Swimming across Lake Zürich with eight thousand strangers

Once a summer, on a weekday afternoon, up to nine thousand people get into Lake Zürich at the Mythenquai lido and swim straight across it. It is called the Stadtzürcher Seeüberquerung, the city's lake crossing, and it has been running since 1985. I take part most years.

The distance is 1,500 m, from Mythenquai on the west shore to the Tiefenbrunnen lido on the east. You start in numbered groups, spread from early afternoon into the evening, everyone in the same striped caps, with rescue boats along the line. The date is only confirmed on the Monday before, when the organisers decide the weather will hold and the water is at least 21 °C. Then the whole city, it seems, takes the afternoon off and gets wet.

What I like most about it is what it is not. Nobody times it. Nobody ranks it. Nobody hands you a medal at the far side. "What do you mean, no medal?" is my line every year, and every year the answer is the same: this is not a race, it is a crossing. You get out at Tiefenbrunnen, they hand you a hot bowl of vegetarian risotto or bouillon, and that is the prize.

Which, I have come to think, is the right prize. Zürich is a city built around its lake, and for most of the year you look at it from the shore, the train, the office window. For one afternoon a year you get to cross it under your own power, one striped cap in a long, loose line of thousands, and see your own city from the middle of the water. There are few better ways to spend a July afternoon here.

If you swim confidently and you are in Zürich in high summer, put your name in. It sells out. You will not get a medal.

P.S. Who wants to join next time?