Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

One of the objectives of these few days in Rio (apart from being a tourist in Rio, of course) is to get used to the humidity in anticipation of getting some at WMOC - although the current forecast for the early part of the WMOC week is actually quite cold at WMOC's altitude. That objective was achieved today; while the promised rain only slightly materialised overnight (and there was none on the run itself), it was humid enough (22/20) to make things rather sweaty.

Today's route involved a circuit of the lake behind Ipanema (where it looked like a couple of running events were soon to get under way), followed by an out-and-back along the beach itself. I'd probably start to get bored with the limited range of realistic running options if I was here for longer - Rio is either flat or vertical, and anything away from the water has a lot of traffic - but it was fine for today. Was feeling a bit flat in the middle before getting a drink at halfway, then quite good in the closing stages, probably in part because the breeze was stronger on the beach.

There was a polling booth at the south end of Copacabana which had quite a media presence outside it. This was probably because somebody important was about to vote there but might just have been the media wanting to get shots of someone attractive turning up to vote in a bikini. (The result turned out to be closer than the polls predicted, but the incumbent has been re-elected with probably about 51.5% of the vote). In case you're wondering, Brazilian polling booths don't appear to have sausage sizzles or any local equivalents.

Wasn't really a beach day today (once the sun came out late in the day it was pretty windy), but did make it to the impressively-done botanical gardens, and otherwise didn't do a lot.

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).

Made it to Rio this morning, with no dramas entering the country but a (predictably) slightly crazy taxi ride from the airport (wasn't confident enough in the neighbourhood before seeing it to be confident about walking from a bus stop to the hotel with luggage; I would be now). Vehicular highlight was seeing a motorbike squeezing through a gap that I wouldn't have been game to go through on a pushbike with the cars stopped, let alone with all vehicles involved going at 60 km/h plus.

I'm staying in Copacabana, a couple of blocks back from the beach - Rio is an expensive city but definitely a better place for less money (still not cheap by any means) than in New York. Did quite a bit of walking around the neighbourhood in what was left of the day (and got down to the next beach, Ipanema, at sunset too). I'd hoped to get up to the Cristo Redentor statue in late afternoon but was too late to get on a trip so that will have to wait until the morning, but did get up to a smaller hill at the east end of the beach which gave plenty of great views regardless. (The forecast for Sunday is wet so I'm trying to get the outdoor things done sooner rather than later). The area has a bit of a seedy (which doesn't necessarily equate to particularly dangerous) reputation after dark but seems perfectly OK during the day; seeing a lot of families around is always a good sign in that respect.

I'm planning to stay in Sao Paulo on Monday night (not because I'm particularly desperate to visit there, but because the bus schedules make it hard not to). Have been researching possible places to stay and crossed one off my list when one of the Tripadvisor comments referred to being robbed at gunpoint outside the front door. (Like in Rio, I expect most of the serious crime is confined to particular neighbourhoods but it isn't so obvious from the information I've seen where these are).

C • eating in Rio 8

This run was my first social engagement of the day - catching up with (another) old school friend who's doing the New York marathon in a couple of weeks. Once again this was in Central Park (and once again in the rain), swapping stories of the last decade or so, as well as more recent things like our respective travels (Kilimanjaro in his case) and his nephew who's starting to make his way in junior orienteering in Canberra (it occurs to me that it's at least theoretically possible that next year's ACT junior boys' team will consist entirely of people who are related to people I went to school with). It turned out to be a very nice run - probably the best I've felt on a run for several weeks - though tailed off a bit once I split off to go back to the hotel. It was a bit earlier in the morning than yesterday's run and there was plenty of traffic (and associated horn-blowing) towards the end of it. (It's surprisingly quiet early in the morning, though - New York may be the city that never sleeps but there aren't a lot of people around at 6.30, at least on the Upper West Side).

Next stage in the social calendar was breakfast with my old uni physics lab partner who works for Google (one can only imagine what it would look like in the Daily Telegraph if the staff food/coffee facility at Google turned up in any public sector organisation in Australia), before moving on to more of the sights of New York. The dismal weather was unhelpful here - certainly a waste of time spending $30 to go up the Empire State or the Rockefeller Center, and even the Staten Island ferry didn't have the views it would normally have because the windows were partly fogged up, but still offered a decent view of the Statue of Liberty. Still walked the length of Lower Manhattan from its southern tip as far as the Rockefeller Center (7-8k - Manhattan is big) and did some worthwhile exploring en route.

Now on the next leg of the trip to Rio. Getting through JFK wasn't the most relaxing airport experience of my life - partly because US airport security is rarely a pleasant experience, but mostly because the semi-automated check-in system, and the staff accompanying it, didn't seem to be able to cope with the idea that Brazilian visas have an issue date but no expiry date until you actually arrive in the country and kept insisting that my visa had expired; someone was essentially found who knew better. (It may be different for US citizens; Brazil makes something of a diplomatic point of matching its visa conditions for citizens of country X to whatever country X requires of Brazilians, and the onerous nature of US visa application procedures is a sore point in much of Latin America).

