Hot stuff: Christy Yiu Kit-ching beats the heat to run a PB but falls just short of Hong Kong’s marathon record

Christy Yiu Kit-ching somehow shrugged off the blistering heat in Rio on Sunday morning to finish 39th in the women’s marathon, setting a new PB with a time of two hours 36 minutes and 11 seconds.

The time was 22 seconds shy of the Hong Kong record, 2:35:49 set in 2004 by Maggie Chan Man-yee, with Yiu a little disappointed she didn’t manage a faster pace in the first half of the race, from the Sambadrome out past many of Rio’s famous sights and back.

But given the fact that Yiu is a recent convert to the distance, having specialised in middle distance, and has only been training full-time for less than two years, it was an impressive finish for the 28-year-old.

The sun was beating down on the exposed stands at the Sambadrome, where Rio’s famous samba schools compete in song and dance at Carnival.

And if you felt sorry for the dancers bedecked in heavy, hot-looking, Carnival attire whom the organisers had shipped in to entertain the crowds at the finish line, you wondered if the runners would cope at all.

But Yiu, who put her career as a nurse on hold to focus on her Olympic dream, said the 35-degree heat hadn’t been the problem.

“I’m happy that I got my PB, but it’s a pity it was just a few seconds off the Hong Kong record," she said.