Bikes and Beaches – Exercise in Rio de Janeiro

The beach along Copacabana is an inspiration to anyone who wants to get into shape – and no, I am NOT talking about tiny bikinis.  

My husband Jeff and I came to live in Rio for a few weeks while he works at a university in town.  We rented an apartment along Copacabana, went grocery shopping and settled in.  Rio is one of the world’s great cities and there are many aspects to commend it.  However one aspect of the city that I am really impressed with is the easy availability of different ways to exercise and the extent to which the city supports and encourages everyone of every age to exercise. There is no reason not to exercise and,  especially as we age, so many reasons to keep or get in shape.  The city of Rio makes it easy!

Last Saturday we downloaded the Rio Bike rental app onto our smartphones, registered to become members and walked to the closest Rio Bike station.  The app includes a map of the many numbered stations in the city.  Each station is a bike stand that holds about twelve or more bright orange bikes, each secured to the rack with an anchor post that fits into a corresponding numbered receptor on the bike stand.  The smart phone app is brilliant.  Once registered and at a station, you log into your account, punch in the station number, enter the number of the bike you want and soon the green light that releases the bike lights up.  A sharp pull of the bike away from the rack and it is yours – free for an hour or less or just five reais (about 2 US dollars) if you bike more than an hour.  It was our first time at a bike station and we were a little hesitant.  A pretty young Carioca (people from Rio are called Cariocas) asked if we needed help.  She showed us the specific sequence needed to release the bike.  She wished us luck and rode off on her orange bike.  Jeff and I adjusted our saddle heights, checked the brakes and wheeled our bikes across the street.  There is a separated 2-way bike lane that parallels the beach all along Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon.  We took off and rode to the end of Leblon – a distance of about 6 miles.  The bikes are great – each has a built in basket, hand brakes and three gears.  We cruised happily along the path, passing some slower bikers and being passed by faster bikers.  Here and there we passed a runner or a skateboarder. 

It was Saturday afternoon and the beaches were full of sunbathers and footvolley players.  Footvolley is a crazy game invented in Rio that combines aspects of beach volleyball and football (soccer to North Americans).  Players follow the rules of beach volleyball but cannot use their hands and a soccer (football) ball replaces the volleyball.  It is fun to watch and the expert skill levels along the beach result in long volleys and excitement for the spectators.  The food kiosks were full of people enjoying themselves, eating, drinking, listening to music and watching the scene go by.  The bike path parallels a busy street in the transition between Copacabana and Ipanema but the low wall that separates the bikers from the traffic gives a feeling of safety.  I marveled at how Rio, which has a reputation for chaos and danger, can have such a safe and universally accessible bike path and rental system when in my USA home city of Seattle, Washington, which has a reputation for being bike-friendly, a woman was just killed while she was riding on a designated bike lane along a downtown street.  To be fair to Seattle that street now has a separated bike lane and that lane had been planned before the tragic death.  Unfortunately the plan didn’t happen in time to save the life of an innocent woman.  None of this is to say there are not dangers in Rio.  Of course there are but on Saturday afternoon, biking along on my orange bike, I was happy and grateful for the chance to rent a bike so easily and bike safely in my newly adopted city.  I would love to see a similar system in Seattle.  Perhaps one day it will happen.

As the week continues I am exploring more than Rio Bike.  The city is full of positive energy.  Rio is world famous so what was I expecting?  Copacabana beach is a perfect crescent moon of white sand and surf.  Along the beach stretches the Avenida Atlantica path, an iconic black and white mosaic sidewalk wide enough to hold at least ten people abreast.  The path is home to a continuous stream of people, retired couples walking arm in arm; young mothers pushing strollers; lovers of all ages sometimes kissing, sometimes strolling, sometimes watching the surf; runners; walkers; bikers; young kids chasing each other; surfers riding or coming in from the waves; just plain folks walking and people watching.   Most people are Cariocas but here and there a foreigner, a tourist like me, is part of the mix. 

