The Day I Ran to the End of Our Barangay Road (And Had to Stop)

I did not plan it. That's the thing.

It was one of those mornings where the work calendar was light, the youngest had not yet started her commentary on my sitting posture, and I woke up before my alarm with some kind of restless energy that I honestly did not recognize at first. Not motivation, not inspiration, just... movement. Like the body had an opinion for once and decided to say it out loud before the brain could argue.

So I put on an old singlet, the kind that used to mean something on race mornings, now just a jersey that survived too many laundry cycles. I laced up my last pair of 5-years old running shoes that logged more idle times than walks or running miles.

It Was Barely a Run

I have to be honest about that. What happened outside could generously be called a jog, err... a shuffle, really. The kind of movement that a stranger watching from a tricycle would clock as "maybe that guy is late for something" rather than "that guy is an athlete." I was not an athlete that morning. I was a 40-something WFH dad trying to remember if his legs still worked in that particular way.

The flat barangay road is not long. End to end, maybe less than 2-kilometers if I'm being generous. A few dogs sunning themselves on the shoulder. Somebody's lola sweeping the front of their gate. The kind of road that does not ask much of you.

I made it to the end.

And then I stopped.

Not Because I Was Tired

This is the part I keep coming back to, the part that made me stand there for probably a full minute just looking at the road ahead and not moving. My legs were fine. My breathing was manageable. Seven years is a long time but the body still remembered the mechanics, even if just barely.

Running, when I was doing it regularly, had a feeling. A specific one. Early discomfort, then something settling in, then a kind of quiet that had nothing to do with the noise around you. I knew that progression. I trained for it. I chased it through BGC roads at 5am and through mud at the 2018 Spartan Race and up mountain trails that had no business being raced on.

Standing at the end of our barangay road, none of that came. Just effort, raw and uncontextualized. Effort with no story attached to it yet. That is what caught me off guard. Seven years of desk life, of meetings, of being tired in the specific way you get tired from a full day of staring at a screen and managing people and picking up kids and feeding cats and watering plants. That kind of tired I know very well. It fits me now like an old jersey.

This was different. This was the chest saying: I forgot what this was for.

Seven Years Is a Specific Kind of Distance

People ask sometimes, when it comes up, why I stopped. And the honest answer is that I did not stop in any dramatic way. There was no injury, no decision, no morning where I thought "this is the last run." Entrepreneurship pulled hard, then COVID arrived and handed me something unexpected: full days at home with the kids. That hit differently than I thought it would. Slow weekends replaced race weekends. Sleeping in until 8am on a Saturday stopped feeling like failure.

Running just... got crowded out. Quietly. The way plants die when you forget to water them but you don't notice until they're already gone.

And now here I am, at the end of a road that took me maybe 15 minutes to reach, doing the math on what it would take to get back to something I was genuinely good at once.

The math is not encouraging.

I Walked Back

No second wind. No dramatic turnaround. I stood there for that full minute, the lola with the broom not looking at me, the dogs not caring, the morning going on without any awareness of the small reckoning happening at the corner of a street that does not even have a name on Google Maps.

Then I walked back. Slowly. The way you walk when you are thinking and not ready to stop thinking yet.

The youngest was awake by the time I got inside. She looked at me, looked at my shoes, and said something along the lines of "Daddy, did you run outside?" in the exact tone of a person who has just witnessed something mildly unbelievable.

I sat down at my desk. Work started in twenty minutes. The moment folded itself into the rest of the morning like it had never happened.

But I keep thinking about it, that stop. That particular feeling of effort with no story yet attached to it.

Maybe that is where it starts again. or maybe it was just one morning that happened. I genuinely do not know yet, and I think that is an okay place to be writing from. Probably!

Have you ever come back to running, or anything physical, after a long gap, and felt that moment where the body remembers the mechanics but something else still hasn't caught up? I'd really want to hear what that felt like for you, drop it in the comments.