Feb. Vacation ’08, Pt 3: Running In Rio

I’ve been putting off this long-winded saga, so I better get it in before I forget all about it. Then again, some of what happened I’ll never forget…

So on a Friday afternoon, I took a flight from São Paulo to Rio de Janiero. Before I get caught up in forgettable details, I’ll mention a few things about Portuguese. It’s a language that reads like most European languages, especially Spanish, but isn’t pronounced like anything you’ve heard before. So the word for ‘no’ is nao, but it’s not pronounced NOW, but NOWN. Interesting sounds spring up out of nowhere. When the hotel concierge discussed fights to Rio, she said something about ‘heeyio’, and I first thought of something sun-related, like helium. No, that’s how ‘Rio’ is pronounced, no hard R sound going on there. So it’s pronounced 'HEE-oh day zhah-NAY-ro'. And ‘Janeiro’ translates to ‘January’; when the city was founded by the Portuguese, they mistook the lake near the coast as the beginning of a big river. And since January is the beginning of the calendar, it was the ‘river at the beginning’ so to speak. See, you’re learning shit here all the time at Cranky’s place.

Off to ‘Hio’ I went, and the one-hour flight was quite nice, especially after the combined eleven hours of flight time it took to get the hell down there. Though most of the taxi drivers don’t speak a word of English (you establish your destination and the cost before you get in the cab), the trip to the hotel was quick, unlike other trips by car in unrelenting all-day gridlock.



Pretty soon it becomes obvious that Rio is a beach resort town with a very, very large city tacked on. It’s Brazil’s version of Ocean City, Fort Lauderdale, Venice Beach, and every other summertime destination all rolled into one. There are two main beaches: Copacabana and Ipanema, names that remind me of specific tunes I’d often heard played in elevators. But that’s where the similarity ends, because the beaches are pretty and yet somewhat grungy at the same time. First thing I notice is the dress code: not much. For men, shirts are optional and the usual choice is none at all, while the women are a little more modest. So I didn’t see any fashion awards handed out, it’s too damn hot. The temperature all day and all night is between 26 and 30 degrees Celsius, or 78-86 degrees Fahrenheit. With tropical humidity that probably violates the Geneva Convention.

And now it’s time for another Portuguese lesson. The phrase for ‘thank you’ is 'obrigado', pronounced oh-bree-GAH-do. I spent the entire time there just dying to say ‘Domo obrigado, Mr. Roboto’, but I figured a dumb-ass MTV-related reference from the ‘80s would get me nowhere fast.

I won’t talk much about the touristy stuff I did, it wasn’t all that exciting, even to me. But it was oddly funny going to the H. Stern headquarters and getting a tour of the facilities. H. Stern is a Cartier/Tiffany-style jeweler that has it’s main office in Ipanema, and they offer free transportation to and from your hotel, the only cost to you is the time you spend privately with a sales associate as they try to hard sell you some high-priced jewelry. I ended up looking at watches with crystal faces and Swiss movements, the cheapest ran about $3000. The whole time I was trying on watches I kept thinking about what $3-5K would buy me at the Tri bike shop, so that put a damper and reality check on the visit. Anyway, I didn’t buy a watch or anything else, I’m no jewelry freak, far from it. Nobody wears a decent watch around town anyway, for fear of it getting stolen.

And I didn’t make it to that Japanese-monster-sized statue of Christ the Redeemer on a mountaintop that you see in all the guidebooks. Apparently, no self-respecting local goes to this gigantic concrete statue, it’s the Rio equivalent of The Statue of Liberty. As you probably know, only tourists go to The Statue of Liberty, New Yorkers have to practically give up their driver’s licenses if they set foot in the thing. And so it is for Cariocas (residents of Rio) at ‘Christ Redentor’, except for the religious hardcore. However, I do like that Jesus is portrayed with his hands outstretched as if he’s about to clap and yell out ‘you’re almost there!’ We all hate hearing that, but if anybody’s going to say it and mean it, it’s good ole’ J.C.

Dude!



I digress. About the running. I mentioned before that Rio is a great running town; it’s flat along the beaches, of course, but they built a special running/biking lane between the road and the promenade along the beach, and it’s pretty wonderful. And non-running pedestrians respect it and don’t use it like the local idiots do here on the Central Park drives. AND I was surprised to find users stuck to the right. No head-on collisions like in some places I know. So I decided to head out on a little 40-minute run the first morning I was there. And this recreation lane always has people on it, Cariocas love them some exercise.

Before heading out, I was mindful of personal security. Brazil, and Rio especially, has a very, very bad reputation for petty crime; I’d heard of someone who had their Swatch watch stolen at knifepoint on the beach, during the day, so I packed lightly. A Xerox of my passport, a little bit of money, and… my iPod. I was ambivalent about bringing it, people apparently get held up all the time for iPods, but I saw so many runners with headphones I decided to take a chance. I turned it on, and the first track to play was ‘Girl From Ipanema’. I’m not making this up.

Off I go, and I’m passing runners while keeping a moderate pace. I pass more runners, and I get to about the 20-minute mark, and suddenly it hits me: it’s HOT. And the humidity is like what you feel when you first walk into a florist’s shop. A wave of steamy, stagnant, damp air overtakes you, and then you realize that delightful local smells (sewage, coconut oil, fried meat stands) are just hanging in the air waiting for you to come along. That was when I realized why I was passing so many runners; it’s too damned stifling to run fast in Rio. So I cooled the pace, even though I noticed my tongue started to hang out like a big black dog’s towards the end of the run.

