So, we are officially in Rio and ready for the next marathon!  After a “marathon” effort to complete the renovations of the Hampton House and getting moved in over the last two weeks, Maria and I are on our way to run a marathon on our 4^th continent!

Rio being in the southern hemisphere is just about to start their winter.  The first day of “winter solstice” is less than a week away and one would think that the temperature would be equal to December in the mid-Atlantic.  Wrong.  The temperature forecast for Sunday, marathon day, is expected to peak at 87 degrees and a relative humidity of 68%.  The good news is the days are shorter and the marathon starts at 7:30 AM, which is just after sunrise.

The bad news is that I have had a chance to do much “warm weather” training.  Before we came up to New England to finish the house, the weather in Florida had been cooler and dryer than usual – in the upper 70’s.  In New England, there were some days just a few weeks ago where I ran in long pants and wore gloves because the temperatures in the morning were in the mid 40’s. 

The good news is that I have been putting in a lot of miles since the first of the year – averaging between 40 and 50 miles a week, and a hamstring issue from a few weeks ago is pretty much gone.  Adrienne gave me a book for Christmas that was about improving your endurance by doing speed work (sprints) and thereby improving your long-distance time.

To some runners the term Fartlek may be familiar to the speed work in this book but the idea is a little different in that you time yourself on a measured distance (one or two laps on the track).  To do this you need a watch that works like a stop watch.  You run the first lap at a warm up speed and then on the second lap you start the watch, run as fast as you can and pause it after that lap.  You then do a warm up pace lap to recover and then run another fast lap after restarting the watch.  Once you complete the second fast lap run another recovery lap at warm up speed.  You can then stop and check your time.

You then start it all over again and if you keep reducing the time you record for the two laps you keep repeating.  Eventually your time will be longer than your last, so you stop the fast laps, run a few laps to recover, and call it a day.

The track I run on is 1/10^th of a mile so each set is a ½ a mile and the most I have ever done is 6 sets.  I try to do this every other day.  In Florida, I do not live near a track so I used a white spray paint can and put a dot in the pavement every 1/10^th of a mile and just run this on the road starting and stopping the speed section as I come to each white dot.

This has helped my overall time on the long runs and my pace is almost a minute a mile faster than when I started this at New Years!  I ran the Kentucky Derby Festival Mini Marathon (half marathon) in Louisville in April with Adrienne, Kit and Erika and took 17 minutes off of my time from last year.

With all of that said, it has been almost a full year since I ran my last Marathon in Davos, Switzerland!  I look forward checking one more Continent off the list this Sunday in Rio.  A few quick photos from our first hours in Rio are below.  Enjoy, and stay tuned for an update on running a marathon on continent #4!