I had a running adventure with my friend Ivan. The plan was to go on a road trip to UP Los Baños to be able to run on campus, then head up to Tagaytay the next day to run from Sta. Rosa all the way up to Tagaytay. The adventure started when it started to rain cats and dogs. We left my house in Parañaque around 4pm (originally, we were supposed to leave 1pm, but the rain would not let us). We found our way to Buendia to take a Bus en route to Sta. Cruz. We didn’t know that there was a terminal somewhere near the Buendia MRT station that we boarded a bus that was passing through EDSA. We ended up standing for over 2 hours for the duration of the trip and we were freezing! The bus air-conditioner was hitting us straight in the face, as well as our hands as we were trying our best not to fall over as the bus was moving. The trip seemed longer than it actually was! When we got to Los Baños, it was already 8:30pm. No way we could run anymore.

That night, we decided to go drinking with some friends at the house of our host which was about a km away from campus. We did some carbo-loading that… BEER! Haha! So much for not drinking anymore. Well, how could we say no to our host who had bought a 2 cases of beer, I think.

We were up the next morning at around 9am and had breakfast. We ended up running on campus at around 11am already. From the main gate of UP Los Baños, we ran eastward and headed to the NPC Power Station and back. It was a good 2-3km warm up run. The campus was really perfect for jogging. Almost no pollution at all. The weather was also perfect and strong breezes blowing left and right. It was 12nn and yet we could not feel the heat of the sun.

On our way to the entrance of UP Los Baños, we bumped into Jericho, another friend from UP Diliman. He decided to join us after lunch after our Ivan and I did our 10 x 100m sprints with rest in between. We did this routine near the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Community Affairs. I’m not really sure what this area is called. After the sprints, we did some ab work.

After our run, we had lunch at this Thai place. I forget the name of the place. We had Fried Catfish Salad, Chicken with Green Curry, and Bagoong Fried Rice.

Afterwards, we decided to walk around campus and take some snap shots with Oble.

Our next stop was Tagaytay. At this point, we were headed to our main destination. Tagaytay. Take note that this was my first time to commute this far. I had absolutely no idea how we were gonna get there. So we took a van to God knows where and ended up in Dasmariñas Cavite. From there, we boarded a Bus that was bound for Tagaytay. We got to Tagaytay at 8:30, again. Since it was too late to run, we ended up doing the same thing… carbo load with Beer! haha!

That night, we were joined by other friends Dan and Raymond. We stayed at Ting’s place. We spent the night away drinking and eating and drinking and eating. Our original plan was to run at 6am the following day. At the rate things were going, there was no way that we were going to wake up to be able to run at 6am. We decided to move our run later in the day, around 10 or 11am. We were still deciding whether we would push through with our original plan of running from Sta. Rosa to Tagaytay, which was apparently 14km or find some side roads with less cars. We decided to do the latter.

Since it was raining hard, we ended up running at around 12:30. We had a war-up of about 1.5km on both uphill and downhill slopes. It was harder than usual to run because of the altitude. We had to get ourselves used to the air as it was too thin. We found this road, I forget its name but it ends at the main road of Tagaytay. So from the side road, we ended up on Tagaytay’s main road then we went back to our starting point. We did about 2 1/2 rounds. We weren’t able to measure the actual distances but I’m guessing it was about 8-9km, but definitely less than 10km.

Our run consisted mostly of sprints on the uphill portions and slow jogs right after. The course was definitely challenging. What I loved about running in Tagaytay was the fact that even though we were running at 12nn, we didn’t feel the heat of the sun. Loved the run!

After our run, we had a big lunch that consisted of steak and tinola (yes, it doesn’t match! haha) BUT we didn’t care, we were hungry.

I’m already looking forward to doing my next running adventure.