At around half past 6 on a gray Thursday morning, a fleet of garbage trucks begins pouring forth from headquarters, merging onto a congested highway before scattering across the northern part of the city. In one, riding shotgun, is Fernando Beserra, dressed in his blaze orange trash collector’s uniform, ready for another day.
When his crew arrives at a quiet street in Sao Paulo’s Penha neighborhood, Beserra and two other collectors hop out of the truck, pull on their gloves and set off at a trot toward the morning’s first garbage bags, mounded on the sidewalk. They fling them in the truck and hustle off to the next pile — bend, lift, heave, run, repeat. They probably will run between eight and 10 miles, all in a day’s work for a Brazilian trash collector. “If they don’t run, they won’t finish their work,” said Cristian Manzale, operations supervisor for the company’s northern unit.
In Beserra’s case, if he doesn’t run, he won’t have time to run some more. In his spare time, Beserra is a competitive runner whose grueling workday is often merely his warm-up. Training by himself another three or four days per week, Beserra puts in another 50 or so miles of running. “I’m used to it,” said Beserra, 33, a slight, soft-spoken man who has been at this six days a week for the past seven years. “It’s not that bad anymore.”
Beserra is a member of a distinctly Brazilian corps of long-distance runners who use trash collecting as a springboard to running careers. The most accomplished is Solonei Rocha da Silva, who is among the elite international competitors who earned invitations to Monday’s Boston Marathon. A top-20 finish at the world championships last August in Beijing also secured da Silva a spot on the Brazilian Olympic team; he will race the marathon at the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro in August…
Read the full story at www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/many-of-brazils-top-marathoners-get-their-start-running-as-trash-collectors/2016/04/17/e9b3cc3a-fb37-11e5-80e4-c381214de1a3_story.html?tid=sm_tw.