Hillary Biscay

4 June 10: Adventures in Rio

Posted on 04. Jun, 2010 by hillarybiscay in Blog | 2 Comments

In all of my trips to Brasil, I had never visited Rio de Janeiro. This year, I decided that my double-ironman adventure would earn me a little vacation, so the GCM and I planned a family holiday with Lukey and Amanda to follow Ironman Brasil.

GCM and The Champ at the post-race celebration

By the way, I cannot believe I have not carried on here about Lukey’s performance in Floripa last Sunday. In case you missed it, he not only earned his FIFTH ironman title; he busted out an 8:07, which is insanely fast on that course! If I recall correctly, I believe I predicted this win here . . .

GCM sandwich! Believe it or not, Amanda and I did not plan our outfits, and we had on matching shoes too.

Fernanda took us on a running tour of “her” beach . . .

Anyways, we had the privilege of experiencing Rio for the first time with the best tour guide ever: Brasilian ironman legend, Fernanda Keller. If you don´t know who this is, you need to brush up on your ironman history! Besides being the hottest, most fit 46-year-old ever, Fernanda has 14x top-ten finishes and six third-place finishes at the Hawaii Ironman to her credit. I have had the pleasure (well that might be the wrong word to describe when she ran me down after I had a ten-minute lead off the bike at Ironman Brasil two years ago . . .) of racing against her many times over the past few years. I am in awe of this woman, so to be able to spend the past few days with her was just awesome–and then to have her showing us her city from a local´s perspective was icing on the cake. What an inspiration Fernanda is– I learned a lot this week, and not just about Rio!

Naturally, we couldn’t get enough of all of Fernanda’s trophies, photos, and other tri paraphernalia.

The GCM and I are in the Rio Airport as I write this, about to embark on the 30+ hour journey to Kona for our summer training camp. We are really anxious both to unpack our bags and settle down for a bit, and to get back into some hard training.  The past few days have been pretty full-on “vacation mode” in terms of training (or lack thereof) and eating; I did manage to get lots of sleep, but somehow after a double, I can never get enough. Consequently, I will also have to undergo a coffee-detox plan after all of the lovely Brasilian variety that I have consumed in the past week. We are, of course, bringing bags of it home with us, but I will attempt to use it sparingly!

I also expect to be back in the land of the internet in Kona, so I will be visiting here more regularly again. I’ve got many more pics to post and lots of airport internet time in my future, so stay tuned.

Tags: