Triathlete stunner who drowned during Ironman battled flu but wouldn’t quit race
· Toronto Sun
The triathlon influencer who drowned during an Ironman event in Texas over the weekend had been sick with the flu, but refused to pull out of the race, one friend revealed.
Visit newssport.cv for more information.
Mara Flavia, 38, was pulled from Lake Woodlands on Saturday three hours after the swim portion kicked off.
“She was ill before the trip, she wasn’t OK,” Luis Taveira told sports website the Spun of the Brazil-born athlete.
“My wife and I spoke with her to say she was too weak for this race, although a couple of days ago when we talked to her, she insisted she was OK,” he said.
“I still cannot believe what’s happened. She was ill because of the flu.”
Taveira noted that Flavia, who also worked as a DJ, continued “training hard” despite being “weakened” by the illness.
Flavia’s sister, Melissa Araújo, also spoke out following the tragedy.
“You lived life intensely. You were always synonymous with determination, with courage — with a strength that seemed too vast to be contained within you,” she wrote in the caption of an Instagram post, according to People .
“You never did anything halfway; perhaps that is why you left such a profound mark on the lives of everyone who crossed your path.”
The grieving woman went on to call Mara her “other half,” writing, “A piece of me is gone, and I will have to learn to live without it. And it hurts in a way I cannot even explain. It is a strange silence, a void I knew existed all along — as if the world itself had lost a little of its colour.”
She noted that the pair were “always a team” but acknowledged that she knows her sister will always be with her — “just in a different way.”
She added: “I will carry you with me in everything I do. Rest now, my sister. It will hurt down here, but I will honour your life every single day.”
Two days before the competition, Flavia shared a photo of herself in a pink one-piece and cap, sitting at the edge of a pool.
“Just another day at work,” she wrote in Portuguese.
Her Instagram account was filled with photos and videos from her training or workouts at the gym.
“Pain doesn’t tell you when to stop,” she wrote in one motivational post. “Pain is the little voice in your head that tries to hold you back because it knows that if you continue, it will change.”
The Ironman Texas event features a 3.8-km swim, a 180-km bike ride, and a 42.2-km run.
Emergency crews were alerts to a “lost swimmer” about an hour after the women’s event kicked off with the swim just after 6:30 a.m. on Saturday.
She wasn’t pulled out of the water until about 9:30 a.m.
Officials have ruled her preliminary cause of death was drowning.