It has been more than two years since I started writing Runner’s High.

Back then, when DAILY TRIBUNE executive vice president Bettina Fernandez asked me to write about a topic she knew I was passionate about — running — I wasn’t sure I would have enough running-related ideas to fill a weekly column. This being my 97th installment, it turns out I did. For that, I am truly grateful.

Writing this column has been an unexpectedly gratifying experience. When you write about something you love, the ideas come naturally and the words practically write themselves. I remember one particular deadline: I decided to write about Alex Honnold’s free climb up Taipei 101 — not exactly a running story, but my angle was mental toughness, and I was convinced there is something different, something almost wired wrong, about that man’s amygdala.

I wrote the piece on a flight to Dubai for the Dubai Marathon. I spent thirty minutes researching while our plane idled on the tarmac in Manila, wrote for roughly an hour once we were airborne, and sent it to my editor, Julius Manicad, the moment we landed — barely beating my deadline. It remains one of the pieces I am proudest of.

Every topic in this column has been personal. I have written about my races, my training, my diet, my supplements, my cross-training, running fads, running gear and every other running-related subject I could think of.

I am thankful to have had an outlet for all of it. Anyone who has taken up running seriously knows how the sport tends to take over your entire personality — how it seeps into the way you plan your weeks, your travel, even your friendships. Writing about anything and everything I feel, know, and think about running has been, in the truest sense, cathartic.

And so, on the occasion of the DAILY TRIBUNE’s 26th anniversary last 30 June, I want to congratulate Willie and Bettina Fernandez, my editor Julius Manicad, and all the men and women, past and present, who have carried this newspaper forward.

A tribune, in ancient Rome, was an officer elected to represent and defend the interests of the common people against the excesses of the powerful. It is not a modest name for a newspaper to carry, and it is not one this paper has worn lightly.

The DAILY TRIBUNE was born in 2000 on a promise to report “without fear, without favor,” and it has been tested on that promise more than once — through a police raid at the height of a state of emergency, through libel suits meant to silence it, through every administration that would have preferred a quieter press.

It did not go quiet. It kept its name, kept its mandate, and in 2025 was inducted into the Rotary Club of Manila’s Hall of Fame for Journalism, having already been named Newspaper of the Year three times over the years. That is not the record of a paper that simply survived. It is the record of one that chose, repeatedly, to stand where it said it would stand.

I am proud, in whatever small way a weekly column on running can matter, to be part of that record. Here is to 26 years of the DAILY TRIBUNE living up to its name — and to however many more columns I have left in me to write.

Congratulations, DAILY TRIBUNE.