That's an old, oddly upbeat The Pretenders ditty. I rejoined the club trainees on their regular training run last night and almost immediately discovered how much I've lost (or gained, depending on whether we're talking stamina or body mass). These people are all competent long-distance runners now after three months of pounding the pavement and climbing mountains, while I hadn't done a long run of 10K or more for four weeks due to the Olympics assignment.  I only managed to run without stopping for the first three laps or 6.3K, and it was run-walk run for the last 2.1K. After the run I did not even join them for the ramps or stair-climbing and the cool-down exercises and instead went looking for a shower.

So off to the boonies we go, and how better to celebrate my return than with a waterproof, breathable, seam-sealed, feather-light, wide-brimmed, tusk-coloured Columbia booney hat? I wonder how I would do on the next training climb, when I would be revisiting Mount Ugu, a three-day traverse from Kayapa, Nueva Vizcaya on the east face and toward Tinongdan in Itogon, Benguet on the west flank. It's a lovely pine-clad mountain, the favourite of TB the team leader, who basically climbs it every year. The ATL Janice made me the leader of one of the trainee groups at that.

I hope to be able to keep up with these kids, I was assigned the trainees who  are among the strongest in many disciplines. Jessie the policeman did the 8.4K at a canter in 40mins flat last night (that was easily under my 5mile time at the Market! Market! run), and Kenneth and Rol are experienced climbers who were on my pace last night. I was not able to time myself because the rubber strap of my watch snapped off in Beijing and I have to buy a replacement if I could find one. Juliet was the girl who stuck to Mercy's heels on the Tarak Ridge descent at the first training climb. My other trainees are Apple and Flinn, who has a complete set of group equipment down to a camp lamp. So that's one less problem to solve, plus we have more than enough tents.

Meal planning, especially on an extended climb such as this is a bit more tricky. Jessie follows Islam and does not care for pork, although thankfully he will not require halal for food preparation otherwise. Juliet is allergic to poultry while I don't eat any red meat at all.

Thursday, August 21
Wrestling ends. The super-efficient techs and volunteers started dismantling the facilities once the super-heavyweight gold medal match was completed. Off went the Internet connection and off came the power supply to the laptops. Hey, wait a minute! We're still typing the story for Chrissakes!

Here I must thank our former sports editor, the now retired Ron, who assembled a superb outfit of Yanks, Aussies, and ethnic Chinese to chase after athletes and coaches and officials of all sorts for a free "Flash Quotes" service to journalists covering the Games. And they are fast too. Since gold medal events could be happening all at the same time, even in one discipline such as wrestling, it is not uncommon to miss a post-match news conference while you are covering another finals match at the same venue. His people are mostly young, and speak Russian, Chinese, and some other unfamiliar languages to boot. With them, theoretically, you can write about the Olympics without leaving your press centre desk.

These guys were very useful in interviewing athletes at the maze, which is are narrow corridors of "mixed zones" where journalists can approach athletes as they walk back to their dressing rooms after a fight, or a match. This is standard procedure at all Olympic venues, but of course you cannot spend your time chasing after them since you are covering another gold medal match.

It was raining hard all morning here, a deluge. My Columbia shell jacket withstood the rain, but my pants and running shoes were soaked I had to stick wads of paper into them under my press desk at the stadium while I worked barefoot until they dried around noontime. One thing about Beijing, they may not have freedom of expression or even worship (see Benetton ad), but their storm drains do work.

Friday, August 22
Allan the sports editor says I don't have to do handball. What a relief! I don't know why anyone would want to play it (it's big in Europe though), it's like football but using the hands, which makes it like a basketball but you are not required to dribble when you run with it.

So off to baseball we go, yay! The Cubans are the best. "I'm sure my players would do well in (US) Major League Baseball, but it is not our decision to make," their manager Antonio Pacheco said after they overpowered the minor leaguers from the United States in the semi-final. But I nearly missed the Japan-Korea semi-final because I misread the fine print in the schedule that said 10:30. I was under the impression that it was 13:30. Ah, de Gaulle, "Old age is a shipwreck."

So I took a rushed breakfast and scooted to the shuttle bus for the venue, which is 38mins away from the main press centre. All the other reporters here are using baseball scoresheets, and here I was drawing improvised spreadsheets with my ballpen and the cardboard cover of my notebook. It also meant I missed lunch, and I did not eat dinner until a few minutes before midnight. At the venue I was forced to eat one Powerbar, which I was saving for future weekend races.

I was back to baseball well provisioned with sandwiches the following day, where the Americans beat the Japanese as expected, but the South Koreans surprisingly beat the Cubans for the gold. When I was done it was nearly midnight, which meant I missed the men's football final, and then I get a call from the editorial desk. What? I am covering the volleyball final as well? Well, there goes my planned Great Wall visit.

Sunday, August 24
I covered the men's volleyball medal matches, which meant I missed the men's marathon, as well as the men's  basketball finals. I did not bother waiting for the post-match press conference, rushing back to the press centre for a late lunch and then to write a baseball review. I ended up covering five sports on my Olympic outing -- weightlifting, boxing, wrestling, baseball, volleyball -- truly a marathon. 

There was a midnight party by the team to celebrate a job well done, with all the big bosses. But after I turned in my Spanish laptop and mobile phone to the IT desk, I went back to the press village before dark, for the first time in three weeks, and did my regular run. First things first. Then after a long shower I watched the closing ceremony in bed. Hey! Is that not Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin on the double-decker London red bus? But when the past his sell-by date footballer David Beckham (why not Wayne Rooney the English bulldog? Too pugnacious?) appeared on top of the bus as well I fell asleep with all my clothes and shoes on, missing dinner and the party as well.

Monday, August 25
Two busloads of our Olympic team with planes to catch, most of these poor guys will be on planes back to Europe and the US for the next 24 hours. Of course the Spanish desk would be even worse off, since these guys have to make the connection from there to Mexico City. My plane itself is overbooked, they are offering free tickets to any point in the Philippines, free transfers and free hotel and meals for passengers to give up their seats and take the Tuesday flight. It's nice to see a congressman, Monico Puentevella, sitting with the cattle at the back of the plane, while Peping Cojuangco and the other grandees of Philippine sports got the business class seats.

