Patagonman Finisher An extreme triathlon at the end of the world I find it serendipitous that our 50th newsletter of the year is occurring a few weeks before the beginning of Karel's 50th birth year of life and I am writing about an event that Karel has dreamed of finishing for the past few years. On December 7th, Karel took on Patagonman Extreme Triathlon . We did everything possible to get him to this start line — but what lied ahead were 140 miles of uncontrollables. We woke up at 2am after a night of no sleep. At 4am, he boarded a ferry in the dark and at 5:30am, he jumped into the fjord (55 degrees - much warmer than usual), and swam 2.4 miles back to shore (1:08). From there, a 110-mile point-to-point ride with over 8,000 ft of climbing, gravel, cobbles, wind and whatever Patagonia decides to throw at him. He finished the bike in 5:50. And then, a 27-mile run with 3250 feet of gain, all off-road, through technical forest trail...
I have a lot of pictures to upload but the internet is a bit slow in our Airbnb(s) so I will upload pictures later on. If you'd like to see more pics from our trip, you can check out my Instagram page. Monday After a delicious dinner at D-Lizia (I got a huge pizza and Karel got a burger), we went back to our cabin and had a relaxing evening. Sadly, Karel woke up in the middle of the night with excruciating pain in his right leg. He thought it was a blood clot but we later put some pieces together that it was likely coming from his disc and SI joint. He couldn't bear weight on his leg and he said it felt like his leg was broken. It was really scary as it came out of no where when he got up to pee in the middle of the night. Even when we got up in the morning, Karel was still unable to walk normally. He decided to try a spin to see if that would help loosen it out. I drove him 15 min up the road (up the last descend of the bike course) and he went out for an 1+ hour rid...