At one point in the hospital, when I was getting ready to leave the TICU (Trauma Intensive Care Unit) to go to the more “relaxed” burn unit, my coach Boris came up with the idea that I had to get better quickly and train to walk the Miami Half-Marathon. The catch? It was coming up in a little over two months. The following video shows how I walked the first day without any help from machines:

It is pretty obvious I was in no condition to be thinking about any sort of athletic event, much less a Half-Marathon. Nonetheless, I thought about it for about two seconds and then I was off on a mission. Originally, the goal was to be able to run it (dream big). If all went according to plan, my burns would have healed by late December, and the neck brace and casts should come off by early January. This would give me a little under 3 weeks to train for the Half-Marathon. If everything healed on time, I should be able to finish it, considering I was in pretty good shape before the accident.

I now had a tight deadline, so I wasted no time and started walking around the hospital wing where they were treating me. The first day I did half the hallway and back, the second ¾ of the hallway, then the whole hallway, then the hallway and a corner, which then became one loop of the wing, then 2 loops and so on – you get the picture. My mentality was that “Every day I want to go to sleep healthier and more recovered than when I woke up” as you can hear on the video below.

The thing about this being a real-life story, is that everything didn’t go according to plan. The three surgeries (two for arms and one for burns) went extremely well, and after 20 days I was discharged from the hospital. Once I was comfortably back home, I started walking more and more. The same friends that had come visit me at the hospital made sure I never walked alone (Thanks guys for that, you know who you are). The time came for me to go back and get more CT Scans to see how my C2 fracture had evolved. Unfortunately the fracture was nowhere close to healing, which meant at least another two months in the neck brace. As if that wasn’t enough, the cast in the left arm didn’t come off when we had hoped it would; the doctors wanted to me keep it on until the day AFTER the marathon, I kid you not. The caveat to being in a cast is that the doctors don’t want you to sweat, since the skin doesn’t dry properly and can cause infection in the worst of cases.

Turns out I was already out-walking many of my friends on Instagram

When I left the hospital that day I was so bummed that I thought: “This is it, my goal of doing the Half-Marathon is finished.” In the conditions I was in, it meant I would have to walk the whole thing in a neck brace (against doctors’ orders) and do it without sweating. I started to really realize the importance of having an amazing support system once I broke the news to my close friends and told them my dream was now crushed. They made me see that I was already walking in a neck brace without sweating during my training (I only walked at night since I also had to avoid the sun because of the burns). Walking in the sun would be a challenge, but the distance wasn’t a problem, some days I was already walking 10 km. Some of them even decided to join me and were committed to walking the Half-Marathon with me, and that is what got me back on track and made me realize that there will always be obstacles in the way. The easy thing to do is to give up, but glory and victories go to those that do the exact opposite, those who refuse to give up.

The day of the marathon went exactly as I expected. During my previous racing experiences, I had learnt that the hard part was to train consistently every day and on race day all you had to do was show up. It wasn’t any different this time. I logged every walk using my Garmin watch and Strava; turns out that by the time race day came around, I had walked 108 miles since leaving the hospital or the equivalent of 8 half marathons in just two months. I was beyond prepared and only worried about the crowd of marathoners pushing me, so I started last. It went smoothly, and my company and I had a blast telling stories and betting about what our official time would be, which came up to be 3h28m, not my personal record but probably one of my biggest athletic accomplishments. It was one of those magical days when you really get to know yourself and what you are made of. I can truthfully and proudly say that we are much stronger than we think.

This post is dedicated to all of those who walked with me at during my recovery, specially my mom, Nelson, Camila, and Felipe, who walked the whole thing with me, and to my coach Boris, who placed this crazy, borderline unrealistic idea in my head.