  We explore the effect of mechanical strain on the electronic spectrum of
patterned graphene based heterostructures. We focus on the competition of
Kekul\'e-O type distortion favoring a trivial phase and commensurate Kane-Mele
type spin-orbit coupling generating a topological phase. We derive a simple
low-energy Dirac Hamiltonian incorporating the two gap promoting mechanisms and
include terms corresponding to uniaxial strain. The derived effective model
explains previous ab initio results through a simple physical picture. We show
that while the trivial gap is sensitive to mechanical distortions, the
topological gap stays resilient.
