María Paredes Fernández’s Relationship With Her Late Grandmother Allows Her to ‘Seguir con Todo’
When runner and triathlete María Paredes Fernández, 38, was growing up outside of Philadelphia, her focus was more on academics than athletics. She grew up with self-described humble beginnings with immigrant parents—her father is from Argentina and her mother from Ecuador—whose outlook mirrored the culture they grew up with in South America.
“My father wasn’t able to finish his education and felt a responsibility to provide for his family, and my mom had a very traditional upbringing with a focus on academics,” she says. “She played basketball and volleyball when she was young, but at the time, in her context, it was just something that little kids did for fun and wasn’t something you could continue with.”
While family is everything in many Latin American cultures, Paredes Fernández describes her parents as being “cautiously supportive” when it came to her athletic endeavors, not quite understanding the allure of the oftentimes grueling training and preparation endurance events entail. However, it was a long-held relationship with her late maternal grandmother, Mariana Zambrano de Fernández, that has made Paredes Fernández’s relationship with sport particularly special, allowing her to feel closer to her culture.
While Mariana lived mostly in Ecuador, she would spend a couple of months out of the year in the U.S. when Paredes Fernández was a child, even working for a period to provide for the rest of her children back in Ecuador. This time together allowed Mariana and Paredes Fernández to become very close during her adolescent years.
“Many people would say we were very similar in terms of our personalities and some of our physical features, as well as our stubbornness and just our drive,” she says. “Whenever I had a creative idea, she would go along with it. She also had this determination of just really believing in something and going through with it, which is something that I carry with me [today].”
Paredes Fernández’s parents felt the way to progress in the U.S. was for her and her brother to do well academically, which meant athletics took a back burner, even though she had an interest in them. While she participated in middle-school track and field, she didn’t immerse herself in sports again until she got to college at Penn State University, where she joined the club cross-country team and finally leaned into developing as an athlete.
“Most of my college career was devoted to running,” she says. “I knew I had the running bug ever since I was a little kid, but I wasn’t able to do anything until college, and I loved that I was able to continue with it through adulthood.”
After graduating from college, Paredes Fernández, now a doctoral candidate in educational linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, kept up with running at the recreational level. She’s completed six marathons, including the 2015 Boston Marathon, and she is planning to run the Berlin and New York City marathons this fall.
In 2018, Paredes Fernández’s running came to a halt when she broke her foot after tripping over a rock and falling on a training run. While taking downtime from running to allow her foot to heal, she took up swimming and stationary bike workouts to maintain some fitness, which ultimately lent themselves to finding love for another sport.
“I said to myself, ‘Well, that’s two-thirds of a triathlon; I might as well sign up for one,” she says.
While she enjoyed her two new sports, she found them to be humbling and challenging, especially because she didn’t learn how to swim until she was an adult.
“I’ve been running for so many years and was just looking for a new challenge, and swimming definitely offers that for me, though it’s still a gratifying work in progress,” she says. “Cycling also took some time, but I’m finally at a point where I'm feeling fairly comfortable with it right now.”
Paredes Fernández signed up for a small local sprint triathlon and then later completed the 2019 IRONMAN Eagleman 70.3 in Cambridge, Maryland. It was official after that: She’d caught the triathlon bug. She most recently completed IRONMAN Lake Placid on July 24 and plans to complete the IRONMAN 70.3 Mont-Tremblant in Quebec next June. She also has aspirations to eventually make it to the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championships.
Even though Mariana was never an athlete herself, she shared Paredes Fernández’s passion for her athletic goals, showing her support by simply expressing how proud she was of her granddaughter, to preparing cultural foods to fuel Paredes Fernández’s training when she was participating in middle school track.
“She would often make manabas, which are small tortillas made from corn or yucca with a cheese filling, as well as fried plantains,” Paredes Fernández says. “She said that those would be packed with energy and calories, so I should eat them. Corn manabas are still one of my favorite foods for carb-loading.”
Paredes Fernández’s says her grandmother instilled in her to have confidence in any goal she was pursuing. “She would often share words of encouragement with me in Spanish, with one mantra being ‘Siga, siga, siga,’ or ‘Siga con todo,’ meaning ‘keep going; just keep going,’ which I repeated to myself when I ran-walked the 2018 New York City Marathon on my broken foot.”
While Mariana unfortunately wasn’t able to continue visiting the U.S. after Paredes Fernández’s high school years because of her declining health, they kept in close touch through regular phone calls, with Paredes Fernández keeping Mariana updated about her races up until Mariana passed away in 2014. Paredes Fernandez is especially grateful for having had this relationship with her grandmother, as it’s somewhat unique with respect to Hispanic or Latino culture to have an older relative sharing in your passion with you in this way.
“I don’t even know if she fully understood [the sport] herself, but I think she saw how passionate I was about it and that filled her up,” she says “Seeing me happy just made her want to see me keep going.”
This story was created as part of From Our Abuelas in partnership with Lexus. From Our Abuelas is a series running across Hearst Magazines to honor and preserve generations of wisdom within Latinx and Hispanic communities. Go to oprahdaily.com/fromourabuelas for the complete portfolio.
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