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Valerie Adams wins gold in Rome - Source: Reuters -
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Muslims break from a picnic and open prayer mats on a grassy bank. To the east, you see the Swiss Alps, still covered with snow.
On a 1000m-high mountain top at the Swiss Institute of Sport at Magglingen, defending Olympic shot put champion Valerie Adams is about to begin an intensive throwing session with coach Jean Pierre Egger.
Summer has settled in and the temperature on this Saturday in June soars close to 30 degrees Celsius.
Adams jogs, then strides out on the orange-surface track. Extensive stretches, which reflect her vastly improved flexibility, follow. Then, during the next 70 minutes, she'll throw 24 times, in sets of six, alternating between a 5kg shot and a 4kg shot and finishing with six at 4kg, the weight she'll throw in London on August 7 (NZ time).
The Magglingen complex offers every facility from hockey and tennis courts, and a big old-school-style free-weight training room, to beach volleyball courts. During the weekend, the public can use the sweeping lawn areas, so Adams, Egger and New Zealand decathlete Scott McLaren - in Europe attempting to qualify for the Olympics - occasionally have to shoo away small children, who wander away from family picnics into throwing range.
Three bicycle tyres are set out as targets, the last at around the 20-metre mark. Adams' throws start to pepper the last tyre.
Egger and Adams talk almost exclusively in French, but her intense body language is clear. In training, her attitude isn't far removed from the laser concentration she brings to competition.
There are moments when it all comes together. Adams has been lifting personal bests in weight training, and her speed and explosiveness have never been better.
But, as Egger says, "It's about levers at this level. Getting the balance between dynamic and speed and using the levers is difficult."
Egger, at 68, still has the imposing physique of the national shot put champion he once was, but he defies the stereotype of a macho strongman.
"JP doesn't talk a lot," Adams says. "But he'll let you know how it's going. He's very happy to praise. The man's a legend. I've never seen him grumpy. Never."
In her lead-up to London, the best competition for Adams was in Rome on May 31, when she had a brilliant sequence of throws, topped off with a fourth-round 21.03m.
On this day in Magglingen, Egger is content with the fact: "Valerie is not throwing as far as she was before she went to Rome, but that is good. We don't want her to be at her best this far from the Olympics".
Adams is not so pleased with her efforts, but after she's finished, she ruefully concedes, "you do get a little greedy. I want to be up there all the time".
McLaren confirms her self-analysis.
"When you train, you see her competitive streak. We do an exercise throwing shots over our heads. Occasionally, I'll throw further than she does."
He laughs.
"But always, before we finish, she goes past me."
To give herself the best possible chance of becoming the first New Zealand woman to win two Olympic gold medals in athletics, Adams has sacrificed the warmth of her family ("I love my sisters with all my heart"), a spacious home in Auckland's eastern suburbs and an extended support crew in New Zealand.
Since January last year, most of her time has been spent at Magglingen. Everyone from the Swiss football team to beach volleyballers stay at the institute for five-days-a-week training camps.
But Adams lives there fulltime. Walking down the corridor to the room she rents, the institutionalised feel is of a Spartan boarding school, with a hint of a minimum-security prison.
Her room has no cheery signs on the door. The Swiss are famously efficient, because they have rules they apply rigidly. Attaching photos and posters to the wall is forbidden.
There's a single bed, a tiny fridge, a kettle, nowhere to cook and a shelf that runs along the end of the bed. The computer that provides her Skype lifeline to her family is perched on the shelf. There's not enough room for a desk and chair.
Under the shelf is her New Zealand treat drawer, filled with lollies and mementoes that family and friends post to her.
"Emotionally, I found it much tougher to leave my family behind this time than it had been the previous year. I'd come over the previous year, thinking I was going to be back in New Zealand in July.
"This time I knew I wasn't going to be back until early October. But I know the choices I have made are the right choices."
Adams has never made big predictions, it's become clear that her commitment to succeeding in London is all-consuming.
She enjoys a party. At the end of the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, she woke after celebrating with not only a hangover, but a moustache drawn in permanent marker.
While her companions enjoy the local white wine at an evening meal with her in a restaurant in Egger's home town of Neuchatel, she sticks, as she does for months before a big event, to sparkling water.
Others may be cynical about the fact her greatest rival - Nadzeya Ostapchuk - does all her best throwing on home soil in Belarus, but Adams says, "I can't afford to let my guard down for a moment. Who knows when everything might click for her? Form before a big competition can mean jack".
Egger is quietly confident.
"For me, the person is the most important thing before the athlete. If the person has the right attitude, then you can work well with the athlete.
"Valerie has a quality you find only in great athletes. A quality to be able, in some minutes or a short time, to be strong, then relax."
Nothing is ever certain at an Olympics, but no athlete in London will have worked harder to make full use of her remarkable natural gifts than Valerie Adams.