on the lawn with an 8 year old from the international school.

A short stroll home to pick up some cash and we were off to the shops to grab some lunch and a few other things.

A quick lunch topped with all things Swiss and yummy was followed by a short run to the train station to catch a train to Zurich.

Arriving in the rather grand Zurich train station we had an hour to explore Zurich before we had to be at the Euro Lounge to watch Italy play Spain with Coni, Stephan and Andrea.

We took a stroll through the park and found a bridge to wander across the river. Stretched between the bridge and the side of the river was a 15m slackline. More pano's ensued before Tim noticed a couple of the slackliners jumping into the river from the bridge (an easy 4m jump). Unfortunately Michael and Roark hadn't brought spare shorts but before long Tim had donned his and was in the water. After his second jump he floated a couple of hundred metres down the river before getting out as we finally caught up.

Our hour was running out so we started heading back and found our way to the Euro Lounge a few minutes late.



Inside the game had just gotten underway so we snuck in and found Coni and Stephan. Soon the Italian's had put one in the net and it became apparent that we would have some vocal support from a few of the people.

We munched away at chips and had a couple of drinks before piling our plates with sausages, bread and salad.
We then all took to the foosball table to battle it out.

 We created all the possible teams of two that we could and soon realised that Stephan was the master. Although his work colleagues are pretty insane too. We learnt this when they took to the table at half time and thrashed Michael and Roark 10 - 2. We nearly felt as helpless as the Spanish when the Italians scored their second goal a bit later to roars of approval from all the Italians present.

After the game we went out onto the balcony to look at the city streets from above before going inside to grab an ice-cream.

We decided to do a bit more exploration of Zurich so we bid farewell to our hosts and took to the streets with another ice cream in hand. We decided to make good use of our rather expensive train ticket which allowed you free access to all public transport in Zurich, by randomly hopping on trams and seeing where they would take us.

We were up for adventure and so we switched trams randomly and as often as we could. We eventually hopped of for good when we saw Lake Zurich (that's probably wrong but anyway).

For the next couple of hours we wondered the city and took in the awesome sights and sounds (including some awesome views from the hill and from the university) before eventually making our way to the train station and back to zug.

Illegal activities of the day:

Thinking about crossing the road not at a pedestrian crossing

Wearing a gopro in a swimming area

Jumping off piers

Swimming in the Zurich river??