BY the time I was just a tourist again in White Beach in Puerto Galera, Oriental Mindoro enjoying the soft sand, cool clear waters and the soothing afternoon sun and clapping for runners each one of them summoning their last ounce of strength to reach the finish line of the 2026 Puerto Galera Trail Ultra, I had already made peace with my fate: I lost the thing I came here for.
I joined the race wanting what all racers here want: finish and earn the medal.
Instead, I came away with something harder to display.
At first, that felt like disappointment. A quiet one, but real. The kind that does not break over you all at once, but settles gradually into the body. Not regret, exactly, because I did not regret joining. It was something milder and more private.
And yet there I was later, standing on the beach near the stage, watching runners from the 50K category come in one by one, sunburnt and exhausted and radiant with relief. I clapped for them. I cheered. And what surprised me most was the sincerity of my own happiness. I was not pretending to be gracious. I was not forcing sportsmanship out of politeness. I was genuinely happy for them.
That was new for me.
When I was younger, losing had a way of making me smaller. I would focus on errors and excuses and indignation. Bitterness came easily then, and with power and force, raising the hand that holds the finger pointed at those I blame.
But age gives us a different relationship to loss.
I am 47 now, old enough to know that the world does not rearrange itself around our wanting. Old enough to understand that disappointment is not always a verdict.
This is difficult to admit in a culture that worships victory so openly. We are trained to remember success in bright, polished images. The medal around the neck. The trophy lifted overhead. The easy retelling. We know how to celebrate and narrate achievement in the clean language of winning.
But when was the last time anyone proudly said: I joined, and I gave it my best.
We do not tell that story often enough.
Maybe because “giving it your best” has been reduced to the language of consolation. Trying hard matters only when you win.
I’ve come to realize how we undervalue what it means to give something our best shot.
Winning feels amazing. Of course it does. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. To win is to feel, if only briefly, that the world has aligned itself with your desire, and it leaves evidence.
But there is another feeling that feels just as amazing, if it is genuine.
It is the feeling of having stepped fully into difficulty, of having exhausted both strength and resolve. It does not carry the same celebratory aura of winning, but in some ways it is more intimate. It asks more of your character. It leaves a mark that says DNF—Did Not Finish.
How many things in your life have you left unfinished still?
When I was young, I wanted to climb mountains. It was one of those youthful ambitions that seemed possible to me. But my parents won’t let me. And by the time I am old enough to give myself permission, I was either busy or interested in something else. The dream did not explode or collapse. It just receded. It slipped quietly into that large, crowded storage room where so many unrealized plans go. DNF.
And then one day, there I was, climbing Mt. Malasimbo.
That is one of the strange mercies of life: sometimes it returns our forgotten desires to us in forms we do not immediately recognize. We think a dream has expired because we stopped speaking of it, when in fact it has only been waiting for another route back.
It happened for me, 30 years later, and I was with the people I wanted to share this experience with—my sister Nette and my brothers Norman and Joey. I told them I wanted us four racing as a birthday gift for me, and they said yes without hesitation.
We are not serious runners. We’re not mountaineers. We shouldn’t be doing things like this. But in the name of always trying new things, we did.
We trained. We showed up. We tried to meet something difficult together, and we didn’t allow it to break us.
The older I get, the more I value these moments when the people you love agree to become beginners beside you. There is tenderness in that. Also courage. To enter unfamiliar terrain without expertise, without guarantees, and still choose to go—that is no small thing.
I’m happy we are still smiling until the end. That’s what I told my sister as I watched the videos I took of us ascending and descending the trails at Mount Malasimbo
We often think courage must look dramatic to count. But sometimes courage is simply this: saying yes to an experience your life has not exactly prepared you for. To have resolve stand side by side commitment.
I know how many things in life remain trapped in intention. I know how many plans never survive beyond the sentence I want to. I know the quiet shame of ambitions that become habits of postponement.
Following through mattered to me, and it mattered deeply. This race became proof that I am still capable of answering desire with action, of not leaving everything at the level of imagination.
For a person with enough unfinished things behind him, this is a personal victory.
Yes, I did not get the medal. But I didn’t emerge from it empty-handed either. Adulthood asks us to become more precise in the way we name our losses.
I got to try something new, and with people I love. I proved to myself I am still capable of following through. And I may have helped start healthier habits in the lives of people close to me.
None of these are fake prizes invented to make me feel better. These are real. And these matter.
Maybe that is one of the hidden gifts of not getting what we want: it gives us the chance to become larger than the wanting.
We do not always get everything we want, but what we do get, what stays with us, we truly treasure. Most meaningful experiences are mixed. They carry loss and gift in the same hand. The younger self wants the world to make sense quickly. But it takes time. And if you are lucky, you’ll get a lot of it in your lifetime, that and chances to give it your best. And you will be kinder to yourself for that.
Unfinished things are not failures.