Ted fills me in on the technological innovations that have revolutionised Olympic coverage. We now employ remotely-operated cameras -- no less than 10 remote ones for the Usain Bolt 100m run -- aside from the 10 photographers we employed from all other angles possible. Our outfit transmitted about 2,000 photos every day, but on that night they held transmissions for 20mins before the race to make sure we were first on the wire with the photos. We also used remote cameras for the underwater shots at the swimming -- our IT guys in their scuba gear install them the previous night. The text transmission is now seamless as well, the laptops have Internet flash cards in them aside from broadband connections at the press boxes at the competition venues. Your ability to write stories at the speed of light gets tested to the limit, and you must do that while having eyes on the side of your head to monitor the action on the floor at the same time. Basically you are writing the story as it develops, and then you have to slap the paragraphs together into an intelligible whole within minutes of the game ending.

Ted gets off on the wrong airport terminal and has to push his heavy trolley to the other building. I remind him that he has to buy me an Amphipod hydration belt, the 32-ounce, four-bottle version. I did not even buy any souvenirs for myself here, so that would be my reward. I hope he delivers. 

Sunday, August 17
Did some laundry and dropped off the rest with the laundromat. What, 166 yuan (1,086 pesos) for three pairs of pants, four socks and a singlet? I could have bought myself new ones instead! The obligatory six shirts for folks and friends back home also set me back by more than 5,000 pesos.

But I loved the results elsewhere. Dara Torres for silver at the 50m freestyle swim and Constantina Tumescu for the women's marathon. Two blows for my age group, ha ha. "You should never set an age limit to your Olympic dream," the American Torres said. Go Yanks! Older Yanks, they're my heroes, not Michael Phelps and his eight golds. Actually the Romanian runner is in her late 30's, and her style of running appears to go against everything that Coach Ige teaches all the BMC students, arms flailing by the side.

I guess I could have ridden the media shuttle bus and gone to the competition venue to watch the women's marathon (7:30am start! Brutal) .But I woke up early just to do my long run (one hour exactly). I was still running by the time the event began near Tiananmen Square at 7:30am. I did maybe 7 or 8K I was not sure, but I stopped running when the stopwatch hit 60 minutes. My short runs here are usually 30 minutes long, and then I use the benches at the small parks between the high rises for my cool down exercises.

The temperature has dropped perceptively here even though it is the height of summer. Some days it even rains. I am weary after two straight weeks of work, and with a week more to go, but then this is the real Olympics. I suppose it is even worse for athletes -- eat, sleep, get on the shuttle bus, train -- all year round.

The People's Liberation Army military police are still ubiquituous here, they would stand at attention and not move for an hour at a time beneath a parasol, facing the chicken wire fence that surrounds all the Olympic venues. After an hour they would do a small walk, more like a slow march, and return to their post and do their statue routine all over again. It is for me what would be my most enduring memory of China, not the wide roads or impressive buildings and infrastructure.

On reflection you could not really blame the hosts. Security has always been the number one concern since the Munich Olympics in 1972, when the Germans failed in their duty and terrorists got into the Athletes' Village to slaughter Israeli athletes. The Israeli secret service hunted all of them down of course, and ruthlessly assassinated them in a literal interpretation of the biblical term, "an eye for an eye." Now that you have exploding humans who kill in the name of God, who could blame the Chinese's communist leaders?

Tuesday, August 20
I stayed in bed the whole morning to watch the men's triathlon, or "splash/mash/ dash" as the Anglo press calls it, on the Olympic channel, which means just footage and graphics, but no commentary. The Olympic version is tri-lite, 1.5K swim, 40K bike, 10K run, not the Ironman variety. It is something I would have tried myself back home had I learned to swim.

The swim part was spectacular, in a reservoir called Ming Tomb, but I was thinking, what is the use of the bike section for this distance? The best cyclists would not be able to establish a lead worth protecting in such a relatively flat course, and so they don't exert themselves and use it to rest while preparing to transition for the run. Javier Gomez, the Spanish favourite, was tucked in in the main pack all the way during the bike section. He lost out of a podium place altogether though, after perhaps unwisely moving to the front at the run section after 5K to do all the pacing. The big German, Frodeno stuck to him all the way and ambushed the lead pack at the sprint finish.

Another big German, Matthias Steiner, also won the super-heavyweight weightlifting gold medal. He kept a picture of his late wife at the back of the stage to motivate him in between lifts. Poor woman died in a car crash 13 months ago. What a heart-rending story, and what a great story line for me as well to write about.

Wednesday, August 20
I am definitely losing the battle of the bulge here, even though I run every other day and do not even eat meat. Perhaps it is the quantity, but it is difficult to hold back in the morning knowing that you will not be eating lunch, and even more difficult at night near midnight knowing that you had not eaten lunch or dinner. I have established a routine after 13 days, run in the morning, avoid rice during meals, and not spend more than 30 yuan on food for dinner. But I tend to cheat on apples, oranges, and pears, as well as (horrors) cookies, which are in abundance at the breakfast buffet and at the media lounges at the competition venues.

The weightlifting was over last night, so I am back at wrestling, freestyle this time. Raucous as usual, a blood sport in the truest meaning of the word. Caveman sport. But the routine is the same, it's still a sprint to the shuttle bus toward the Main Press Centre at midnight in order to catch the last resto open (grills, mostly). But the number of people inside that building appears to be significantly down, maybe many had gone home with their country athletes, or gone shopping. But we are here for the long haul. I have yet to meet any Filipino athlete or official other than at the weightlifting. Of the Filipino press I frequently see Dennis of the European Press Association, and Ted of our photo desk. I once saw Bullit at the bus stop, but that was it. He is stuck at the table tennis or badminton competitions I think, which is the worst place in the Olympics to be in. The matches are long, and you  are basically covering Chinese garbed in different country colours. Like the Africans who sold out to Europe, Panama, or the Gulf states or whoever wanted to pay them, many of the Chinese shuttlers have also taken on Singaporean, Hong Kong, and other nationalities.