My favorite time to walk along the beach is in the late afternoon.  That is when you realize that Cariocas really are mad about exercise.  Yesterday I left my apartment about 5 pm and went to a little park close by.  The park sports a veritable gymnasium of exercise equipment all provided by the Rio municipality.  There are elliptical trainers, lat pull and rowing machines, parallel bars, leg extension machines, and goodness knows what else.  It looks like a reduced, outdoors version of the weight room at my YMCA back home in Seattle.  The whole “gym” is just a few feet from the beach.  I chose an elliptical trainer and started to work out.  The machine was at least as good as ones I’ve used in gyms but the view was a whole lot better!  I looked out onto the beach and watched the surfers rise and fall with the waves.  Occasionally a surfer would catch a big wave and ride casually into the shallows.  There is something inspirational about watching a surfer ride a big wave.  It looks so effortless!  I know it isn’t but that is the charm and the compulsion of surfing.  When it works, it is perfect.  I worked out in parallel with another woman and a man…the elliptical machines are in stacks of three.  Around us I could see other people my age working out on the various machines.  I had to smile.  Here we all were, no one less than fifty years old and most of us well over sixty and we are all pushing and pulling on the machines, limbering up and strengthening our bodies.  After my set time on the elliptical I moved onto a set of upper body exercises on another machine.  The air was fresh; the temperature perfect.  A slight breeze blew off the ocean.  At one of the elliptical racks a woman from the Rio municipality explained correct technique to the three ladies working out.  Wow I thought to myself.  How great is it that?  This city is focused on improving the physical condition of its citizens.  When I finished the upper body exercises, I stretched and joined the parade of people walking along the sidewalk.  I had in mind about a 45-minute fast walk.  It was late afternoon and the men who rent beach chairs and umbrellas were stacking them up and moving them into storage for the night.  The lights were beginning to come on as I walked.  Dusk is surprisingly short in the tropics – so different from northern temperate endless summer evenings.  I reached my halfway point and stopped at one of the many stainless steel stretching stations.  These stations are set at regular intervals along the beach.  Each station has a poster that shows in diagrammatic form stretches for upper and lower body.  The equipment is simple but allows one to accomplish all the stretches.  I read the poster and tried out several of the stretches.  I was grateful for the instructions since, despite years of exercising, it is easy to forget to stretch enough.  Even when I remember I usually shortchange some part of my body!  As we age, stretching is at least as important as any other form of exercise.  It is always surprising to me how easy it is to get stiff – and it only seems to get worse the older I get.  I finished my stretching and turned around for the last part of my workout.  Thanks Rio!  Thanks for supporting the health and well being of us middle aged folks.

Late Summer on Lopez Island

Flowers at Horse Drawn Farm

I have been up on Lopez Island in the San Juans for much of the past month.  The island rhythm is seductive…slow mornings lingering over island roasted coffee with delicious breakfast pastries and fresh berries; bicycle rides over familiar roads lined with red rosehips and white snowberries; wandering the island to procure amazing late summer food and flowers; going to the bakery to buy one more loaf of fresh French bread; sitting in the garden reading in the golden afternoon light; taking friends out in our boat and setting the crab traps; late afternoon bike rides; and perhaps best of all, pulling the traps up and harvesting the big male Dungeness crabs.  My husband’s college roommate and his wife, Jim and Sue, visited us this past week.  They live just outside Chicago and had never been to the San Juans.  We picked them up at the morning ferry and went first to the oyster farm to buy a fresh Sockeye salmon and then to Horse Drawn Farm – a 24-hour self service farm stand in the middle of the island.  Our friends couldn’t believe the flower gardens or the quality of produce set out in the open air timber structure – green and yellow zucchini; shiny eggplant; red, yellow, purple and green peppers; basil; large lumpy heritage tomatoes; shallots; sweet onions; farm made sausages; the list goes on.

We returned home laden with goodies, enjoyed a quick picnic lunch and went down to our boat for a fishing expedition.  The sky was clear blue and the sun shone on the water, sending ripples of sparkling light across the bay.  We decided to start our afternoon with a brief tour around the nearby islands before we settled down to salmon fishing.  Despite the late August date, the returning salmon are barely running.  It has been an unusually dry and warm summer.  The annual fish runs are reported to be staying north in the cooler waters off the British Columbia coast. 

Crab Trap!