In what's going to be a big week for iconic runs, today I headed for Central Park for the longest run I've done since I've been here - one complete lap from where I'm staying (a couple of blocks west of it), plus a lap of the reservoir to make up the distance to what I was looking for.

The park has a lot of the small rolling hills (particularly towards the northern end) that are nice on a run like this but would be hard work if you hit them at the 40k mark of a marathon (as many will be doing a couple of weekends from now). Lots of glacial rock features (mostly knolls) scattered through the park - I wonder if this was part of the reason the area wasn't originally built on? It would certainly be a spectacular (if probably reasonably technically straightforward) area for a sprint event, although I understand the permit obstacles are sufficiently formidable for it only to be worth doing for something really special - if only there had been a sprint at the time of WOC 1993...

This was a decent if unspectacular run in fairly dismal weather - even a thunderstorm at one stage, although I wasn't too concerned about lightning - it's not as if there's a shortage of tall things for lightning to hit.

Most of the rest of the day was spent in museums - the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History. Could easily have spent a lot more time in both, particularly the latter.

C • Central Park 2

A morning session in Winchester, Virginia (west of Washington DC). I was staying in a strip-mall district the likes of which you certainly won't see in its British namesake (it took me five minutes to traverse the car park coming back), but once over the freeway overpass it was much nicer, first through Shenandoah University and a park, then past various war memorials and cemeteries before reaching the old town centre at the far end. The buildings there weren't quite as historic as the British version either (I suspect most of what was there pre-1861 got flattened in the Civil War), but still a nice enough precinct. A slow start to the run but picked up somewhat later on.

That was the start of the final day of the road trip part of this, a long day on the road which involved crossing a vast number of state borders - the score for the day was Virginia, West Virginia, Virginia again (for about a kilometre), Maryland, DC (for 20 metres on the south side of the Silver Spring roundabout, on the way to lunch with a longstanding NOAA contact), Maryland again, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. Swung via the New Jersey shore, partly to see how it was recovering post-Sandy (pretty well in the section I saw, although its foreshore dunes may have been high enough not to have been breached), and partly so that I wouldn't hit New York in peak hour. Now in New York City for the next couple of days before flying out Thursday night.

Spotted one sign at a set of roadworks (of which there have been plenty - especially in Canada, probably because they're rushing to get everything done before winter) saying it was a joint project between the federal and New Jersey governments. The sign also said that the feds were stumping up $151 million and New Jersey's contribution was a somewhat underwhelming $760,000, which doesn't sound terribly joint to me.

C • Gough 5

This was a "tourist run", good for the views but not good as a run - which was predictable, as I hadn't slept much (thanks mostly to a 5am OA board meeting) and 2.30pm is usually a flat spot for me if I haven't slept enough. The run itself was to the summit of the Stony Man in Shenandoah National Park, the park's second-highest peak (I think) - good views as you'd expect (in a park which has plenty of them). The peak has a lot of rock on it but the track wasn't rocky (although with reasonable climb - you can hide a lot in 100-foot contours). Back didn't enjoy the initial climb but settled after that.

This also gave me a bit of a taste of the Appalachian Trail (almost invisible in places because of fallen leaves - could easily imagine losing the trail), though still a few hundred kilometres short of the amount of it that feet has run (let alone the whole trail, which is about 3500km). Saw a few people out with packs although it's presumably too late in the season for people to be walking the full distance (anyone doing that would be closer to either the north or south end by now).

The park itself (my afternoon destination after a morning at Monticello, the Thomas Jefferson residence) was fairly similar to the Blue Ridge Parkway - a road along a long ridge without too many especially dramatic features, but lots of great views along the way (and as the closest significant natural space to quite a few big cities, I imagine it gets swamped on weekends, but was quiet on a Monday). The park's best-known major walk is to Old Rag Mountain, but that was a bit longer than I had time for (14-22km, depending on the route), and also involves, according to the park notes, some rock scrambling which requires upper body strength (fail) and a good head for heights (fail) - suspect not being able to bend a knee past 45 degrees without pain (something which doesn't affect running) would also be unhelpful.

Experienced the delights of American talk radio later in the day. I have actually come across a rabidly left-wing talk radio station in the US (in Miami, of all places), but none are to be found here - the options seemed to be Michael Savage and Sean Hannity (the former managed to get himself banned from entering the UK for inciting racial hatred, the latter is a Fox News regular).

(They seem to be getting very excited about Ebola, and finding ways in which Barack Obama can be held responsible for it).

C • Simple 1

C • Old Hat 2