I am definitely fading here, but it's the last stretch. Four more days and that's it, goodbye China. I've been catching up on sleep at the shuttle bus, which is pathetic.

Oh, and I finally managed to open this journal for the first time in two weeks today. Catharsis!

Tuesday, August 12
The Chinese apparently did not take the hint. An armoured troop transport (APC) parked in front of the main press centre.

Something gets lost in translation somewhere, especially at the press conferences. When you have a Chinese, a Korean and an Armenian on the podium it's a recipe for trouble. A question is asked in Chinese, the translator renders it in English, the athlete answers in Chinese, the translator gives the English version. It gets more difficult for Korean. Questions and answers have to be translated both in English and Mandarin. For Armenian it is something else. The coach translates it into Russian for the interpreter, who translates it into English, for the the other translator to render in Mandarin. Then the athlete answers in his native tongue and the same long process is repeated. Tape recorders are not recommended, so I just rely on my notes.

Wednesday, August 13
Liu Chunhong, the fat Chinese lifter, obliterates all the world and Olympic records in her weight class. Although we are trained to write one-paragraph urgent stories in two or three minutes, we could barely keep up because the record lifts were coming at intervals of one or two minutes each, and she was not the only one setting records! Poor North Korean silver medallist, hers lasted only 60secs.

Thursday, August 14
Off to wrestling! It's the world's oldest combat sport, the cavemen hunters of five millennia ago harvested plant dyes and drew their hunting and wrestling exploits on the rock walls of their abodes, thus inventing art and culture.

The competition is fast, intense and furious. Three mats on stage, so three matches are all going on all at the same time, in different weights. The music is the theme from "Star Wars" and Orff's elemental classic, "O Fortuna" and the best fighters are from the Caucasus and Ural mountains -- real-life mortal enemies Russians and Georgians, Chechens, Dagestanis, Ossetians, Armenians, Iranians, Turks. The Americans looked like fruits by comparison in their short tights and were shut out of the medal rounds accordingly, though they would later win one in men's freestyle. And this is supposed to be Greco-Roman, its civilised branch! No holds allowed below the waist, no using legs and feet to trip or pin your opponent. In the men's and women's freestyle events to come, all holds are allowed! Well, maybe except eye-gouging, biting, or crotch-grabbing or kneeing. Boxing does not hold a candle to it. I love it!
   
Saturday, August 16
Nine days to go and my first real "light" day, light being in relative terms. For the first time I had the luxury of being put in a position to kill time before my first event at 7pm, which also means my first real lunch opportunity since the start of the Games. I switched to tourist mode and went to see the women's freestyle wrestling, leaving Shigemi to do all the work there while I checked my mail and wrote an entertaining story about weightlifting and beauty. I just love doing these types of stories, bringing out the pathos behind the men and women, in this case women, at the top of their game. The Brit girl and the Canadian, a flaxen blonde, were real lookers too, but of course they did not win their events. Later that night I covered the over-75kg women's final, where the 11 contestants had a combined body weight of 1.268 tonnes. The South Korean winner tossed a total of 386kg. The silver medallist was a 166.97kg (368-lb) tub of lard, but listed dancing as her leisure activity. Hmmm, and what does it take to become the strongest woman in the universe? The Korean said she lifts 15-20 tonnes a day in training, the equivalent of lifting maybe 13-18 Toyota Corollas. The Ukrainian said she only lifts 14 tonnes a day, and concedes she needs to train more. Ha ha. The Australian lifter said she needed to get under 75kg to be able to fit into her gown at her approaching wedding.

I was rather loudly rooting for the Samoan for what would have been her country's first ever Olympic medal, because her massive legs were covered in tattoos and I wanted ask her at the mandatory press conference for medallists to tell us the story of those tattoos. Primitive societies supposedly write sagas on their skin. I'm sure the Cordillera Igorots' body paint also tell a compelling story.

I also got to visit bird's nest stadium, finally. It's a huge steel monster. They have battery-powered shuttle vehicles that take journalists from the basement entrance to the press section. Too bad I could not watch Usain Bolt's extraordinary showboating world record 100-metre dash performance, where he looked at his rivals 15 metres to the line, realised the race was his, lowered his hands like a jet plane slowing down to land, and thumped his chest just before he crossed the line. Priceless. But I had my weightlifting event to cover across town.

Monday, Aug 4
Noontime and humid at Beijing Capital Airport, but the air is coloured white, like Cordillera mountain mist, and visibility is down to a sprint distance of a few hundred metres. China, the world's factory, had shut down half the region's industries and banned half the city's cars from its roads, but maybe world record holder Hailie Gebrsellasie's decision to give the marathon a miss makes sense, after all. Jack Rogge, the International Olympic Committee chief, earlier accuses the media of exaggerating the problem, shooting the messenger of bad news instead of addressing the cause.

I checked in my luggage and went to the Main Press Centre to get my laptop and mobile phone. My outfit's operations is huge, three separate desks for text, photos and television, about 200 journos in all plus more than a dozen more IT techs and other support staff. I never even met most of these people before. Allan the sports boss and Martin his Asia head I could no longer recognise, and Shigemi the Japanese and Jim our NBA guy have a few more grey hairs.

Spanish keyboard! Milk!, as the Latins would say. This one would take some time getting used to. The tab key, for some reason is situated beside the shift key, so every time I need to go upper case the cursor goes on a walkabout and I have to spend time looking for it again. It later crashes as I try to download the results of the TNF 100 trail race. But yay! Top 50 finisher! Top 12 or 13 in my age group!

