I would not call myself a football fan.

I could not name a starting eleven, and I have never sat through a full 90 minutes just for the sport of it. So it says something that I am writing a tribute to Cristiano Ronaldo at all. Football is not even close to the biggest sport in the Philippines, and I am not the audience Ronaldo was built to impress.

Yet here I am, a recreational runner and a wannabe hybrid athlete chasing Hyrox floors and marathon finish lines, drawing inspiration from a man whose sport I barely follow. That, I think, is the real tribute — not the highlight reels, but the fact that his discipline reaches people who never watched him play.

That is what makes Ronaldo rare. Plenty of athletes are admired within their sport. Very few capture the imagination of people entirely outside it — the non-fans, the casual observers, the ones who could not tell you his best season but know exactly what he represents. Ronaldo has done that. He has become shorthand for a certain kind of relentlessness that transcends football, the way certain names become synonymous with a standard rather than a scoreboard.

For a recreational athlete, his talent is irrelevant. His habits are not. Very few of us will ever have his acceleration or his aerial instinct. All of us, however, can copy the architecture behind those gifts: the sleep protected like an appointment, the recovery treated as seriously as the workout, the diet built for function rather than indulgence, the refusal to let one good season become an excuse to coast.

Ronaldo has never separated the athlete from the daily routine that sustains him. That is the transferable part — the part available to a marathoner squeezing in miles before work, a Hyrox competitor building a base between meetings, or anyone simply trying to still feel strong at 60.

What makes his example so useful is that it reframes aging itself. Elite sport is unforgiving about decline; bodies are expected to peak and fade on a predictable curve. Ronaldo has spent his career quietly disputing that curve, not through a single secret but through the compounding effect of thousands of small, correct choices — the extra recovery session, the meal chosen over the convenient one, the rest day respected rather than skipped.

Multiplied across 20 years, those choices look less like discipline and more like identity. He does not train hard because a final is coming. He trains hard because that is simply who he has decided to be, match or no match.

There is a lesson in that for anyone who has ever wondered whether it is worth training on a day with nothing on the calendar. The people who are ready for the moment are rarely the ones who trained for the moment. They are the ones who trained on the ordinary Tuesday, for no audience, expecting no reward, simply because readiness had become a habit rather than an event.

Ronaldo’s career is essentially a 20-year argument for that idea: that the body rewards consistency long before it rewards intensity, and that most of what we blame on aging is really the accumulated cost, or benefit, of everyday decisions.

Mad respect, Cristiano.