Four Years Later

It has been almost four years since I last ran over full-sized, 1.067-meter high hurdles. In the run-up to that fateful day, I felt the frustration building up. I was way behind my training program for the 2012 National Games. Despite the best of my efforts, I could not seem to get my hurdling rhythm going. The crowded conditions of the only public synthetic track in Manila exacerbated this rut I was in. I actually felt somewhat in shape doing my warm-up that night. But lo and behold, my bearings were all off. Although my eight-stride starting approach was decent enough, I couldn’t seem to run the three-step pattern in between those barriers. For a sprint hurdler, losing touch of this almost biblical hurdling commandment is a no-no.

I tried to muster every motivational trick in my decades-long hurdling playbook but none of those seemed to work. After my third (or fourth?) attempt I decided to call it a night. My vainglorious quest to juggle work and sport had come to an abrupt, unassuming end.

It took months before my muddled self got over the disappointment. Except for a two-year layover after college, I had been running track since 2000. Needless to say, it took much introspection to get over that sudden jolt. Luckily, I was never that good to begin with. There were no titles to defend or sponsorships to cancel.

I never did stop doing sports in the succeeding years, but my interest in writing about the sporting world became the last of my priorities; hence, the reason for this blog’s long dormancy.

I have absolutely no plans to write about the current state of the sport with all these embarrassing drug controversies. I also won’t be churning out new versions of that particular weekly feature. More importantly, I have no plans of staging a second comeback now that I’m way past quarter life. But then again, I’ve always loved reading about history. Maybe, just maybe, I can rekindle that old fascination on athletics’ storied tradition and write something that could be vaguely relevant.

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