Of course fishing isn’t just about catching the big one; it’s equally about being out on the water and enjoying the whole experience.  While I trolled slowly around our favorite fishing spot, Jeff and Jim set up the downriggers.  Sue sat in the cockpit with me and we watched our GPS sounder carefully, tracking depth and the location of baitfish.  Running at about 120 feet, we could see dense clouds of baitfish swimming at 60 to 80 feet.  Jeff and Jim set the downriggers at 75 feet and I drove in big slow circles across the waves.  While we chatted, we watched sea lions diving and a flock of gulls floating on the waves.  Suddenly the gulls rose from the water in a single cloud, responding simultaneously to an unknown signal.  Sue and I watched them circle in the sky overhead and then disappear around the edge of the nearby island only to reappear minutes later and land in a crowd on the water.  As luck would have it this wasn’t the day we would catch that big one.  We trolled through the slack tide thinking the fish would surely come.  We tried our favorite childhood fishing calls but to no avail.  The fish weren’t biting or perhaps aren’t in our part of Puget Sound yet.  We pulled the rods back into the boat and drove across the open water to check our crab traps.  Jim and Sue thrilled at the sight of Mount Baker hovering above the horizon.  They loved seeing the huge green and white ferries plowing across the water.   My job was to give the ferries the right of way as we skimmed across the waves!  I approached the first crab trap slowly and carefully, bringing the boat alongside while Jim hooked the trap smoothly as if he had been doing it all his life.  We measured and secured the legal males in a bucket of salt water and threw the undersize and female crabs back, repeating the whole process with the next trap.  The rest of their visit was delightful.  We shared old memories, told family stories and laughed together.  As we said goodbye the next day we promised to “do this more than once every forty years”.

Sunset over Fisherman Bay

It is always a surprise to me how summer accelerates in the last days of August.  Just a few days ago it was my early August birthday and now there is a tiny chill in the morning and Labor Day weekend is almost over.  I’ve heard the ferries sending their foghorn calls at 5 am and watched the mist drift across the straits as the air starts to cool in the evening.  Last night I rode my bicycle home from the other end of the island after we hauled our final delicious crab catch out of the cold water.  It was Sunday evening and no one was on the roads.  I pedaled along alone, skimming the familiar roads easily after a summer of biking.  Biking is a wonderful middle age sport – not stressful to your joints but still a very good work out.  My summer has been full of incredible rides both on Lopez and elsewhere – the Portugal bike trip in May; training rides throughout Puget Sound in June; the 2-day, 204-mile Seattle to Portland ride with my husband and eight others, family members and close friends, in July; and almost daily rides in and around Seattle and Lopez in August sometimes with my husband and daughter; sometimes with friends or alone.  This amount of biking has been wonderful both for my mind and for my body.  My legs are noticeably stronger – I can pedal up steep hills without thinking I will die or worse, get off my bike.  My mind is calmer and happier, filled with memories of wonderful vistas – Puget Sound from the edge of Magnolia; barrier islands lit by the setting sun across Davis and Fisherman Bay; tree filled valleys and fields full of Queen Anne’s lace and round haystacks.  I've had time to think through new stories to write in Brazil and share rides with my grown daughter who joined us for the month while she finished writing her dissertation.  It is a privilege to live in a beautiful place and to have the health and opportunity to enjoy it with family and friends.

Beach Rock Cairn

Early this morning we said goodbye to the last of our summertime visitors - close friends from Seattle.  Today we’ve been doing end of summertime chores.  It is almost time to put the boat up into storage and move the outdoor furniture inside for the winter.  I can hear my husband’s chainsaw cutting the overgrown junipers back before the autumn rains set in.  We’ll be returning to Brazil soon – saying goodbye to the Pacific Northwest for a few months and saying hello to our adopted home in the southern hemisphere.  It has been a summer full of memorable visits with friends and family; cooking and sharing wonderful meals; walks on the beach and in the lovely cedar woods; watching the sun set across the water, lighting everything in a molten glow.  I have many new rocks and shells to add to my collections.  We’ve used some of the lovely smooth beach rocks to build small cairns around our house – not because we need directions from the porch to the front door but because the small piles of stones mark a place we love.  I like the idea that the stones will be waiting to greet me.  I know I’ll be ready to greet them.