How Humango Helped Me Reclaim My Triathlon Journey
By Hugo | Jan 2, 2025
As a former track and field and swimming athlete as a teenager, I've always dreamed about being in multisports (especially triathlon).
But life got in the way—or, rather, my mind got in the way. At 17 years old, I found myself stuck in the process of going to college and working part-time to support my studies, so I left the dream of studying physical education (because my love of sports was huge) and went to Economics school instead.
I worked in the market for a while: finances, marketing, and investments. I went through teaching for several years. Finally, when I was 31 years old, I had my own coaching and therapy business. It healed me so deeply that it led me back to my childhood dream of multi-sports.
And finally, after 22 years of being what I didn't want to be and working with what I wasn't really passionate about, I was able to access that memory again. I remember coming out of a hypnotherapy session (working on inner child) with TRIATHLON jumping out like a slap in my face.
With all those repressed memories coming out, I remember saying, “Why not?" In February 2023, I dusted off my swimming cap and goggles, bought a very old, second-hand mountain bike, borrowed my sister's sneakers, and simply started training.
In the beginning, I noticed it was not something so simple. To handle 3 sports (plus strength training and transition training), I started to google some plans I could buy in order to have a training plan.
At the end of my first year of training in 2023, using fixed, general “cookie-cutter” plans and learning a lot about my mind, body, and triathlon, I was tired. Not just my body, but my mind was "kinda done" with the same training. They helped shape my beginning but I knew those generic plans couldn’t take me to the athletic level where I wanted to be.
Every time I start doing something in my life, I have to be the best at it. And with triathlon, it had to be the same.
So, I started googling for different kinds of triathlon training plans—not in my native language, Portuguese, but in English—and I found a Superleague video on YouTube that mentioned something about this adaptive app called Humango.
I thought to myself, “Why not give it a try?”
As I started using the Humango App and experiencing the dynamic training sessions, I fell deeply in love with it. The sessions were fun because they were never the same. They pushed me SOOO much further from my comfort zone and I started to notice real results, especially in my weakest sport, cycling. I was suddenly becoming a stronger athlete, which gave me the confidence to grow even bigger in the sport.
I won The State Championships twice: the 2023 Enduro Triathlon and the 2024 Standard Aquathlon, plus the other podiums that came before the big titles.
I believe that the master only appears when the student is ready. So I needed to go through all those physical and mental challenges to prepare for what Humango brought me afterward—a training program that considers my level of fatigue, my mood, my soreness, and more.
Another aspect of the app that helped my training was changing my periodization. I was so tired from my routine (being a mom, wife, athlete, and business owner), that I needed to change training heavily for three weeks heavy and one week of recovery to two weeks heavy and one week of recovery. This is another thing that up-leveled me as an athlete. I slowed down to level up.
Humango changed me from the inside out. The journey has been so transformative that it gave me the strength, power, and confidence to go deeper into my athletic skills. So much so that I transformed it in my career (dedicating myself 24/7 to races and training) and even started studying a post-graduation in physical education specializing in movements.
