On Sunday, Bontol, with the rest of the Cebu-based Team Reborn, will join the CamSur Ironman 70.3hoping to finish strong in a three-discipline event that ends with running, which he describes as his “comfort zone.”

Coming from hearing mass in Sto. Rosario Parish while wearing the hot pink Ungo shirt, the running shirt of a group of Cebu-based night runners, a Phiten necklace and a Power Balance bracelet, Bontol said in an interview that he’s ready to do anything he thinks can help his first Ironman event.

Preparing for the event has consumed Bontol’s life these past months. He has decided to postpone an important exam for his specialization next year because he thinks he isn’t prepared for it.

“I don’t want to go into something unprepared,” he said. A confessed obsessive-compulsive, Bontol says he could hardly sleep the night before important races, getting out of bed repeatedly to make sure everything he needs the next day—shoes, shirt, race bibs, timing chip, energy gels, cap, eyewear—are ready and in order.

On Sunday, Bontol hopes to swim 1.93 kms., bike 90 kms., and run 21 kms. in less than six hours and with enough energy left to take a phone call. He said Sunday will be the “graduation” of months of triathlon training under an elite athlete, Noy Jopson, last year’s Philippine 70.3 Ironman champion.

Bontol has been training, along with fellow Team Reborn members Jung Cases, Joseph Miller, Annie Neric, Tenggoy Colmenares, seriously under Jopson for the past few months. The intensity of the training is such that the once muscular Bontol lost 20 pounds without diet, “eating whatever I want.”

Heading to CamSur, Bontol is on a roll, winning last Sunday’s 5th University Run doctors’ category with a new 10K personal best of 42:38.

That win, said Bontol, proves cross-training works. He said he used to think that to run fast, all you needed to do was lace your shoes and hit the tracks or the road.

But Bontol said his triathlon training made him an even faster runner. He was third in the Speedo National Age Group Triathlon in the 30-34 age group. He said he did not expect to win and was already in his car when the results were announced.

Bontol has gone far and fast, from being an overweight 1st year high school student with a waistline of 34 inches. A close friend, who was also overweight, started going to the gym and shed off pounds. That inspired him to also hit the gym.

Since then, Bontol has been on and off the gym. At any given year, he has at least three months of gym membership.

It was heart surgeon Dr. Alex Junia who encouraged Bontol to run, enlisting him in the 10K category of the Run for your Heart in February 2008.

Bontol finished the race in 72 minutes even without training. The only running he did before it was five- to ten-minute sessions on the treadmill as warm-up to his gym workouts. He said Junia, who was the race organizer, stayed at the back of the pack to look after the runners and paced Bontol, challenging him that if he could do it, how much more the young resident physician, a muscular and buff gym rat.

After that race, he did regular 10Ks before joining the Milo half-marathon six months later. Bontol has finished two full marathons, both in four hours and 55 minutes—the Milo Marathon and the Quezon City International Marathon.

After CamSur, Bontol wants to focus on his medical practice and return to running. On Sunday, however, he only has one thing in mind, “to finish strong.”

“I want to run to stay fit but I’m too busy with work. I barely even have time for my family,” an acquaintance told me a couple of months ago when our conversation inevitably turned to the fastest growing sport in the country.

GO OUT THE DOOR AND RUN! “Consistency requires discipline,” Bob Glover and Shelly–Lynn Florence Glover say in The Competitive Runner’s Handbook, “Force yourself out the door.” (FROM THE FLICKR ACCOUNT OF INDUSTRY IS VIRTUE)

Bob Glover and Shelly–Lynn Florence Glover have an emphatic advice in The Competitive Runner’s Handbook, “Consistency requires discipline. Force yourself out the door.”

Dr. Raymund “Reel Runner” Bontol is more blunt, “MAKE TIME!”

Cebu Maternity Hospital obstetrics resident Dr. Cecillie Milan goes on a 24-hour duty every three days.

Yet she makes it a point to run at least an hour three times a week.

She ran 21 kilometers in The Great Lapu-Lapu Run and in the Mandaue City race earlier this month before reporting for 24-hour hospital duty.

Dr. Milan says running helps her deal with work stress and at the same time “shed a few pounds each week so I’m not complaining.”

“Plus, it’s a good way to show our patients that we do practice what we preach. We’re setting good examples to our patients to adopt a healthy lifestyle,” she said in an interview.

