Sports
Shubi Guimarães Takes on Extreme Triathlon at 50
The adventure racing pioneer shares how she combined pedagogy with outdoor sports and details her training for Swimman.
With over two decades dedicated to adventure racing, Silvia “Shubi” Guimarães looks back on her career and founding Team Atenah. Now, at 50, she tackles a new challenge at Sweden's Swimman, blending intuitive body awareness with metric-driven training.
Silvia “Shubi” Guimarães’ relationship with movement started long before her expeditions to the planet’s most remote corners. The bicycle was always her primary tool for exploration and autonomy across the streets of São Paulo. Later, combining her degree in pedagogy with the rise of Brazil’s first adventure races in the late 1990s, Shubi realized nature served as an unmatched classroom—one capable of forging character, empathy, and self-control.
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The bicycle and outdoor education
With nearly two decades leading adventure camps in upstate São Paulo, Shubi applies outdoor pedagogy to build self-confidence in children and young people. For her, learning on two wheels symbolizes power and freedom, teaching everything from basic handling and braking to dealing with frustration and minor falls. One of her recurring mottos captures this learning philosophy: every scrape is worn as a medal of honor for daring to try.
Her experience as an educator also highlights the impact of parental overprotection. Shubi notes that excessive vigilance often stifles independence in young people. In programs designed for parents and children together, the challenge lies precisely in allowing kids to experience discomfort and discover their own limits without constant adult intervention.
Two decades on the edge of adventure racing
As an athlete and captain of the historic all-female Team Atenah, Shubi built a formidable career competing in the toughest multidisciplinary races on the international circuit. Over the years, she faced challenges that went far beyond the traditional trio of mountain biking, trekking, and canoeing—including inline skating sections in Sweden, open-ocean sailing navigation, and technical glacier crossings with crampons and ice axes across mountains in Kyrgyzstan and Patagonia.
Beyond competing, Shubi brought this expertise behind the scenes of outdoor events. In 2015, she designed and coordinated the logistics for a 700-kilometer course in the Pantanal for the Adventure Racing World Series, managing a complex operation in completely isolated areas without electricity.
The Swimman challenge and training by numbers
Turning 50 in peak physical shape, Shubi decided to return to long-distance endurance racing by accepting an invitation to Swimman, the Swedish leg of the Extreme Triathlon (Xtri World Tour) circuit. The extreme course features a 3,800-meter cold-water swim, a 205-kilometer bike leg with 2,750 meters of elevation gain, and a 43-kilometer trail run—with a mandatory support runner joining for the final 25 kilometers.
Historically reliant on training by perceived exertion alone, the athlete is now undergoing a technical shift under coach Wagner Spadotto. Using power meters, structured spreadsheets, and training zones, she is fine-tuning her output and managing muscular and neural fatigue, merging the intuitive body awareness honed over 20 years of expeditions with modern sports science.
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