Let's go, Felipe!
From Envigado-Antioquia in Colombia to Emilia-Romagna in Italy. The first point on the map was drawn in the 1980s and the second, very far from those lands, was planted in history on September 18, 2021.
This story requires me to write it in the first person, because it is my coach I am talking about, the athlete Terret, the “professor” of Dynamic, the one who always goes full throttle. A guy with whom I shared the squabbles of both of our bad English in a classroom at the university and whom I admire today, almost 8 years after those classes, from afar as I write about the path he has taken to get to Europe to run a full IronMan for the second time.
I can assure you that he will have little to say if he meets a local or another foreign-speaking athlete. We did not learn much about foreign languages in the classroom. Where I am sure he will speak is on the road. Felipe González repeats in Spanish, loud and forceful, the word “powerful” as a kind of mantra for himself and for those of us who follow in his footsteps. Ever since I have known him, he has made it clear that his thing is to have a high pulse, voltage at full speed. I watched him with amazement in every athletics race that was run in Medellín, giving everything to the asphalt at full speed while I, a simple mortal, suffered to avoid dying. At that time I, far away from him, was a witness to the journey that brought him to these lines that will be written in Italian.
Years later, when I was a little closer to him on the bike and wearing trainers, I realised that he was an athlete who had built himself up through discipline. As real as the person who writes and the person who reads. Who, despite his appearance as a hero, also struggles to get up early, who has also swallowed the blows of a bad day in training, who rewards himself with two or a few beers after a good race and who, like any good hero, quickens his steps to reach his love quickly after the finish line.
His passion for sport caught him in the nets of tennis courts, then led him to the world of fitness and weights, showed him the hardness of the mountain in the Trail and today he has an IronMan-type logo tattooed on his skin, hours after competing in his second full among medieval-style towns. I witnessed first-hand his struggles with the road, the hells that are experienced when suffering and the heavens that are touched when everything goes well. I had to see him postpone his dream for a few months because of the pandemic, sit on the bike for hours to add endurance to his lungs and run under cloudy and sunny skies to meet his challenge today. Even, due to that stubbornness that we have, we accompanied him a few months ago to do a kind of "simulation" of this race, completing the 180 kilometers of cycling and the 42 kilometers of athletics that it demands to be completed.
Felipe's time has come to add 4 kilometers of swimming to those two sports and to reap with strokes, pedal strokes and strides what he has sown for years to reach that place on the map so far from his native Envigado. Let his legs speak, in whatever language they want, but let them speak loudly so that the next story will be about the day Pipe, my teacher, qualified for the IronMan world championship in Hawaii.
Come on, Felipe! Which is the same as saying: Come on, mighty one!