Teletech Holdings, Inc. language trainer Jareliese Prescillas Mauro also makes it a point to make time for running.

But, she admitted, she used to think the sport was boring.

“But I figured that I was just hanging out with couch potatoes way too long,” she said.

Now, Mauro is a regular runner in the weekly Friday night run from the Sun.Star Cebu office to the Banilad Town Center and IT Park.

Mauro said running, which never made it in her life’s initial to-do-list, has made her a better employee.

Conventional wisdom has it that it takes only 21 days or three weeks to start a habit.

Three weeks, I kept telling myself in the first few days when all the cells of my body screamed for me to stop running and return to smoking cigarettes, and I’ll be a Zen master at running.

Three weeks later, I still wasn’t a Zen master but I found running tolerable.

A year later, and I now share Dr. Milan’s sentiment, “I can’t imagine life without running.”

It’s easy to feel that you have better things to do than run. Work demands time. The family needs your time.

But Dr. Bontol is right. MAKE TIME.

It’s the best investment for your physical well-being.

New York City Marathon founder Fred Lebow is also right. He said, “When you run in the morning, you gain time in a sense. It’s like stretching 24 hours into 25. You may need to sleep less and get up earlier, but if you can get by that, running early seems to expand the day.”

Ahmed Cuizon, who anchors the Sugboanon Na Ni radio program over dyAB, said the swimming by Lapu-Lapu was continued by Oponganons (Lapu-Lapu City used to be known as the town of Opon) until the 70s, when swimming contests were held across the Mactan channel every fiesta.

BLACK SATURDAY WITH THE BLACK PANTHERS. Testing The Great Lapu-Lapu Run route with Noy Jopson, Dr. Raymund “Doc Reel” Bontol and triathlete Amale Jopson with her Black Panthers Aegis PeopleSupport running team. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MARLEN LIMPAG)

“As to running, I only presume that he was well into it, too, considering that there was no means of land transportation in those days and since Lapu-Lapu was the supreme ruler of the entire Mactan Island, he would surely have run around his kingdom at times,” Cuizon said.

On Sunday, Mactan Island, the erstwhile kingdom of the first Pinoy to have resisted Spanish colonization, will hold The Great Lapu-Lapu Run.

“And that’s one more nice thing about the activity. You get to run around in a place where Lapu-Lapu moved about during his days. In a sense, we are celebrating his life and times,” Cuizon said.

This Sunday’s run is being organized by Ironman Noy Jopson, who seemed cast from the same mold as the Visayan hero, marathon man Raffy Uytiepo and Waterfront Airport Hotel and Casino general manager Hembler Mendoza, himself a runner who finished a marathon.

“We are working hard to have a memorable race for everyone,” Jopson said.

Lapu-Lapu City is doing everything that it can to make this Sunday’s event a great run.

The Great Lapu-Lapu Run will be using RFID timing chips for the 21K and 10K races. This is only the second time that timing chips are used in a race in Cebu. The first time the system was deployed was during the highly successful Cebu City Marathon.

The Cebu City Marathon, however, only used chips for the 42K and 21K races. On Sunday, 10K runners in Cebu will, for the first time, be using timing chips.

Jopson has been repeatedly running the 21K route to check on the distances and it is as advertised—a half-marathon route of 21.1 kilometers—to the meter.

The race will have water stations every two kilometers and several Gatorade stations.

For the first time in a race in Cebu, pacers will be deployed.

Pacers are runners who run at a certain pace so that other runners can gauge their speed. You’d know the pacers because they’d have balloons where their target finish times are printed. Kenneth Casquejo and Annie Neric are the 2 hours to the 2:15 pacers.

Mendoza said the race will also be fielding running marshals, on top of the scores of marshals deployed in strategic portion of the route.

“We are 100 percent ready. We’re just waiting for the participants,” Mendoza said.

The race will start and finish at the Liberty Shrine in Barangay Mactan. The route is relatively flat, save for the bridge portion of the 21K race, and runners stand a good chance of setting personal records. (The virtual map is embedded below.)

If you haven’t registered yet, you still have time. Organizers will still accept 10K and 21K registrations until Thursday and 5K and 3K registrations until Saturday.

