Lies vs. iPod Friday 28

It hasn’t been a very good week for Silda Spitzer. I live about ten blocks away from the governor’s apartment in Manhattan, and Thursday morning I could hear the helicopters circling as everyone waited for Client-9 to come out and tell reporters he was leaving his job. When the news conference came, there Silda was, standing by her husband, and frankly she looked like hell on a ritz cracker. Well, if anybody had a right to, she did.

Now the news media is all over the young woman who met with the governor in that D.C. hotel room, and she’s cashing in big.

Not much more to say, the media will say it all as they rummage through the Spitzer’s trash and dissect ‘Kristen’s credit card bills. Keeping with the theme, here’s a new tune by Moby, it’s not as annoyingly easy-listening as his last few efforts, but he’s back to sampling gospel singers; it’s not ‘I Will Survive’ (thank God), but close, and would probably make a good Silda Spitzer theme song.

Moby – Disco Lies

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.

Great.

Just when I thought we were going to get a little break from politics on the nightly news… our governor admits to hiring prostitutes. The next ‘turning point’ primary (Pennsylvania) isn’t until the end of April, so until then we get to hear ALL about Mr. Spitzer’s sex life. Thanks, Eliot.

I don’t give a damn what public people do in their homes or hotel rooms, as long as it isn’t hypocritical. But now laughing boy has gone and done it, and now the only thing the media will cover for the foreseeable future is what or who he ordered from room service.

About a year and a half ago, I was walking out of Central Park on a sunny afternoon, and found this goofy-looking runner waddling past me on the path. He wasn’t moving very fast (nothing wrong with that), but I remember thinking to myself ‘this guy needs to get himself to running camp pronto for some emergency help on that running form’. And yes, once he got closer, I realized that it was Mr. Spitzer. Nice to see our public leaders getting out for a little jog, but they, like the rest of us, could use some coaching.

And now, Governor Spitzer needs a lot more than coaching, he needs to learn how to keep it in his pants.

So bring it on, networks, CNN, major cable outlets, the morning shows, late-night comedians, we know what to expect, you never disappoint. I can see it like a truck coming down the highway, inexorable and boring at the same time. For now, real news won’t get reported, only seamy conversations and teary-eyed apologies. If only Mr. Spitzer had just gone out on some goofball run instead of calling Dial-A-Ho.

With that, I will offer one piece of advice for myself or anyone else out there who’s sick of what passes for news these days. Next time you turn on the TV and hear wall-to-wall coverage of this kind of crap, turn the TV off, and go out for a run. And dream of better days.

Race Report: Colon Cancer Challenge (4M and 15K)

It’s behind me now, the 15K I finished along with about 3200 other runners Sunday morning. Over an hour before, a 4-miler was held also, and I got to stand on the course and cheer on the early runners. It’s a win/win for everybody, and I’ll take any good karma I can get, especially before a race. And it’s a pretty good way to kill some time before you have to go on…

So my strategy was to run the same pace I ran in a 10-miler three weeks ago, over a shorter distance. How hard is that? I found out soon enough. After a Saturday of torrential rain and high winds, the temperature dropped 30 degrees, while we kept some of those nasty winds. So another wintertime race in clear, cold, blustery weather. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to move on to races that do not include ice on the course and getting thrown around while mid-air.

The Central Park hills I know so well kicked my ass, so keeping the pace was a lot harder than I expected. And when people start passing you in the last three miles, you know you’re slowing down. But I didn’t slow down too much. I generally kept the pace, and tried to do the math, you know, distance remaining, pace per mile, etc., and failed miserably at that. I wanted to beat my previous 15K time of 1:06:50, and I just couldn’t get the arithmetic going right in the brain. Someday I’ll write about ‘Runner’s Brain’ (or lack thereof), the relationship between increased running distance and decreased ability to compute simple, 3rd grade math formulas.

Anyway, I reached the finish line at 1:03:33. Not as fast a pace as three weeks ago in the 10-miler (any faster would’ve made the pace barfworthy)… but it’s the PR I’d hoped for. And happily, a nice improvement over the previous record. It helps to not run in many 15K races anyway, but I’ve averaged one every year for the last ten years, so I’ll take what I can get. And I’ve been doing tempo runs at 6:48 m/m for a while now, I guess training helps after all. I’ll put a little sticky note reminder about that on the brain hard drive the next time I start to whine about tempo/interval runs…

Update/iPod Friday 27

Haven’t posted in a few days, too busy, but I just wanted to acknowledge some of the comments and encouragement I’ve received over the last week. Thank you. And for a bunch of people who type at each other more than anything else, we know what’s going on, even when it’s not being expressed.

So I won’t yet continue my account of the National Lampoon Brazilian Vacation, but instead mention a couple of things about training and races and all that stuff. I’ve got a 15K race on Sunday, and in a rare move, I’ll discuss it in advance (usually I just over-discuss marathons in advance). I’m actually looking to do a PR; if I can keep the pace I ran during the 10-miler three weeks ago, I’ll finish pretty well. I found out a few days after that last race that I finished third in my age group, and even though there were only 300 runners in that race, I’ll take it.

And I need the boost in confidence. As Bob-O commented, I need to cool it (my words, not his) and save the bricks for later. In January I trained like gangbusters, and discovered I had no swimming ability, and also discovered pedaling on a bike was dead-boring. So February rolled around and I was in burned out. I spent a week away; maintaining running mileage helped a little, though. For now, I’m in the middle of my second round of swimming lessons. I feel like I improve about 2% every time I hit the pool and it’s not fast enough for me. But I am still learning how to breathe in the pool, and learning I can’t swim as fast as I run (!)… even my swimming instructor has made that observation, and told me to calm down. For now, I’m doing headstands at the bottom of the pool with the kids, and getting blisters from blue rubber flippers.