Tuesday, August 5
The press village has spacious gardens, a faux stream and an elongated profile that is perfect for long runs, and I begin my once every other day long run regime. Long is relative though, I don't really have time for this as I would be working long hours for three weeks straight, so my long run is 7K and my interval run is 5K, all done at the same 7mins7/K. We are housed in modestly furnished high rises that would be sold after the Games, like most Athletes' Villages in any major sporting event. The development is aspirationally named North Star Village, but something is wrong here. My sister asked if the Chinese name is Huijan but that is the one across town. The authorities had demolished the old neighbourhoods of small nuclear homes of brick in that historic section of Beijing in the seven years they took to prepare for the Games, and apparently the homeowners were never compensated. The Maoists still have to learn about the meaning of property rights.

Wednesday, August 6
These are the dog days before the competition proper, so stories are at a premium. You go out to the training venues and the Athletes Village, a cluster of high rises, in the sporting equivalent of the classical doorstop, or "ambush interview" in Pinoy English. But the shuttle buses are few and far between or are not in service yet, so the commute and the waiting is tedious. The wrestling training venue is one good marathon distance away. As if the athletes are dying to talk to journalists. Of course they are not, they are all dreaming of the medals and so are focussed on training. The International Weightlifting Federation banned the press from the training site, so we stay outside and try to hassle everyone wearing their national colours.

But thank God for tobacco. The lifting coaches all smoke! Amazing, coaching the world's strongest men and women and leading by bad example all at the same time. But they have to do it outside and we get the quotes that we need so I don't mind. I see the Filipina lifter Hidilyn Diaz and her coach Ramon Solis and offer a high five. Hidilyn socks it with her chalk-smudged fist.

Friday, August 8
I call up my daughter to make sure she watched the opening ceremony and stand in the press centre lobby with the young, English-speaking volunteers in their colourful red or blue sport shirt uniforms, joining them in oohing and aahing the spectacular show. When the fireworks began the kids all rushed out to view the starbursts outside. The building is a mere block or two away from the bird's nest stadium and the Water Cube, but they all came rushing back in shortly afterwards, looking bemused and disappointed. Now I know why. Some of the fireworks were not "live" and were shot beforehand, supposedly because the smog would ruin it. Li Miaoke lip-synched her way to the patriotic song "Ode to the Motherland" from the pre-recorded voice of another kid, but one with a tubby face and uneven teeth. The director said it was a directive from the communist party politburo.

Earlier I had discovered that the Chinese had blocked all blog sites, which means I could not update my own or post pictures or read my friends' for three weeks. How frustrating! They may be the next superpower, but the Chinese will never eclipse the Anglos unless they can prove they have something better than what makes the US, Britain, and all other nations in their sphere great. Property rights, freedom of expression, sanctity of contracts, democracy. It may be an economic powerhouse, but the human imagination that underpins that potential cannot be unleashed if the mind is imprisoned.

George W. Bush, of all people, hits the nail right on the head when he said that "trusting its people with greater freedom is the only way for China to develop its full potential."

MANILA, Philippines -- For as long as she can remember, Hidilyn Diaz has been carting five-gallon jugs of water to her home in a poor Philippines village. It was only a matter of time before she started lifting real weights.

Now, the stocky, bashful 17-year-old is one of 15 athletes from the Philippines heading to Beijing, and she is hoping her hard work and sacrifice will help her become her country's first-ever Olympic gold medallist.

Such a feat would not only be a sporting achievement -- it would earn her P15 million ($339,000), an unthinkable fortune in an impoverished country where a third of the population lives on a dollar a day or less.

"I will try my best," Diaz told Agence France-Presse, explaining how her Olympic dreams have changed an otherwise ordinary teenage life.

"I can't wear sexy gowns or high heels. I can't have a boyfriend and I walk like a boy. Sometimes I get jealous as my female friends go to school while I have to lift weights."

Diaz, one of seven children born to a tricycle driver in a poor coastal village near the southern port of Zamboanga, started training out of necessity -- her family's two-bedroom home has no running tap water.

So every day, the first order of business is to haul two five-gallon containers of water home for the family to use for cooking, drinking and bathing.

"We have to buy our water. Each container is worth a peso (2.26 US cents)," she said.

She discovered the colorful barbell discs at age 11, at a weightlifting gym in Zamboanga run by one of her male cousins -- a former national champion. Several other cousins also won national titles.

"I got curious so I began lifting," she said.

Earlier this year, Diaz left behind the water jugs and her family for China, where she has been training with the world's best after a top-three finish at the last Southeast Asian Games.

"I miss my mother. I have not seen her since March," Diaz said.

Her personal bests are still far off the mark set by the 58-kg favorite, China's Yue Hongmei, the double world champion.

But Monico Puentevella, head of the Philippine Olympic delegation, describes Diaz -- the country's first lifter in 20 years -- as a "project" who is not expected to reach her full potential until the 2012 London Olympics.

The Philippines, which has seen two boxers win silver in the past 44 years, only has one fighter competing in Beijing after a dismal showing at the last world championships.

This has put added pressure on Diaz, along with two track and field entries, two divers, five swimmers, an archer, a shooter and two taekwondo jins who make up the Filipino contingent.

The swimmers trained in the United States and are coached by Suriname's Anthony Nesty, the 1988 Olympics gold medallist in the men's 100-metre butterfly, while the jins sparred with the world's best in South Korea.

"My fearless forecast is that they will be successful," Philippine Olympic Committee head Roberto Aventajado told reporters, declining to set specific medal targets.

"We need to make an effort on what is becoming an increasingly important means of communication," Allan our chief sports editor for the 2008 Olympics said as he called for volunteers to blog in Beijing. It's the wave of the future, so goes the argument, the competition is already doing it. Hmm, well I have an online diary, I said. You want to link my content? Ha ha. No chance of that happening. Our news outfit has set up its own platform, according to Peter, a former senior regional editor who now runs this operation. Well, why not? Blogging is kid's play compared to our bread and butter work.