Below is an interactive virtual map of The Great Lapu-Lapu Run race route. The blue line is the route for 21K and 10K while the red line is the route for 3K and 5K.

View Great Lapu-Lapu Run route in a larger map

At that time, reporters Justin Vestil, Linette Ramos and Rene Martel have finished writing their stories and are now in running attire. Graphic artist Kent Ynot and Ariel Catubig of the Sun.Star Network Exchange are also ready to go.

WE OWN THE NIGHT. Ungo runners in front of the Sun.Star Cebu office before running to the It Park in Lahug, Cebu City. CLICK TO VIEW LARGER IMAGE.

Outside the newsroom, men in tights sit on the steps of the stairs talking to one another. Dr. Raymund “Reel Runner” Bontol accompanies a large group of runners, among them Jefferey Chua and Ralph Noval, from the Cebu Velez General Hospital, and gives tips on running. Aeda Mae Siao, meanwhile, accompanies a friend who is on her first night run.

Higher up the stairs, Eric Agaton of Nike Banilad Town Center leads a group of three men all wearing Nike running shoes.

In the newsroom, Teddy Espinueva and his wife Belle and cousin Bikik Besavilla stand waiting, the reflective patches stitched to their clothes and caps shimmering.

Cebu City Council candidate Joel Garganera, meanwhile, cracks jokes with So and The Freeman community editor Divine Ngujo near the central newsroom library.

On Fridays, you’d have gynecologists Eleanor Casquejo, Humility Igaña and Vilma Pesa fidgeting, waiting for the run to start while praying none of their patients suddenly go into labor.

Joe France Cañizares and Cadjing Pelicano of Waterfront Cebu City Hotel tower above everyone else while mingling with the runners. Rounding up the group are veteran runner and now race organizer Kenneth Casquejo, Ramie Igaña, Charles Su and 17-year-old student Anthony Gabriel Tuldanes.

A few minutes after 10 p.m., the group goes down to the Don Pedro Cui St. exit of the Sun.Star Cebu office and hams it up for the night’s designated photographer, usually Sun.Star Cebu chief of photographers Alex Badayos. Last week, we had Philippine Blog Awards winner Estan Cabigas, a newbie runner himself.

At the word “go,” the runners group themselves according to their running paces. Bontol, Igaña and Abby Ponce are typically in the lead pack. My wife, Marlen, would be in the middle and I’d typically run with her. But I usually sneak in a speed training by serving as running marshal, going from lead pack to the middle pack to the runners who choose to enjoy the scenery and go at a leisurely pace.

FRIDAY NIGHT ROAD PARTY. Runners gather at the Sun.Star Cebu office on P. del Rosario St. for the weekly Friday night run to the IT Park in Lahug. CLICK TO VIEW LARGER IMAGE.

Like most people, we look forward to party on a Friday night, only ours is on the road.

Instead of laser lights setting the mood, we’d have the monotonous blinking of bicycle lights clipped to our waistbands. Instead of tequila, we down coffee.

We run in the rain.

We call ourselves ungo runners after that Bisaya word and its double meaning—the noun for that creature of superstition that comes out in the dark and the adjective to mean addict. We are running addicts who run at night.

The group started with just Marlen and me on our Friday night road dates. We later invited newsroom colleagues. The group later grew larger.

This Friday, we’ll take to the streets again.

See you on the road.

But he later found out that with the proper form and correct pair of shoes, he could run despite his bad back and knee injury. Now, the eponymous eldest son of Toby’s Sports founder Roberto Claudio, Sr. regularly runs and has even finished the half-marathon. He’s still planning to run his first full marathon and is considering doing it during the Cebu City Marathon on Jan. 10, 2010.

ONLY IN A NEWTON. Toby Claudio explains to Cebu bloggers and reporters what sets a pair of Newton Running Shoes apart from those of other brands. Claudio, who runs only in Newtons, is the founder of the running specialty store RUNNR, which will open in Cebu in the first week of December. CLICK ON PHOTO TO ENLARGE. (PHOTO BY MARLEN LIMPAG)

“Running is not as easy as it looks. It’s hard on the body,” Claudio said in a briefing last Saturday for Cebu journalists and bloggers on the opening in the city of his running specialty store RUNNR.

From “zero running,” Claudio said he was able to regularly run relatively injury-free after learning the proper running form, particularly ChiRunning, and wearing correct shoes.

