Surrounded by humid jungle and hilly terrain in Guatemala’s ancestral Mayan city of Tikal, Marco Fernandez ’10 raced toward the finish line.

He couldn’t track his competitors in the blur of the scattered participants swimming 1.2 miles, cycling 37.5 miles and running nearly 9 miles, but it wasn’t long before the HMC international student from Guatemala City stood in a class of his own.

In four hours and 24 minutes, with his parents cheering him on, Fernandez won first-place in the 20- to 29-year-old age group and fifth-place among the 100-plus competitors in the Gran Jaguar Long Distance Triathlon—Guatemala’s hardest, longest and most popular annual race.

“The distance was long and challenging,” says Fernandez, who plans to major in engineering. “After the swim and the ride, it was a plus just to be able to complete the running event without any walking, but winning is something I wasn’t expecting.”

Arriving at first-place was far from easy, as it required much more than just completing the race.

Fernandez—a self-taught, self-trained triathlete since high school—began training for the August event in April, a month before returning to Guatemala for the summer.

During the week, he alternated cycling and running in the mornings, swam in the afternoons and cycled 65 miles on the weekends—all of this on top of his HMC classes and homework.

“I think doing sports during the school year is good,” says the sophomore, who hopes to apply his engineering training and knowledge to better people’s lives in Guatemala once he graduates. “It keeps you motivated for class. But it’s hard to train at Mudd because classes are the priority. It’s difficult to get enough sleep to get up early and train because most of us do homework at night when help is available.”

Back home, though, Fernandez had the time to ensure that his daily training was more regimented: He got up at 4:30 a.m. every morning, followed a strict diet of balanced proteins and carbohydrates, trained twice a day and was in bed by 9:30 every night.

In the end, it all paid off.

“A triathlon is not a race where the first person out of the water wins,” says Fernandez. “The winner is the one who keeps the pace throughout all three events.”

“This was the longest and hardest triathlon I had ever done,” he adds.

With discipline like that, it’s no wonder he’s already looking forward to taking on the race again next August.

But this time, Fernandez is upping the challenge: “Classes will remain my priority, but I plan to find more time to train during the school year.”