He said I would need to submit a profile, describing my "career and interests to date." Hey, you can find it here! "Climbs mountains and trees. Runs as well -- both road and trail."  So how many entries do you need per hour? But he said the Olympic reportorial team need only submit one entry per day, and it would have to conform to "editorial guidelines". And they were dead serious about it too! Peter said major clients have been sounded out about buying our blog service "and the feedback is positive." Whoa, selling a blog service? Get out of here.

There is something to be said about where this news business is going. We built the business, and staked our reputation on, the platform of offering the facts in an objective manner. But it seems more and more people now ignore the traditional news outlets and get their news from people dishing out opinionated versions of the same on the web. News aggregators like Matt Drudge are a lot more popular, a lot more powerful than the world's greatest newspapers. The model has been stood on its head. No wonder the Philippine Inquirer and ABS-CBN have been passing off opinion as news. It sells!

So how about you? What have you been reading? I must confess I have stopped reading the dead tree editions of most newspapers, except perhaps the Wall Street Journal. I take Bill Clinton's 1992 mantra, "It's the economy stupid", literally and require all college interns who come to work for us to read the paper's "Heard On The Street" section and advise them to take as many economics and history electives as possible. For my news I don't even read our own service now. Aside from the Wall Street Journal's online edition, I read those of the conservative British papers, the Times of London and the Telegraph.

I know I will never find the time to read during the Games, but I will be taking books with me just the same. Let the office pay for the excess baggage. When I was new to mountaineering, I would always pack a book on the climbs, hoping to read inside my tent at the campsite at night using a headlamp. It would invariably be my favourite Hemingway book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which I read every six months or so for relaxation. But of course you never have that luxury of time when climbing. So after a while I just left my copy at home.

I plan to pack an unread tome by Thucydides, the world's first journalist and war correspondent (431 B.C., how's that for ancient history?), which is basic reading fare for the neoconservatives who formed George W. Bush's robust post-9/11 foreign policy. I have just started reading the hardbound edition of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, a buoyant, unapologetic account of the British/US legacy of the past 100 years, where I learned that it was Theodore Roosevelt who bastardised the language, leading to American English and the peculiar spelling of some words. There, I have just let you in on my worldview. I get ribbed a lot about it by smug friends who invariably call Bush an idiot and think they are smart. But I would tell them they are myopic and that he launched this grand undertaking to ensure that people like them would continue to enjoy the freedom of, well, of being able to call him an idiot. It must be extremely frustrating to have to be on the same side as these people, but then free speech and democracy are among the hallmarks of the Anglo-Saxon legacy. 

My biggest fear at the Games is not pollution, nor terrorism. It is the real possibility of losing my fitness in the 21 straight days that I would be at work. I will miss a training climb of Mount Malipuno, the peak where I proved that I could climb as well as anyone. I would miss the Milo marathon and all the training runs and races that will be staged in and around Manila during the Olympics. I know it sounds glamourous but in reality it's donkey work. I have covered enough major sports events that I know the routine and it's unhealthy: Wake up early, stuff yourself at the breakfast buffet because you will never know when you will get the chance to eat again during the day, take the bus shuttle service and chase after the athletes and officials at the Athletes Village or at their training venues, file feature stories based on these interactions, go to the competition venues and write about the results of the actual matches, do another round of interviews, sometimes in between rounds if you are doing combat sports, and file another round of features or advancers that will run in the service early the following day. By the time you are done you have to catch the last shuttle bus back to your hotel, and by then it would be too late and you would be too dead tired to even consider going out for a run or to use the treadmill.

I gatecrashed invited myself to a Philippine Sportswriters Association forum today to meet the Filipino athletes going to the Beijing Olympics, and got to meet the Nestle executives in charge of sponsoring this Sunday's Milo marathon eliminations as well. Bong Pedralvez introduced me as a marathoner, the horror, and gave me the microphone. Well, might as well make hay, so as is the norm, and even though I did not enlist for this race, I promptly hogged it, and got to throw some of the running community's perennial questions at Rudy Biscocho, the race organiser, and at the money men.

This year they are going for four simultaneous qualifiers involving four of the country's biggest cities. You are talking 66,000 runners here -- 19,000 for all events in Manila including 400-plus starters for the 42K race and about 60-80 AMCI members and trainees in the 10K, 23,000 in Cebu, and 12,000 each in Davao and Tarlac, many of them doing the 21K, the longest distance offered in the provincial eliminations. The top finishers there will get to join the Milo nationals later this year, joining those who make the 4hr cut for the men and 4hrs 30mins for the women in the Manila eliminations. 

Biscocho talked about the "second coming" of the sports in the Philippines (But why can't we get any play in the local newspapers beyond the society stuff that Leica Carpo writes in the Inquirer? I wonder.). He said he could not afford to invest in 3,000 pieces of an RFID-type transponder technology that would eliminate the old, cumbersome and error-prone way of taking the official times of race finishers. Come to think of it, he does not put up his race results on a website either. I urged him to take pity on the half-marathoners by flagging the provincial races off earlier than the 6:00am schedule, but he demurred.

I told Pat Goco, the Nestle Philippines VP, that TNF 100 attracted 600-plus participants last weekend, and asked him if the Milo series might not be extended into off-road racing in the near future. But he said the company was focussed on supporting road racing and was not into the "extreme" stuff. Oh, okay.

Rank 10K Bib No. Time (unofficial)

?                246        1:20.27

I ran my first ever offroad race today in Nasugbu, about 73 kilometres south of Manila. I would like to believe I was in among the upper third of the 300-plus field, because 10K people were still streaming in at the tape more than two hours later. At 8mins/K however my pace was a bit slow. The event also needlessly started an hour later than advertised, and when I saw the tent city behind the hotel, I felt cheated. Had I known I would have driven there straight from the house, or pitched my own shelter for the night, instead of paying for a hotel room in Tagaytay. On the plus side, I got eight full hours of sleep and my daughter loved the contour lines of the finishers' shirt, even though they were mislabelled as distance, rather than elevation, markers, duh. And why could they not give out the bibs before race day so runners could warm up properly instead of stewing at the back of long queues? 

