Run 1:04:00 [3] 12.0 km (5:20 / km)
I'd said earlier on that it was going to be a big week for iconic running venues - today's was Copacabana beach (with a little bit of the east end of Ipanema thrown in to get the distance up). Lots of people out even early in the morning (and not just because the morning was expected to have the best of the day's weather). Iconic as the venue was, I didn't have a lot of energy this morning, perhaps in part because of a bit of jet lag? (7.30 in Rio is 5.30 in New York).
Decent conditions (low 20s) though a bit humid. (I've often found it hard to get good stats for Rio, and now that I understand the local geography I appreciate why; seabreezes would be a major part of the climate here, and I could easily imagine the northwestern suburbs, cut off from those breezes by mountain ranges, being 10 degrees or more hotter than the southern beaches under some conditions).
By the end of the run the campaigners were out in force. The Brazilian presidential election final round takes place tomorrow, and there's been plenty of last minute action, much of it taking the form of flag-waving on street corners. In these parts the supporters of the challenger, Aecio Neves, are most prominent (like the Gold Coast, I suspect Copacabana votes conservative, though he is probably better characterised as a centrist). National polls, though, suggest he will lose (with the caveats that Brazil would be a fiendishly difficult country to poll as many voters, especially poorer ones, would be very difficult to contact on any systematic basis).
The icons continued for the rest of the day - the Cristo Redentor monument (and associated views from 700 metres above the city) in the morning, then a game at the Maracana in the afternoon. I decided to do this independently rather than on a tour and was glad I did - all the logistics functioned smoothly (there were even orderly queues at the ticket windows, the loos were better than those at the MCG and vastly better than those at Victoria Park back in the day, and the drink-purchasing facility was the most civilised I've seen at any stadium anywhere) and it was about a fifth of the price for a seat just as good as in the most expensive section on the other side of the ground. Wasn't a massive crowd - about 23,000 - but it made an awful lot of noise, and it turned out to be a dramatic game. Fluminense, the home team, led 1-0 for most of the second half before Paranaense (the visitors, from Curitiba) equalised in injury time - whereupon Fluminense scored the winner a minute later, thanks to their star player, Fred (the one whose World-Cup semi-final "heat map" was one big dot in the centre circle because most of his few possessions were kick-offs after German goals; not to be confused with the one who's played for several clubs in the A-League). Some of the defending was as shambolic as the aforementioned semi-final but the defenders weren't made to pay for it - three times Paranaense's number 7 found himself completely unmarked within 10 metres of goal and he failed to convert any of the three chances - one miss, two straight to the keeper. (Perhaps the defenders didn't bother to mark him because they knew he was useless).