Ironman Barcelona

Back in Lisbon, I pulled everything together and got in a single training run with a very special soul who knocked on my door and hauled me out onto the street: my friend Ángel. They say people like that appear rarely and at particular moments, and I can do nothing but confirm it. The run we did out by the airport helped me in more ways than I can describe.

Over the next few days I lost a lot of weight and slept badly, but the day came, and I left for Barcelona with Andreia, a colleague who would turn out to be much more than a traveling companion.

Nerves, last-minute preparations, gear checks, and dealing emotionally with the many flashes that kept sprinkling through those days. It was intense, and would only end when the race started. I had to learn to wait for that moment, and the moment itself became magic. On Calella beach I ran into Luís Nunes, a former coworker, already a big name in running, who would go on to become a great champion in triathlon too.

The starting gun took the nerves away, and less than 100 meters into the water there were already kayaks coming back with athletes who had quit. It’s easy to panic and hyperventilate at a swim start, and it was easier still before the more organized start waves of today. The course was about 200 meters straight out, then a right turn, a long straight parallel to the beach, a U-turn, another long straight back, and out.

The Mediterranean is calm, but those side waves can work against you when you’re a beginner. Every time I breathed toward the sea there was a chance of swallowing water. I was adjusting my stroke — breathing more to one side, a little queasy — when I went past two swimmers and noticed how close they were. I only understood it fully later, on the bike — which was a tandem — and on the run, with a tether between them: one of them was blind. Think about that. There I was, struggling not to swallow water, and these two extraordinary human beings were working together so one of them could face the same conditions, only without sight.

It’s one of the things I take from these challenges again and again, and one of the reasons I keep coming back: lessons in humility, and in redrawing the scale of what is possible.

I got out of the water however I could, and relieved: the first leg, the one I feared most, was in the bag. For the bike I chose not to wear a tri-suit but proper cycling shorts and a white Rapha jersey with a black armband — the original 2004 series — that he had given me as a present. Coming out of the bike park I tripped and went down with the bike on the exit ramp — apparently a knock of no importance. It wasn’t visible right away, but I had cracked the carbon handlebar, and from that point on it was weakened without my knowing it.

On the bike — a flat, boring course along the coast, scenic enough, with a beautiful lighthouse, and a single climb thrown in just to break the route up and put a few feet of climbing into the profile — I spent those hours remembering, above all, childhood memories of the two of us. The trips up to Alto de São Bento to kick a soccer ball around. The go-karts. The sunset the two of us called Gema d’Ovo, the yolk of an egg. The father-to-son talk after a fight with a kid at school. The afternoons working side by side at the computer company — hour after hour of learning and turning screws. The contained praise after good grades. And then, out of nowhere, cowbells and voices from the roadside urging me on — “Acorda, João, vamos embora, carrega!” Wake up, João, let’s go, push.

The hours went by, and at 68 miles (110 km), as I pulled harder on the bar on a climb, it visibly came apart at the bend on the right-hand side, just ahead of the brake and shift lever. Held on by nothing but the tape, I could no longer steer the bike normally. I kept my right hand in close to the center, adapted, and focused on bringing the two of us home.

The marathon worked until halfway, then alternated with fast walking, very little nutrition going in, and was finally reduced to a plain walk for several minutes. At one point I actually had to stop and stretch my calf on the grass for a few minutes. I couldn’t walk. I was wrecked, tank empty, legs refusing to cooperate. It looked like a dead end, but I knew I had to finish. All that was left was to work out how. We had a few conversations — bora, Mig. I started running again, with rhythm, two miles out.

In the last half mile, a straight through the park just before the turn toward the finish, I went somewhere else. I was running in a vacuum: my legs moved without applying force, all I could hear was the sound of the strides, all I could feel was their rhythm.

Around me I heard: “Yeah! That’s the way to do it! Finish strong!”

A tight left, and there it was. The finish of what was also my first marathon, inside my first long-course triathlon. I didn’t hear, in the announcer’s famous voice, the words most people long for when they set out on a journey like this — “Joao, you are an Ironman.” But I felt the moment hard, I pointed at the sky, and I finally gave my body the order to stop. It was over. I had emptied myself, squeezed out every drop of energy, even when I believed there was none left. On that particular day I went beyond myself in more ways than one, and I had the best company.