Tiago Rodrigues

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible. This, I did.

— T.E Lawrence

Back in 2024 I was struck with my first ever serious injury. While playing football with some friends, I suffered a bad tackle that dislocated my kneecap and had to be rushed to the hospital. To read about this event in detail, you can check out my dedicated post on it.

Luckily, everything went well for me, and I recovered in full without any serious repercussions (I never played football again, but that’s more out of fear than any risk).

What I did face was a long recovery process, and that was the first time in life where I felt I had taken a total reset. In my first day, I could barely walk and limped everywhere, with a ton of help from people.

In the weeks that passed, I started walking alone again, standing on my two feet for a bit more time, climbing stairs without going one by one and I started physical therapy to get me back in shape.

After around a month or two, my legs felt “normal” again, though seriously debilitated. I had lost a ton of strength and I felt weaker at just about anything. Not only on my legs, but across my whole body as well. I mean, who would have guessed that being sedentary would atrophy all the muscle you had 😳.

It was in these days where I had no real way to move and a lot of time to think that I pondered on one thing: My body was at the lowest it had been since I can recall, what would it look like at its absolute limit?

This question led me on a journey to discover the limits of my body that I would like to share with you, the readers, and that is ongoing at this very moment. This is my journey on Becoming an Ironman

How did I get here?

After about 4 months from that accident, I started running again as it was just about the lowest impact activity that I enjoyed doing, and bit by bit I started increasing my distance until, on the 31st of December, 2024, I ran my first 5k. For some reason, I took it as a sign that this was a worthwhile pursuit. So I kept going.

I made a plan using ChatGPT to go from 5 to 10k, and I had big dreams of doing my first triathlon by the end of 2025. For about a month, it was looking good! By mid February, I had hit my first 9k and was feeling strong, and that’s when I decided to start adding my bike workouts. This is the point where things went south.

My knee suddenly started hurting like in the first weeks after the accident, and even days after workouts it felt super sore. After a day where I did a 4k easy run and my weak leg was killing me, I decided I needed to get checked.

I went to a different physical therapist my girlfriend knew and he told me that, even though I had been doing all this exercise, only the good leg was actually benefiting from it. The weak knee still did not have enough muscle to be able to bear such a load, and that I was going way too hard for its capabilities. He said I left rehab too early, and was going to have to do a lot of fixing before it was “fully restored”…

This consultation broke me. After that day I stopped running, stopped cycling, and gave up on the dream of doing a triathlon by December. By his words, I was lucky if I was able to do a 10k by December. I was feeling pretty down, having just started doing well for myself.

Fortunately, this was an opportunity to go back to the drawing board. For a while, I started going to the gym regularly to focus on my leg, doing the exercises he gave me, and I made a decision that such a diagnostic would not shape what I was capable of.

Unfortunately for me, I was then forced to take a long hiatus due to a ton of life events happening at the same time.

I took his words as a challenge. Not only would I do a 10k by December, but I would crush it while doing so. By the start of October of that same year (as I said, long hiatus due to a lot of simultaneous life events), the journey had restarted. I started focusing much more on form and keeping the knee stable, and soon enough I got back to doing a 5k and had my lungs back. Also, this time felt different. I didn’t have the knee weirdly placed, my feet were hitting the ground well enough, and I was going at a much better pace than before.

At this point in time was also when I signed up for my first ever race, the 31st edition of Porto’s S.Silvestre Race, on December 28. So now, I had a concrete goal to work for. Every week, I started training 3x a day and the results started coming fast. At the start of November, I hit my first 6k and by the end, I had nearly doubled the distance to my first ever 10k in training.

At the race day, I felt more excited than ever, my adrenaline got the best of me and, even though this was the course with the most amount of hills I ever did, and I felt like passing out about 5 different times, I smashed the race with an official time of 54:29, my fastest time ever on a 10k and my biggest fitness accomplishment that I can recall.

This race got me hooked. Now, I want more.

So, what’s the plan?

After training for this race, I realized that doing an Ironman is not something that is immediately attainable with just some small bit of training. So, I decided to do this by stages. My first step, to end off 2025, was to crush that 10k. Now, the plan goes something like:

2026: Doing my first half-marathon by mid-year, and completing my first Olympic triathlon. The second half of the year, I plan on dedicating entirely to the other two disciplines which I have been neglecting.
2027: Increasing my running to my first full marathon, and doing yet another triathlon (if more races come, I’m happy to tag along for them)
2028: Completing my first half-ironman
2029: Becoming an Ironman

It is rather daunting to look at this plan and see that my goal is still basically 4 years away, but it gives me joy to know that there is a full journey that I get to partake in, and gives me time to fully appreciate each stage of my development.

Does an Ironman represent the upper ceiling my body is capable of? Who know, but right now it sure seems like a good goal post. Maybe in 4 years I’ll be re-writing this with a newer, even bolder goal. Let’s see what the future holds!

Right now, I can only be sure that I need to go to sleep because I have training tomorrow! Goodbye to you all!

Sic Parvis Magna

— Motto of Sir Francis Drake