There are races you run to beat a personal record. There are races you run to finish. And then there are races you run simply to find out what you are made of when every rational instinct is telling you to stop.

Last Saturday night, I lined up at the start of a 12-hour endurance run inside the walled city of Intramuros — a race that would take me from six in the evening until six the following morning, circling a 2.4-kilometer loop through one of Manila’s most storied districts, as many times as my body and my mind would allow.

I joined not because I had any performance target in mind. I joined because the format was unlike anything I had done before, and because unusual discomfort tends to be the most honest teacher.

The premise sounds deceptively simple: run the loop, finish a lap, run it again. Repeat for 12 hours. What it does not prepare you for is the particular cruelty of repetition. Road marathons have scenery that shifts, trails have terrain that demands your full attention. This had neither.

What it had instead were the same streets, the same corners, the same stretch of ancient wall — again and again, until the familiar became almost hallucinatory.

At some point deep into the night, I felt the historic walls of Intramuros begin to close in on me. Not literally, of course, but in that way that only runners who have been at it long enough will understand. The walls weren’t getting closer. My world was simply getting smaller.

The heat did not help. Intramuros sits enclosed by its centuries-old stone fortifications, and whether by geography or by something less explicable, the air inside felt warmer and heavier than it had any right to be on a June evening.

The humidity was relentless. It was, in every sense, a second opponent — invisible, unyielding, and entirely indifferent to how tired you already were. Some runners did not make it to morning. The DNFs were not failures of character; they were honest acknowledgments that the body had said enough, and there is a particular kind of courage in listening to that.

I ran long enough not to join them, though I want to be clear — finishing was the goal, not performance. My purpose was singular: to subject myself to a different form of test, to see how I would hold up when the only thing keeping me moving was the decision to keep moving.

In those quieter moments of self-pity — and there were several — I would notice the barefoot runners. Yes, barefoot. Running the same loop, the same asphalt, the same course, with nothing between their feet and the ground. I would catch myself mid-complaint and think: what right do I have? If they are out here taking double the pounding, enduring far more discomfort than anything I was feeling, then silence was the least I owed.

But Intramuros from dusk to dawn is also, genuinely, beautiful.

Under the warm amber lights of the night, the old city transforms. The stone walls soften. The streets narrow into something that feels like a different century — late 1800s Manila, unhurried and quietly magnificent, its charm not merely preserved but alive. Running through it hour after hour gave me a strange privilege: I got to inhabit that beauty at an hour when almost no one else could.

I made new friends along the way — the kind you only make when you are both suffering through the same thing at two in the morning. I crossed no finish line in glory. But I left having passed the test I had set for myself.