Last night I went to an awards ‘gala’ that was put on by the Tri team at the swimming fitness center I use. I’ll write about that later, but in the meantime, I was looking to be inspired by a hundred triathletes together in one room. I heard a few comforting stories (‘it took me so long to learn how to swim’, ‘you’ll be fine’, etc.), but most of the night was spent hearing and watching people get awards for 9-hour Ironmans and the like. Awards are fine, and I’m sure people deserve them, but watching the same total strangers win award after award gets tiring in itself. Well, like I said more on that later.

And now for something unrelated… I have to answer a few comments about my trip. I didn’t exactly ask anyone on the street in Brazil, nor did I personally check this out, but… I did NOT get the impression that everyone is bisexual in Brazil. Outside of Rio, it’s a fairly Catholic country. Sorry, Claire. And AR, I did not notice that Brazilian women were the most beautiful in the world (paraphrasing, here). Not to say that beautiful Brazilians don’t exist, nor that Brazilians as a people are unattractive. I just didn’t notice drop-dead gorgeousness everywhere, female, male, or otherwise. I will say that I didn’t see the level of obesity we have here in the States. Brazilians appear to be a bit more up on exercise and physical health than we are, that’s for sure...

Oh, and Mindy, we’ll talk later about that future Ironman. I’d like to see the gear we'd invent for THAT.

More later, but for now I’ll lay on you the new Hot Chip video that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but makes me laugh, and we probably all need that anyway. Because after all the training I’ve been doing, I really do feel like I’m ‘Ready For The Floor’.



Hot Chip – Ready For The Floor

Running Vacation February ’08, Part 2

(São Paulo, from the 23rd floor of my hotel.)


I arrived in São Paulo after an eight hour plane ride, and airport customs was not so bad and actually easier to get through than it is back home. It shouldn’t have been bad anyway, because the damn visa to get in the country had already cost $130 along with two days spent at the Brazilian consulate in New York. The weather was warm (it’s still summer), but not horrible, and rain was imminent. Later I was told by a local that it rains all day, every day, in March. Nice.

Well, the next day included some business outside of town… though you wouldn’t know it was outside of town, because the city is gigantic and sprawling in a Southern California kind of way. Recently I heard São Paulo described as what you’d get ‘if New York threw up on L.A.’, and that’s not far from the truth. Twenty-story high rises are clumped by the dozen far off into the horizon, while every so often you see some random green space. And the traffic is, I am told, worse than in L.A.

Luckily, the fitness center in the hotel was one of the best I’ve ever seen, as in more than one machine left over from the 80’s… there were at least eight treadmills, ten bikes, every weight machine they could get in there, and most exciting of all, the room had huge windows. These people take fitness seriously. Now, I’m usually intrepid when it comes to running on city streets, but this time I had to reconsider. First off, there were NO pedestrian walk signs on 95% of the intersections. The guide book I brought explained that driving is a hazardous sport in Brazil, and quite often drivers feel that obeying red lights is, well… optional. Plus, scooters and motorcycles constantly cut in and out of sitting traffic, so they are the main cause of pedestrian death. Great. So after walking around the city, I observed all this mayhem on the streets, along with the gridlock, and decided the (I can’t believe I’m saying this) treadmill was the way to go. At least I got to watch American sitcoms with Portuguese subtitles.

A day and a half later, it was off to Rio, an hour away by plane. But before I forget, I’ll lay on you some facts and figures and odd info about Brazil; having never been there, I decided I’d at least learn something about the place:

Population of Brazil: 185 million. Judging by the bathing suits I saw in Rio, that’s about 30 meters of cloth divided amongst the entire population. But interestingly, women going topless at the beach is a real no-no. Apparently, going topless is only for heathen Europeans.

Geographically, Brazil is larger than the continental U.S. You find that out fast when you’re flying over the country for hours and hours and still haven’t gotten to where you want to go.

With 18 million people, São Paulo is the most populous city in South America. That’s bigger than my hometown. And that’s pretty big.

You knew this already, but they speak Portuguese. The recipe: two cups Spanish, a tablespoon of Italian, an teaspoon of Arabic, and a dash of Klingon. Hmmm… I just moved this blog up four million notches on the Google search result list for ‘klingon’. Anyway, half the language rhymes with ‘Nike Swoosh’. Since they are foaming-at-the-mouth soccer fans, that’s rather appropriate.

São Paulo has the largest Japanese population in the world, outside of Japan. Which means there are Japanese/Brazilian fusion restaurants. OK…

Brazilians LOVE pork. The national dish is a bean stew with every imaginable part of a pig thrown in. Like in Europe, I don’t know how vegetarians handle going out to dinner.

And yes, there’s a level of poverty unlike anything you can imagine. It’s very strange, on one block you’ll see an expensive office building or ritzy high-rise (both with armed guards standing in front, glaring at passers-by) and a few blocks away you’ll see shacks and slums, and empty, one- and two-story windowless buildings. And shoeless kids, sleeping on the sidewalks. And we think OUR social safety net sucks…

On that happy note… more later…

Bob-O is an Ironman.

(A still image taken from the live feed at the finish line. Mr. D had just 'rolled' under the tape.)