Some data of my days between the accident and race day (334 days):

• 6 surgeries
• 20 days in the hospital
• 202 hours of workouts
• 1,418 miles covered
• 150 hours of one-on-one therapy

The math comes out to having dedicated on average over an hour per day specifically healing and getting stronger.

Workout Hours and Distance covered each month during recovery

“Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted” – Albert Einstein

When people ask me, what drove me to do an Olympic triathlon just 11 months after such an accident, I think back to my mindset even since the first days in the hospital, driven to be 100% recovered and to prove it in a big stage. I remember my triathlon (and life) coach Boris coming to the hospital one night, sitting by my bedside as he proceeded to outline specifically the different stages and athletic goals of how he thought my recovery would look like. He said: “In 2018 we heal and build, in 2019 we are back up and running stronger than ever”. He even suggested I would eventually write a book and he put forward the tittle:

“It’s going to be called My Way Back” – Boris Fernandez

My way back was exactly my mindset and motto through every training session and even during the Triathlon itself. It is impressive how accurate he was on how the recovery processed looked like; it was awful and wonderful at the same time. Awful, well you can imagine why; Wonderful, because the feeling of getting stronger and going to bed everyday better than when I woke up is an addictive feeling. The secret sauce? Discipline and consistency, doing your therapies and scheduled workouts every single day, no matter how much it sucks. It’s a slippery slope to rely on motivation alone. If we worked out only when motivated it would be only twice or three times a week.

“Discipline is demonstrating a clear decision on a daily basis” –

Discipline gets you to put in the work when you least want to do it. Once I stringed 3 or 4 consecutive days of completing all my tasks, I would get momentum and just keep going. A friend from my MBA once told me “When you are going through hell, just keep going” and it gets very real. Completing workouts and seeing your body responding positively and getting stronger, further adds fuel to your mission.

I then started to focus on what other factors I could tweak to help improve my recovery even if it meant improving by just 1%. Early on I identified nutrition to be a huge factor. My biggest criticism about the health system in the US is that when I asked the doctors specifically what type of diet I should eat to help boost my healing, they didn’t have a satisfactory response. I can’t blame them; the system makes them so specialized in their field (Orthopedic surgery for example) that once they stitch you up they cannot really give you a recommendation or point you to a study about a specific diet that aids bone healing for instance. Their answer was mainly: “Just eat healthy”. I took matters into my own hands and dived head-first into an ocean of information about healthy eating and different diets. Wow! Was it overwhelming! After days of research the only thing I was sure was good for everybody was maybe water. Everything else had contradictions online, the keto diet, intermittent fasting, vegan, paleo, vegetarian, balanced, low carb, high protein, or whatever.

The main message that I kept stumbling upon was that everyone’s body is different so there is no one diet that is adequate for all types of bodies/lifestyles. In the end I was quite influenced by the first book I read during my recovery “Finding ultra” by Rich Roll. His story about living his best life, highly resonated with me, and (spoiler alert!) a big part of his story was his change of diet into a plant-based lifestyle.  I did more research to corroborate some of his findings and spoke to a nutritionist friend of mine before doing anything crazy, so in the end I decided to give it a try. I figured one week of eating only plants would be enough for me to see results and how I felt with the change of diet. It went great and I loved it, so one week quickly became two and now its been over a year at the time of writing that I have been eating basically only plants (with a few exceptions). In short, I feel this diet optimized my recovery, by making my body run cleaner and more in a more efficient. I like to draw the comparison to fueling your car with the most premium fuel, it’s simply better for your engine and things break down less. Anyway, this is not a “Why a vegan diet is good for you” post, I just want to be straight forward and write about what I found were the key factors to having a successful recovery.

There is no short-cut or substitute to showing up every single day. My goal was to get stronger while also being mindful that my body was still healing. I put a lot of time and energy into staying extremely hydrated all day, every day. I even went as far as making sure I was taking special salts and electrolytes several times a day to make sure my blood Ph was as alkaline as possible and that my body was properly hydrated to optimize healing. Then came the results. It obviously didn’t happen from one day to the next, but gradually and sooner rather than later my legs got stronger and then indoor-rides and climbs that would previously leave me out of breath, now were less of an effort.

Strava measures your fitness level based on heart rate and power meter data from your workouts, which allows you to see your fitness level over time. The highlighted date was the day of my first triathlon back after the accident (big down slope on the graph).

I believe that what gets measured gets managed, and boy did I measure my heart rate during my recovery and training. One of the doctors made fun of me for wearing two heart-rate monitors all the time but then also admitted that it probably took somebody as obsessive with his health to have the best recovery he has seen, even beyond what he considered best case scenario. For almost two years now I have been using Whoop’s HRM (www.whoop.com) which is a cool wrist band that captures 100MB of heart rate data daily, then analyses the hell out of it and gives you a few indicators as to how your system is working in terms of sleep, recovery and if you should load your body up or maybe take it a little easier. Whoop has been my friend in high intensity triathlon training and quickly became my best friend during my recovery. In fact, the week of my big Triathlon comeback I unfortunately lost my whoop (fell in the ocean). I had never been so lost and truly realized the value of the data Whoop provides you about your body and it is when I realized I am officially Whooped.  I tell you this because one of the most magical things about this journey has been to see my body heal and find strength that I didn’t know I had in me, it is a wonderful experience.

By the time race day came around I knew I was more than ready for the challenge; its like they say “You earn trophies at practice, you just pick them up at competitions”. It was a very emotional to line up at the start line once again around familiar faces and I thoroughly enjoyed that race although for me this time it was not about finishing but about taking it all in and enjoying the results of my hard work and my the journey of My Way Back.

Finish line picture with my good friend Jorge after the big comeback at Escape to Miami Triathlon

P.S: For those wondering I finished in 2h42m which was good enough for 6th place in my Age Group (Male 25-29yr olds) and about 20mins slower than my pre-accident fitness level

This post is dedicated to all those facing a what seems like a big insurmountable goal, keep chopping at it every single day and with hard work and consistency it will become more closer to a reality