Sponsored by The North Face, a fashionable an overpriced mountaineering brand, the TNF 100 was raced under dark storm clouds in the cool, mid-20s in the beautiful, rolling hill country behind the Evercrest golf course, tracking the dirt road until just before it branches off to the left toward the mist-shrouded craggy peaks of Mount Batulao. Then it was off to a single track taking us through plots of cassava, peanuts, corn, and upland rice, laid on a green grid on one side of a deep gorge. "Sorry sir," I would tell farmers walking the other way, one of them leading an ox-drawn cart, as they stepped aside to avoid the stampeding herd of, er, billionaires and relatively well off kids and middle-aged men and women from the city who were mucking up their modest front yards. Rural Batangas has retained much of its rustic charm, but for how much longer? These must be some of the most valuable pieces of real estate outside Manila, and the developers are coming. I am sure Jhoana, were she still alive, would have been in this race, as she had in the Timberland series of the past two years running. So as soon as I got my red and black bib I rushed back to the car and wrote a dedication on it. That was for you as usual, daughter, wherever you are.

It was a hog bath! Overnight rain ensured that, plus the fact that some 100-plus others ran the 20K race using the same loop twice. I met my university confrere Ray Abenojar (RayAbe) for the first time, Bards, as well as Eric the Passion Runner and Victor Lim, who both did the 20K. There was a posse of AMCI mountaineers who must have comprised between five and 10 percent of the 600 or so race participants. Two of them completed the monster 100K while the third pulled up at Km 73, after running the equivalent of a ditch stretching from Luneta to Evercrest. James, who will give me great pictures to post here, completed a 50K. This is us! Mud is our element.

Some of the runners were overdressed, with jackets or arm sleeves and big camelbaks. The muddy trail sorted out the climbers from the city slickers, if you discount the elite runners like Totoy Santos, who placed 6th at 54mins, and Fernando Zobel de Ayala, who passed me at the first water source at the Batulao trailhead, 4.7K out. The climbers call any potable water a water source, while others call it by the more conventional term water station. I ran at a comfortable pace and helped kill the grass on the side of the trail, keeping my centre of gravity low to avoid slipping. Light rain hit the course as the paved road melted away. Jepoy tracked Don Fernando most of the way and he was among the five AMCI members who finished ahead of me along with his soul twin Aaron. Makes sense because these two are speed climbers.

Jenipay, Mercy and then Tatax also passed me just before the wooden bridge, located at the bottom of the gorge about 6.3K out, but I gained time on the way down because I have always been a daredevil descender, running down screes and muddy slopes where others would proceed with baby steps or slide down on their backsides. On the way up to the lee wall of the gorge we got held up by runners struggling to climb the slope. Aha, non-mountaineers! "You can apply for membership in AMCI," I advised them in jest, as Jenipay and Aaron laughed. "Some of the sections were not for running, they were for climbing," Bards complained afterwards. Welcome to the great outdoors dear.

*Some of my AMCI colleagues. Pic courtesy of Ai

At the top the pain on my left knee recurred, but I did not mind, since large sections of the single track were too slippery, so I walked together with the rest, single-file, pretty much like a climbing party minus the packs. The view from the ridgetop was spectacular, with a long line of the slower runners streaming past the lush green heathland atop the other side of the gorge. Or maybe they were the elite 20K runners, coming up fast to lap us. The top four 20K runners lapped me, I think. "Can you give me a pair of trek shoes?" I asked the marshals at the summit junction. The cheap, year-old New Balance 755 street trainers held up remarkably well under the circumstances, and I avoided any spill. 

The last kilometre or so was back on concrete, but it was uphill with a brisk headwind as well. I met Robot, a 40 year-old runner at this point. I told him I was older than he was, then left him behind just past the beautiful Caleruega church. The Dominicans make beautiful things. Pie said it's famous for elaborate theme weddings. Well, I'm done with all that. After the last water source I sprinted all the way to the finish.

We had a meaningful and satisfying chat yesterday with the forensic pathologist of southern Zambales, as we attended to matters concerning one of our friends and colleagues who have became the latest in a long line of sad statistics in our sport.

There is no equivalent entity for a coroner in our country, and I use the term broadly to refer to officials responsible for establishing the cause of wrongful death, if it were one. I have heard first-hand accounts before of overworked doctors to the barrios who performed autopsies in between delivering babies. Yesterday in this small town near the Anawangin cove I came face to face with one of them, discussing the awful terms of their other trade as expectant mothers and indigents queued up outside for prenatal care, vaccines, and free medicines and prophylactics. Among them, he said, is a 10 year-old girl who had been raped by her father. The dead, the living, the crime victims, they are all the responsibility of the rural health officer, a folksy, middle-aged man who wore an orange shirt and dungarees and drove an ambulance to work.

But the first issue of contention for the day was geography. We in the mountaineering community have been casually referring to that portion of the San Antonio range directly across the lighthouse on Capones Island as Mount Pundaquit, but he insisted that part is properly called Mount Silanguin. Well I don't know, Silanguin seems to be on the southernmost section of the peninsula, overlooking Subic Bay on the other side. Anawangin and Capones look closer to Mount Maubanban on the map.
   
His own town, on the floodplains of the great Santo Tomas and Mapanuepe rivers, had been depopulated by the eruption nearly a generation ago of the Pinatubo volcano to the east. It lost 41 percent of its population to deaths, migration, and the scourge of volcanic debris that silted up the waters upstream. This area of Zambales itself was first settled by Ilocanos and the older Aeta inhabitants. Just eight families from Santa Maria comprised the first wave of new arrivals, and intra-marriages among the migrants might have weakened the gene pool, he said, in a self-deprecating reference to himself.

He is some sort of a mountain climber himself, since 10 percent of his wards are cultural minorities. He hikes three hours to provide basic health services to the mountain dwellers, and what is more, his wife is the provincial tourism officer. He claims the wife has gotten the mountaineering federation to choose Zambales as the next venue of the annual federation climb -- Silanguin, Pinatubo, Tapulao, and one other mountain whose name escapes him would be featured, according to him.

