Race Report · Triathlon / Ironman · 2022
Ironman Vitoria
Six months after shoulder surgery — and family at the line · Vitoria-Gasteiz, July 10, 2022
The year before, I’d signed up for another long-course triathlon. This was more than a bike ride, this was an Ironman — still with no strength in me, six months after they opened up my shoulder and a week after coming off the anticoagulants. I keep three moments from that day, and they could hardly be more different from one another.
The first is the swim — more precisely, reaching the first buoy. After so long without hearing a start horn, finding myself out there in the middle of all that again and feeling that I had control of the arm back was a dream. It has nothing to do with the pace or the time I put up. It has to do with the body, even with barely any strength in it, obeying an order it simply could not carry out for months.
The second is the exact opposite. What is normally my greatest strength, the bike, was my worst moment out there — and I have no other way to describe it. Even though I’d already done BikingMan after the operation, the tune is different on a time trial bike for that long, coming straight out of the water: the position, the weight through the elbows, all those hours locked on the same line. I rode almost all of it in pain, with the shoulder hanging.
The third is mile 15 of the marathon. My calf was barely holding together, and I knew it could go at any time. But that was the moment I felt I was already close enough to the end that, one way or another, I was going to finish. From there on it was only a question of how much it was going to hurt. It hurt. And then it was smiling all the way in.
And so many reasons to. The heat was immense, and the city center, the park, the crowds cheering — it was incredible, the kind of energy that carries you when the body has nothing left of its own. Vitoria-Gasteiz, in the Basque Country, knows how to welcome an athlete like few places do.
But what makes that day unforgettable wasn’t the race. It was the finish. It was the first time my family was waiting for me at the line — a few yards before the arch I took the flag from their hands, and what I heard, screamed with completely unmanaged emotion, was the highest compliment there is in Portuguese: “Ganda paaaai!!!”
No Garmin, no Strava records a thing like that. I’ve crossed a lot of finish lines alone. That one I crossed not just for them, but with them.
