Run 1:00:00 [3] 11.0 km (5:27 / km)
Slept through my alarm this morning (first time I can remember doing this) so went out sooner after getting out of bed than I normally would. Perhaps it wasn't surprising that I wasn't very awake for this run and only in the later stages did it start to feel reasonable, although one positive was handling the climb through the old town without too much trouble. I'll have plenty of hills to handle tomorrow so it's encouraging to see some evidence of still being able to function on them.
The rest of the day was devoted to travelling to tomorrow's event area (near Winterthur) via an indirect route with the principal purpose of looking at mountains - Geneva-Brig-Andermatt-Zurich. Some of this was unexplored territory for me (Andermatt and the valley downstream from there), some of it was taking me back to the scene of the 1994 World University Championships (Fiesch, which we successfully ate out of bananas) and the notorious 1996 World Cup race (Leuk). There were plenty of paragliders out at Fiesch - I think it's a local claim to fame because the opening ceremony flag at WUOC 1994 was delivered by one. That opening ceremony had a few flag-related issues, because they gave us New Zealand's flag to march behind, and somewhat more undiplomatically, gave China Taiwan's.
I didn't take any pictures of the Rhone Glacier in 1994 so I wouldn't have been able to tell you how far it's retreated now even if I'd been able to see it from the train. I think this was the glacier which was involved in the story a couple of years ago about the village which had prayed in the 17th century or thereabouts for the then-advancing glacier not to destroy their town, and have now written to the Pope formally asking for their prayer to be rescinded.
One of the less attractive features spotted was a kilometres-long traffic jam at the entrance to the Gotthard Tunnel, something which I gather is a regular occurrence (especially on weekends). I was glad to be on the train. The Swiss transport system didn't quite live up to its clockwork reputation (five of seven legs were late, and one section was replaced by a bus because of a derailment which, if I understand the local paper correctly, involved a runaway train with no driver), but I made every connection, finishing up with a 6pm Saturday bus which you might have expected to be quiet but instead was full to bursting point with kids on their way home from what I presume was a sport event of some description (don't think it was today's orienteering, although I could be wrong).