Zaza and I alternated in driving through the new Subic-Clark Expressway to get there, and we agreed it was a visual treat. The smooth, modern toll road rolls straight ahead for miles and miles, and you feel you could throw the steering wheel out the window. Dawn puts the tableau of the Zambales mountain range and its foothills, and the tiny farming communities of rice, mangoes, sugar cane and eucaliptus in their midst, in a great perspective. Mount Arayat by its lonesome on the other side was shrouded in mist.

On our way back at an intersection we passed a truck that had spilled half its cargo of rice. Rice, the seed of life, the grain that nurtures half of humanity. What a great loss in these times, much like our fallen friends and colleagues.

We have been compiling pictures of the ill-fated Mount Pundaquit reconnaissance climb at the request of Jhoana's family. We believe it is an encouraging start to the healing phase of this tragedy. Some of these pictures are now in the public record, something which we think would also help friends understand what had happened.

There has been a huge outpouring of grief and sympathy over the loss of our friends and colleagues Jhoana, Thads and Anjo. It also has, ironically rekindled interest in the dangers inherent in our beloved but often misunderstood sport. There has been, sadly but understandably, an undercurrent of blame-making, of "I told you so's" and "You failed your friends" pontificating. Of a tendency to second-guess the actions and decisions made by those who were part of the team shortly before and during the accident, and who lived to tell the horror of it to the rest of us. I read one Internet posting that characterised mountaineering as as an escapist undertaking "highly conducive (to) sex, booze, doobies and other forms of (bourgeois) adventurism."

I suppose this guilt-pinning, shades-of-armchair-Maoist-Leninist, rant is all part of the grieving process. But Thads, who does not even drink and who brushed off the cannabis merchants who homed in on his long hair and goatee in Sagada after the Mount Ampacao climb last month, must be seething in his urn. Campsites would certainly be a strange place to seek out intimacy, where climbers who have not bathed for days trek from dawn to dusk through muddy trails and crawl wearily into tiny tents or roll themselves into sheets of tarpaulin on the bare earth as the light fails.

Some of this blame-heaping is clearly offside, and many of the critics are ill-informed. Some have evidently not climbed a mountain all their life. This is not beach camping, folks. All the members of the team, even those who did not make it, are excellent mountaineers who have been trained by the best rescue outfits in the country -- the Red Cross, the Makati Search and Rescue, to name a few. But all this training does not endow anyone the power to tame nature. They are not God. Those fellow mountaineers who were swift to set on and crucify my friends -- to their face I was told on good authority -- are beneath contempt.

This is all a bit like arriving late to battle and then bayoneting the wounded. The fact is, you were not there. So you do not know the conditions obtaining at the time.

Lay off.

Let us understand that the survivors are also victims here, and hurting in sinew and spirit. They are undergoing their own healing process. Once they have completed that, then and only then will they be able to conduct a proper post-climb.


*Mount Pundaquit recon climb pics courtesy of Bojo

Bojo complained of the heat but his digital sigh bore portents of the coming disaster as his team cleared the saddle of the bald, 464-metre southern Zambales mountain two Saturdays ago. In the 20/20 vision of hindsight, everything now seems so clear and simple. But if anyone could predict the future then they would be winning the lotto jackpot every day.

"Storm clouds on d horizon, but not a single drop of rain. Haay! Ang init! (The heat is terrible)"

That we had been communicating by SMS on mobile phone at all is all due to the fact that I am a worry wart when major weather disturbances are concerned. Typhoon Fengshen was coiled for a strike on the southern tip of Samar island far to the country's east when I last saw the team at Genie and her twin brother's birthday party on the previous night. "There's a typhoon coming," I warned the team before I left for home early, and I imposed myself on the team even though I had nothing to do with their mission and held no elective position in the club, demanding regular updates of their movement. I take pride in being a soccer dad of sorts, and I had to drive my kid to school early the following day but I was also looking out for Kim, one of my de facto daughters in this organisation, who was climbing. The Mount Pundaquit reconnaissance team left for the bus stop a few hours later, I was told, forewarned but secure in the knowledge that the cyclone was heading north, toward the Bicol peninsula. But I knew something was wrong.

In nearly a quarter century of tracking storms and typhoons and documenting the human miserythat they leave in their wake, one can tell with a reasonable degree of certainty that if they come from the Pacific and hit northern Samar or Bicol on the way in, you can rest easy knowing that  the Sierra Madre and the Cordillera are formidable barriers. They deflect cyclones but they also stop rain reaching the country's northwest, turning it bone-dry. This singular feature of the land has been key in moulding our defining character as Ilocanos, gritty people who through will and perseverance have time and again overcome adversity. On balance, these great walls of two mountain ranges have also kept the rest of the country safe.

But this one was making landfall at a lower latitude, which means it would plough through the central islands that lack these natural barriers. Throughout that day, I appointed myself as the team's weather forecaster and gave them constant updates by SMS, imploring them always to "take care". I knew, and this I duly passed on to the team, that the eye was forecast, due to the differences in atmospheric pressure prevailing in the South China Sea and the Asian mainland, to make an abrupt right turn and wheel north to hit Manila and surrounding provinces. The only question was when. By Saturday afternoon the local forecast was for Fengshen to hit Mindoro on Sunday and the central Luzon provinces early Monday. So I told them to enjoy their campsite socials but urged them to leave the area immediately the following day. But nature never sleeps and I awoke before dawn on Sunday already in the eye of the typhoon. It had arrived a full day earlier than forecast. So I sent updated SMS warnings to the climb team but Bojo later told me their phone batteries had gone flat. Power was soon knocked out in Manila and with it my phone signal. 