“Many still use improper footwear for running. That and the lack of proper technique can cause pains. Then they stop,” Claudio said. “The solution is to get the right shoes. Choosing the wrong shoes can cause a lot of problems.”

Problems caused by wearing the wrong type of shoes are something RUNNR can help people avoid.

The store is known for its Footworx, an integrated system that helps people pick the right pair of shoes based on their foot type and the way they run.

The system consists of the Footdisc Analysis System to determine foot type. After that, the customer is then made to run on a treadmill for a high speed video gait analysis. Using a camera, the system checks the customer’s pronation angle as he or she runs. The customer can then compare different pairs of shoes to find out which works best for him or her. After that, the store can then craft a custom insole using its “Flashfit” molding process while the customer waits.

Claudio said RUNNR’s custom insoles, which are really custom-made and not like the generic orthotics being sold elsewhere, costs between P3,000 to P4,000. And if the insoles start to get out of shape, they can be re-flashed in the store for free.

STORE EXPERIENCE. RUNNR founder Toby Claudio says that apart from offering top-of-the-line brands, RUNNR offers a total store experience that inspires people to run and educates them on the sport. RUNNR Cebu will have information kiosks and the distinct environmental panoramic graphics that dominate the RUNNR store on Bonifacio High Street. CLICK TO ENLARGE. (RUNNR FOTO)

“These customized services ensure that whatever one’s requirements as a runner, the shoes and optional insoles minimize foot instability for better shock absorption, and minimize fatigue while reducing the chances of injury,” the company said in a statement.

Claudio said the gait analysis system will be offered to customers for free.

“It will always be for free but we’ll be setting up a queuing system especially for busy days,” he said.

To discourage the practice of groups of people deciding to have their gaits analyzed just because one member of their group had it done, Claudio said they might require token purchases like buying socks for those who won’t buy shoes in busy days.

Claudio said that when he went to New York City, the world’s running mecca, he checked out running stores and found a few that had treadmills on which customers can run to test out their shoes. He said he found at least three with video gait analysis systems but none with the advanced software that RUNNR uses. He said no store offered the integrated system that RUNNR offers its customers.

Claudio said RUNNR had the gait analysis system custom-made in Germany for running. Using the system, RUNNR employees can determine which pair of shoes works best for a certain customer.

He said his company’s goal is to train its workers to a point that by merely looking at a customer take three steps into the store, he or she would know the shoe type for that person.

Claudio said that they decided to open their second RUNNR store in Cebu because they see it as an underserved market.

“Every major city in the world has a running store. Cebu is a major city,” he said.

RUNNR Cebu will open in the Active Zone of Ayala Center Cebu in the first week of December.

He said RUNNR offers more than just a good lineup of products but a total store experience. He said a distinguishing design element of the store are panoramic environmental graphics that inspire people to run.

RUNNR will carry premier brands including Adidas, Asics, Fuelbelt, Hammer, Nathan, New Balance, Nike, Polar, Newton Running Shoes, and CW-X compression apparel.

Apart from these, RUNNR also sells books and educational materials on running. It will also have information kiosks to guide people on running.

“RUNNR will have everything that you need to enjoy running to the fullest,” Claudio said.

But when asked by broadcaster, lawyer and runner Haide Acuña what he would recommend to someone who has never run and who finds his or her way into the store, Claudio said, “I won’t even recommend that they buy a pair of shoes. Buy a good running book.”

RUNNR BRIEFING. Toby Claudio with (from second from left) The Freeman columnist Raffy Osumo, Marlen Limpag and Max Limpag of Sun.Star and CebuRunning, Dr. Raymund “Reel” Bontol, and Haide Acuña, the Marathon Foodie.

More than just a market, running is an advocacy for his company, Claudio said.

“Some people still have not discovered the joys of running,” he said. They plan to spread running through regular clinics in the store. He said RUNNR is looking for a local running coach who can be tapped for the store and for the clinics.

He said the mission of RUNNR is to get people into the sport and to help those who are already in it.
Claudio, who runs only in Newton Running Shoes, stressed the importance of the local government supporting the sport as a way to improve tourism.

“When you run, you realize how much you are capable of,” Claudio said.

He said he uses running to de-stress and “when I have a bad day, I really need to run.”