Mario Mendoza Jr.

What a historic season its been, its taken a few days to sink in 🤯. The lady buffaloes won the team district title for the first time since 1983 😮. Way to represent Madras High School ‼️. You are inspiring the next generation, and we cant wait to keep celebrating your incredible accomplishments 🙌🏻 .

We have our first track meet today 👊🏼. Lets go Madras ☀️🙌🏻.

Just turned 40 ‼️Officially a “master” now 😂. Life goes fast ➡️➡️➡️, it’s been fun celebrating with family and friends 🫶🏼. Grateful to the big man above 👆🏻 for the journey and all the lessons.

Swipe right ➡️ to see some raw, un-edited finish line scenes 🎥 from my last race as a professional trail runner for 🙌🏻 🌋🏃🏽.

A perfect finish after such a grueling race 🥇. The only thing I regret is not pulling out my phone during the sunrise 🌅 while I was on the top of Acatenango. Hoping to get some pictures soon from the volcano. It was the most beautiful sunrise I’ve ever seen 😮.

My approach to the race was simply to have fun and complete it. I think that attitude is what helped me surprisingly find myself in 1st at the end. The terrain was so hard it just kept breaking everyone 😮.

The first downhill and second uphill were so technical that I actually broke my leki hiking poles. I’ll post a picture 📸 of it in my story ☝🏼. The key to navigating that type of terrain was to remain calm and playful like a kid doing parkour 🥷. I imagined myself like my son Jair doing obstacles for fun 🤩.

I was able to stay positive and get through most of the vert, which is in the first 50k of the race, thanks to my friend 🇬🇹🙏🏼. Even though we were “racing” each other in the 100k, he kept giving me tips on the course because he has run it every year since 2021. I also gave him some tips and help on how to settle his nausea and get through his first 100k here (he had raced the 77k every year until now). At the 79k we found out we were now in the lead.

I was actually hoping Nando and I could cross the line together. I waited for him a couple times while he battled nausea/vomit (even though he encouraged me to take off and win it), and it wasn’t until the last aid station that I actually listened to him because we got word that third was closing in.

In the end Nando was able to rally back on the downhill and still secure second place 🥈 which was so cool 😎. Grateful and proud of him 👊🏼.

More to come, if I can secure some action shots from the volcanoes…🤓