*With Alman Marc Ai Janz Jhoana Edwin and Jovs at Mount Napulauan, April 7, 2008. Pic courtesy of Alman 

Nineteen storms and typhoons on average hit the Philippines every year and, together with earthquakes, floods, landslides as well as man-made disasters, they kill an average of 500 Filipinos every year. The Asian Development Bank says eight million Filipinos are displaced by them every year. I have witnessed more than my fair share of the human and economic cost, but for the most part the victims are poor people whose occupations require them to be at places where they would be at the mercy of the elements. Them and the Manila squatters, who cause perennial flooding by clogging up the waterways of a city, some portions of which lie below sea level. Sewer rats. But nothing brings home the personal devastation more cruelly than the helpless, doe-eyed look of Jhoana's frail great-aunt shortly after I and the latter's other friends and pallbearers were done saying our goodbyes to this only child. "Bakit ninyo naman pinabayaan (Why did you not take better care of her)" The Tagalog spoken in this western section of Batangas province, between the Batulao and Talamitam mountains and the sea, is -- like the priest's sermon at the memorial service -- pure, luminous, beautiful. And cuts like broken glass. There were only two of us within earshot. I did not even know of her last-minute decision to join this climb.

As my club tries to recover and attempts to tackle a question that may have no satisfactory answer, the hope is that more people would take interest in the archaic and sometimes inexact science of weather watching. I believe the club would revisit its climb protocols in adverse weather conditions. We lost our enviable record by sustaining our first fatalities in 25 years of mountaineering, but the club is big and strong and will not compromise its core values. Safety. Camaraderie. Environment. The current Basic Mountaineering Course batch was given the option to walk away from the programme, but nobody did. Instead, five more joined the class.

*With Bing Jenny Genie Leo Bojo and Thads at the Daraitan River trailhead, February 24, 2007. Pic courtesy of Bajay

Filipinos are an anachronism in weather forecasting. We are the only country in the world I know to give local names to weather disturbances, as if giving them intimate nicknames, feminine names mainly, would tame them. The same thing can be said about the way we put out and read weather bulletins. The government service basically puts out bulletins at 5am, 10am, 5pm and one before midnight. And the focus is the centre of the disturbance, instead of the probabilities of its projected paths in the next 24, 48, 72 hours. So by the time the average resident hears about it on radio or television, the fury of nature is already upon him. And how many Filipinos know to dial 433-ULAN for a typhoon update and actually do? And yet if you did, you will hear a five hours-old forecast. In the age of the world wide web this is criminal negligence. The storm signals 1, 2, 3 and 4 that we put out concentrate only on the eye of the typhoon, and gives out only the wind velocities expected, giving communities immediately outside it a false sense of security. The eye itself is calm, it is the 300-kilometre, 500-kilometre radius of the violent winds that provides the conditions for life-threatening situations. What this means is, if the eye is over Manila, central and southern Luzon must be getting pummelled even though they are under a lower storm alert.

And yet again the wind is only one of the threats. It is the rain that they bring with them that causes landslides and flash floods, such as the one that brought so much pain and sorrow upon my club. The bulletin itself does not provide projections of the volume of rain expected in a locality, and appends only a footnote of a warning to people in the floodplains and mountain communities -- more than two of every 10 Filipinos now live in areas with more than 18 degrees of incline -- about these secondary hazards. And then it must be stressed that typhoons kill people even beyond radii of their winds. Tropical cyclones enhance the rain-laden southwest monsoons in this area of Asia, and so people were getting killed in flash floods and landslides in Mindanao in the south at the same time that Luzon and the central islands were being hit.

It's Thads' birthday today. Fingers fumble for the right keys as his classmates comb land, water and air to try to get him to buy them a beer or two. As we the rest of his friends and family bite our nails and clasp our hands in dread and anxiety, it is always left to the old and grey people like me to put together the words that we hope would approximate the heights of our regard for this rarity of a Renaissance Man.

"Ang umaga ay kay ganda. We will jointly pray at 12 noon for the rescue and/or recovery of Ted. Today is his birthday." -- Thads' aunt

I don't think I ever met Thads while I was training to climb mountains properly. He was this slight dervish of a wild-haired -- in perpetual motion, both in action and in words --lead pack man while slow learners like me tested the patience of the sweepers as we floundered at the rear.

Later on as I got to join his rarefied club, at campsites I would get to talk to him, if I could get a word in edgewise, for this man is a motormouth, with the legs and gait to match. Trash talker, some of our younger colleagues would describe him, but his words made perfect sense. He never imbibes alcohol himself, a necessary caution I believe to manage a medical condition, but he lights up the camp with his tales, his jokes, and his encyclopaedic knowledge of a lot of things that are normally of no practical use. In this aspect Thads reminds me of my own daughter actually, and by implication my younger self. Though he just turned 32 today, he has been the only person in the club who totally embraced my musical preferences. 

By camp fire I use it in metaphor, because as responsible mountaineers we are not allowed to alter the environment by taking from it. So we bring up our own food, water, fuel, and bring down our garbage. Thads, just like me, hauled a self-contained pack, with a stove, fuel bottle, cookset, tent, earthpad, you name it, but this did not seem to slow him.

In the 20 months or so that I have known him, he has almost always been present at my most memorable climbs and other sorties into the wild. We acted as emergency sweepers in a previous climb in Mount Pundaquit, but he is always more comfortable up front, where if there were a fork in the road or a doubt as to the right trail, he would always volunteer to leave his pack and push on ahead alone to reconnoitre.

Such was the nature of last weekend's climbjoined by Thads and Jhoana. To scout out a trail and campsite so that other people would get the opportunity to enjoy the beauty of the mountains.

POSTSCRIPT
Thaddeus Reantaso's body washed ashore on Hermana Mayor, a tiny island off Santa Cruz Point in nothern Zambales and was formally identified by his own father accompanied by members of my club today. His cousin said they found him beneath a red fire tree in full bloom. "It is his birthday. He wants to be found by friends," a club colleague told me. Even in death, Thads was busy doing a walkabout. The place is about 90 kilometres north of the mouth of the river where he, my batchmate Jhoana Pimentel and guest climber Joseph Felarca were swept away to their deaths on June 22, 2008.