I write this column with a heavy heart.

As someone who has spent years pushing my body through brutal mileage, hill repeats and recovery sessions that test the limits of will, I understand something many outside the world of competitive sport never will: that suffering is part of the process.

Discomfort builds character. Fatigue builds resilience. We, runners, chase that edge deliberately because we know that growth lives just beyond it.

But there is a difference — a vast, non-negotiable difference — between training that pushes an athlete to their limit, and an activity that ends two young lives before they ever get the chance to fulfill their promise.

This week, the basketball world and the entire sporting community mourn the deaths of Rene Baterbonia, 18, and Divine Adili, 21, two Ateneo Blue Eagles who drowned during what was described as a “team-building activity” in Dipaculao, Aurora.

Reports indicate the players were walking in chest-or-hip-deep seawater — part of their training, according to police — when a strong current swept four of them out. Two were rescued. Rene and Divine were not.

Let that sink in. Basketball players. In the open sea. Walking against currents they had no training to read, no equipment to survive, and apparently no adequate safety net to pull them back when things went wrong. Rene’s mother said it best, through her grief: “Why were they in the sea when my son’s sport is basketball and not swimming?”

That question deserves an answer — and not the easy one.

Authorities have called this “purely an accident.” I understand the impulse. No one wants to believe that an institution as storied as Ateneo, with all its resources and tradition, could fail its athletes so completely.

But here is the uncomfortable truth that every endurance athlete, every coach, and every sports administrator needs to sit with: an accident is something that could not have been reasonably foreseen, and could not have been reasonably prevented.

Was this that?

Open water with currents strong enough to sweep away grown athletes is not a secret hazard. It is well-documented, well-understood, and entirely foreseeable to anyone with basic knowledge of coastal conditions — knowledge that any team-building organizer, any coaching staff, any institution sending student-athletes to a beach activity has a duty to possess.

If no lifeguards were stationed, if no flotation devices were issued, if no risk assessment was done, if the parents were never informed that “training” would mean wading into the sea — then this was not an accident. It was negligence. And when negligence results in death, our laws have a name for that too.

Training is supposed to make an athlete stronger — sharper reflexes, deeper lung capacity, tougher mental resolve. It is never supposed to be a gamble with an athlete’s life as the stake.

The moment an activity carries a foreseeable risk of death and no one bothers to mitigate that risk, it stops being “training” in any meaningful sense. It becomes something else — reckless endangerment, at best; criminal negligence, at worst.

I am heartened that the National Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice and Department of the Interior and Local Government are now investigating with a focus on possible criminal negligence and potential violations of the Anti-Hazing Act. That is exactly as it should be. Not because anyone wants to see careers destroyed or institutions humiliated, but because two boys are dead, and their families deserve the truth — the whole truth, not a sanitized version that protects reputations at the expense of accountability.

To the families of Rene Baterbonia and Divine Adili: no column, no investigation, no policy reform will bring back what you’ve lost. But I hope — for your sake, and for every student-athlete who steps onto a field, a court, or a beach in the name of “training” — that this tragedy becomes the line in the sand. The line where we finally say: enough. Push athletes to be stronger. Never push them toward the grave.