BEYOND THE SURFACE

The Eighteen-Month Mirage

For the last eighteen months, my life has been governed by a spreadsheet. Every morning started the same way: analyzing metrics, measuring paces, checking the power meter on the bike, and forcing my body to conform to clean, predictable, round numbers. I was completely focused on building a roadmap to high performance, treating my body like a machine that just needed the right inputs to produce the perfect output.

But as the months went on, the data stopped making sense. Amidst the peak training blocks and the perfectly executed sessions, subtle glitches started to surface. At first, I dismissed them as standard fatigue or the price of pushing physical limits. But these weren’t just temporary setbacks; they were the first warnings of an underlying breakdown that my spreadsheets couldn’t predict, completely changing how I look at the start line of Ironman Vitoria, which is now exactly fourteen days away.

The Cyclical Ghost in the Machine

To understand where I stand today, you have to look back across this entire year-and-a-half journey. For eighteen months, I have been haunted by a cyclical ghost. Like clockwork, every three months, my body would completely derail, leaving me feeling trapped inside a physical shell that refused to cooperate.

Every 90 days or so, I would fall into a brutal cycle of biological frustration. I would wake up multiple times a night in a state of sudden, unprovoked panic, my heart racing against my ribs, completely unable to find deep sleep. My body would begin retaining massive amounts of fluid, leaving me feeling heavy, bloated, and chronically swollen from head to toe. Worst of all, my cuádriceps would completely lock up; during training, they would turn into rigid blocks of concrete, entirely resisting movement.

Because it happened so regularly, I kept trying to fit the problem into standard athletic boxes. I came up with every logical theory a triathlete could manufacture to keep from admitting something was deeply wrong:

• The Carb-Loading Illusion: I convinced myself that the extreme swelling and heavy legs were just “carb bloating”—the classic cellular retention where storing $1\text{g}$ of glycogen binds roughly $3\text{g} \text{ to } 4\text{g}$ of water. I figured I was just overdoing the pre-race plates of pasta and trapping fluid in my tissues.

• The Taper Tantrum: I blamed bad tapering. I assumed that dropping my training volume suddenly before a peak race was causing “taperitis”—that heavy, sluggish, phantom-pain phenomenon where the body throws a tantrum because it doesn’t know what to do with sudden rest.

• Neurological Burnout: I thought I was suffering from pure central nervous system (CNS) fatigue. I reasoned that the cumulative, high-voltage electrical stress on my spinal cord and motoneuronas alfa from months of grinding was finally frying my circuitry, triggering a neuromechanical brake to protect my joints.

Every time an episode hit, I would adjust my macros, rewrite my taper schedules, or take a few days of desperate rest. But the cycle always returned, right on schedule, chipping away at my confidence.

The true breakthrough didn’t come from a better taper or an adjusted carb-load; it came from a hard medical reality. Because of an underlying thyroid issue, I take Eutirox (levotiroxina). In the chaos of life and high-volume training blocks, my consistency would slip every few months, and I’d miss just a few doses over a couple of weeks. For a sedentary person, that tiny lapse might pass unnoticed. For an endurance engine running at a thousand revolutions per minute, it was a catastrophic bottleneck that cut off my power at the source.

Without that steady hormonal spark, my muscles literally ran out of cellular energy (ATP) to pump calcium out of the fibers after a contraction. The calcium stayed trapped inside, leaving my legs permanently stiff, rigid, and locked up. My kidneys slowed down, building up water-attracting molecules under my skin—a true clinical mixedema, not a simple carb-load bloat. And because my cells were starving for energy at night, my brain panicked, flooding my system with cortisol and adrenaline at 3:00 AM just to keep the lights on. My nociceptors—my body’s pain alarms—were dialed up to 100%. Every stride felt like tearing muscle tissue because my nervous system was screaming for mercy in a state of pure hypervigilance.

At least, this is my last theory / reality now…

Tearing Up the Script for Vitoria

Learning that lesson was a masterclass in humility. I had to stop fighting my body and start listening to it. I had to learn that more is not always better—that sometimes, rolling on the bike for 60 to 90 minutes in a gentle Zone 2 to actively drain fluid is infinitely more productive than grinding out a stubborn three-hour block that keeps the cortisol tap running wide open.

Ironman Vitoria is a completely different beast. In two weeks, the safety net of the known is gone, and the luxury of a controlled, predictable race script is officially out the window.

If I let the perfectionist inside me take the wheel, the sheer scale of the unknowns would paralyze me. I still don’t know how my lower back will tolerate hours on the aero bars, or exactly how my gut will process fuel in hour nine, or what lives on the other side of the invisible wall during the marathon. But after eighteen months of messing up, crashing, guessing, resetting, and finally discovering the true root of the problem, I have realized something profound:

This is the best I have figured out.

This version of me—with all my hard-earned data, my lingering questions, and my imperfect, resilient body—is the version that is showing up to the lake in Vitoria. I am trading the mathematical obsession of a target finish time for a strategy of radical presence. I am throwing away the rigid pacing spreadsheets to navigate purely by internal sensations. I will listen to the machine. I will push when it grants permission; I will retreat and protect when it asks for grace.

A Small Request for the Universe

A Quick Side Note: While I am fully committed to the raw poetry of absolute surrender and finding my soul in the uncharted depths of Vitoria, I still have one pressing question for the universe. I “believe” I have finally understand the why behind my regular three-month crashes. I know this could be because of the biology of the missing thyroid spark. But what I desperately need to know is the exact internal dialogue my cuádriceps are having during those moments when they decide to turn into literal slabs of granite. Are they staging a structural coup? Are they hosting a localized concrete convention? If the universe (or you) could drop the transcript of my leg fibers’ union strikes directly into my DMs I’d greatly appreciate it.