The next day I ran earlier, but since the temperature doesn’t drop overnight, it didn’t matter. Sauna running time again. I could only manage about five miles, and it wasn’t even sunny. In fact, it wasn’t sunny for very much of the time I was there, and one day I hit the beach mid-afternoon for about an hour or so. It looked like it was going to rain any minute, so I just hung out for a little while. I had a little suntan lotion, that was OK, but I soon discovered I didn’t need SPF 45. I needed SPF 45,000. And so I got cooked like Nazis at the end of that first Indiana Jones movie. Christ the Redeemer, I got burned, and burned badly.

And when I went on my next run under cloudy skies, my shoulders were singed. It was unbelievable, the damned place is a carnival of melanoma.

SO, later that weekend it was time for my Sunday long run. Two hours plus of good times (sarcasm alert)… cause these-are-the-good-times... I made my way along the recreation lane, and off to a route I found through the Copacabana Runner website the week before. There’s a lake (lagoon) inland about a mile from the beach, and since I knew the circumference was about 7.5 kilometers, I decided to run that twice on top of the 15K or so it would take to get me there and back. And around the lake is a fine running and biking and walking path, asphalt on rolling hills. Off I went, exploring new neighborhoods of Rio/Hio. I felt pretty good keeping an easy pace (or die) and passed a few runners. I passed one running group of four, they seemed like they knew what they were doing without being dicks about it (my definition of a good runner; after all this time reading all these dumb posts you just got my definition). Later I slowed down, they passed me and I was behind them. At one point I noticed that some lady walking her dog had gotten caught up with this running group ahead of me, and her dog was dragging her along, by the leash, with the runners. Two of the runners started to point and laugh about the ‘gato’, and that’s when I realized it wasn’t a dog, but a cat on a leash that had joined us. So here I am, in Rio in the blistering summertime, running along a lake with hyperactive exercise-obsessed Brazilians and a goddamn cat dragging some lady yelling in the highest-pitched Klingon-inflected Portuguese accent she could belt out. This was one of those ‘no one will believe this’ moments that only show on the widescreen plasma TV of your life, and you know it when it’s happening.

After the heat caught up with the cat, the cat stopped and quietly collapsed, and then the heat started in on me. And I began to feel my shoulders burn again, and the sky is STILL completely overcast. I finish the second stupid loop of the lake and headed home, slower than ever. Are there water fountains anywhere? No. Little convenience stores? No. Supermarkets? Are you kidding? You’re supposed to buy tiny, little bottles of mineral water, and that’s if you can find them, because Sunday is a holy day of rest, right? Right. The water bottle I brought on the run was a distant memory, and I later ended up, in a dehydrated trance, having to hit the hotel room minibar where everything is $15 a pop. As Joni once said, you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone. Oh, and another thing, you can’t drink the tap water, ANYWHERE. They even tell you to brush your teeth with bottled water. At this point I’m about ready to go home. Nice place, but the personal security paranoia thing gets tiring, and the only tourist activity is to go outside and get skin cancer in ten minutes or less.

One other observation. While in the middle of my heat-induced delirium moving at 5 minute/kilometers, I kept seeing runners with technical shirts emblazoned with the word ‘PETROBRAS’ on the back. It seemed that PETROBRAS is a major race sponsor like ING, and I kept trying to figure out what the hell that PETROBRAS was. Then it hit me: frilly, petroleum-based lingerie, black of course. And then I kept imagining salespeople at the Brazilian version of Victoria’s Secret having to re-price inventory all day long as the price of oil fluctuated. Yes, this is the crap I think of when heat has addled my brain, and regrettably, sometimes not. Anyway, later it occurred to me that it stood for ‘Petroleum Brasil’ and I suddenly realized my junior-high stand-up routine was over.

Fast forward to my late-night redeye flight back to the land of safe tap water. The international airport in Rio reminded me of JFK circa 1985, and that is no compliment. It looked like the kind of place you’d be stuck in during a third-world coup, where you couldn’t get out and would end up having to spend the night under dim, dirty neon lights. It was so bad I was reasonably sure one of the set designers for Saw II had been there for inspiration. And while I’m standing in line to tell nice, nice lady I’m not carrying cuticle scissors, the biggest, fattest American to cut a swathe through Brazil this decade is in line in front of me. Six and a half feet tall, two and a half feet wide, he could only be a football player with an eating problem. And you can see this coming, can’t you? Oh yes, you can.

I get on the plane after the craziest South American cattle call the airline could organize, get seated, and sure enough, Mountain Fiji shows up and is sitting right behind me. Of course, he doesn’t fit in the seat, so his legs stick out into the aisle and all the way under my seat and sticking out. I can’t blame him for being big (though he might’ve at least tried to send dessert back once in his life)… but damn, he’s large. And my seat never once reclines because his knees completely stop it. And every seat is taken on this 8-hour, overnight flight of sardines arriving in Miami at 4AM. And my shoulders and back are on fire thanks to that sunburned run with the gato. Obrigado, Hio.

When I arrive, I have another flight back home to that other dimension called New York City. After 14 hours of traveling, I spend an hour looking for parking in Manhattan; though my skin is already peeling, I’m home.

OK, OK, I’m glad I went. I learned about a world outside my own, a world most New Yorkers can’t imagine exists. I can now say I’ve been to South America. I have new respect for Brazilians’ dedication to running, which is more than I can say for folks at most tourist destinations elsewhere. And I love finding new places to run, even if it means later looking for malignant skin tumors on my shoulders, in the middle of the night, in an airplane toilet.

Should you go someday? Probably. The people of Brazil are cheerful, and welcoming. Bring your running shoes, some SPF 45,000, a gallon of bottled water, a slower running pace and you’ll be OK.