Pages, one of Cebu’s best sports writers, told awardees and their relatives present during the 29th SAC-SMB Cebu Sports Awards that failure leads to success.

He shared with those present a gem of a quote by sports legend Michael Jordan, who said, “I have missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. Twenty six times, I have been entrusted to take the game-winning shot…and missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life…And that is why I succeed.”

In running, as in real life, failure is but part of a cycle that leads to success. It’s easier and faster to see the connection in sports, where training and preparation bear almost immediate fruit.

But for that to happen, you have to embrace failures and learn to use them as a springboard to success. You have to learn to fail successfully. How?

1.) Accept that you failed. That is the first step on the road to success.

The person who does not acknowledge failing will never succeed. Do not wipe out your failure by redefining success or lowering the benchmark because you’ll only be fooling yourself. Do not be obstinate in refusing to see your failings or doctoring data and results to make it appear that you are succeeding, you’ll just be a sad portrait of a loser.

2.) Find out why you failed. First, blame yourself. It’s easy to blame others, it’s harder (and yet infinitely much more fruitful) to blame yourself. Ask yourself, “what did I do wrong? What should I have done?”

If you fail to complete a 10K run, a 21K event or a full marathon, take time to find out why you failed. Did you lack training? Were you over-trained? Did you start too fast? Did you not eat enough or did you eat too much? Learn from your mistake.

Apart from running, web technology is my other burning passion. I experiment with a lot of programs and scripts and take pleasure in learning new things, even from encountering error after error after error. In one amusing incident that still makes me chuckle years after, I crashed my phone while making it run a web server.

I try to learn from each error I encounter, each mistake I make. I have an entire section in my personal wiki to log “errors and solutions.” By learning from each error I encounter or commit, I become a better Web worker.

That’s also the case in running, as in all sports. That’s also the case in life. We get better by learning from mistakes.

Failure, said Henry Ford, is nothing but an “opportunity to begin again, only this time more wisely.”

3.) Resolve to do better. Falling down isn’t as important as getting up. After finding out why you failed, plot a different course.

Someone once described insanity as “doing the same thing and expecting a different result.” Do not repeat the things that led to your failure.

If you DNFed (runner parlance for did not finish) because you lacked training, this time, be serious in your workouts leading to the race.

4.) Work hard; train hard. Mileage isn’t something you can buy. You can’t buy-one-take-one-kilometer. There are no shortcuts or habal-habal rides in running, you have to run the distance and the only way to do that is to put in the required training.

HONG KONG MARATHON. Cebuanos set personal records in last Sunday’s Standard Chartered Hong Kong Marathon. Leading the charge was serial marathoner Joel Garganera who finished the route in 4:26:54. Ultra-runner and journalist Haide Acuña exacted her HK revenge by finishing in 5:04, a long run for her 160-kilometer event next Sunday. Kenneth Toledo, meanwhile, finally broke 4 hours with a scorching 3:56:55.

Others who finished the full were Gifford John Perral, Jeppy Lumongsod and Ungo Runners Dindz Bartolabac, Troy Suico Pao and Victor Chan.

Meanwhile, speedster Arnold Go of Team Boyek blazed through the route in 3:57. Other Team Boyek members who completed the full marathon included top man Boyek Galang, Erickson Ong, Benedict Hong, Fr. Siongo Tan, Michael Enriquez and Rudy Galagar.

Mary Grace delos Santos bannered Cebu with a 3rd place finish in the 21K.

Those who completed the 21K included Waterfront top man Hembler Mendoza, Linaflor Chan, Gerard Tan, Sidney Carcel and Joanne Castillo.

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

Veteran runner Raffy Uytiepo sent me a text message last Wednesday to ask whether I would like to join organizers Noy Jopson and Hembler Mendoza run the route they were considering for The Great Lapu-Lapu Run on April 18.

WITH NOY JOPSON. Running with Noy Jopson and Hembler Mendoza (left) to map out the route of The Great Lapu-Lapu Run. (FOTO BY MARLEN LIMPAG)

As soon as I read the words join, Noy Jopson and run, I immediately hit the phone’s reply button and said “YES!!!! What time?”

Several minutes later, I realized the full implication of the invitation.

Noy Jopson is The Ironman. He is the Philippine 70.3 Ironman Champion. He has three national triathlon titles. He won the Asian Cup Junior trophy in 1995, the bronze and silver medals at the Asian Championships and the Philippine Enduraman. I’m an overweight journalist barely a year into running. It was like Ronaldinho deciding to play pickup 1-on-1 football with an elementary school kid.

I immediately texted Raffy to ask about the pace, telling him I might pass out trying to keep up with Noy. He texted back, “slow lang. Walang iwanan.”

We met at the Liberty Shrine in Barangay Mactan at daybreak the next day. Noy is easy to pick out in a group, especially among grouchy early-morning runners, because the first thing you see him do is smile. For an elite athlete, he is down to earth. He’s “just like your boy next door,” said Annie Neric, Holiday Gym & Spa fitness program director.

“He has accomplished a lot but is still down to earth…He can be very unassuming,” Neric said in an e-mail.

The two hours and 15 minutes that Hembler and I ran with Noy Jopson last Thursday were among the best two hours on the road I’ve ever had. While running, we kept on discussing The Great Lapu-Lapu Run route. Noy commented on my and Hembler’s running forms. We talked about running equipment—from shoes to GPS watches to a Timex watch he was beta-testing. He talked about chia seeds, which was mentioned in the seminal running book “Born to Run.”

Noy Jopson’s enthusiasm is infectious. We were set to run directly to the Waterfront Airport Hotel & Casino Mactan, where Mendoza is the general manager, but ended up running the Marcelo Fernan Bridge not once, but twice, and going down to the park under the bridge in the Mandaue side.

Noy Jopson is a great athlete not just because he is a bio-mechanically efficient human being. Noy Jopson is a great athlete because he is such a wonderful person who is also bio-mechanically efficient. He has no airs about him.

Four years ago, when Annie Neric was still new in Cebu, she attended a spinning class, an aerobic exercise on a stationary bike, conducted by Noy at the Holiday Gym & Spa. When Noy knew she was from Manila, he got excited to know that she was a kababayan and kept on talking and interviewing her while holding the class. When she told him she was also a spinning instructress, she ended up leading the cooldown for the class.

“After his class, he introduced me to the manager of Holiday Gym and the week after, I became one of the spinning instructors of the gym and got myself a job in less than two weeks here in Cebu,” Neric said.

Noy would later introduce Neric to triathlon.

“I remember how he would go back for me after he finishes his race. I was still in the course since I was a new runner then. He would shout at me that I could go faster even when he knew that I was already struggling. Noy is like that because he knows that you could do it. He motivates and challenges you at the same time,” Annie said.

When we were in the final meters to Waterfront last Thursday, Noy playfully pushed Hembler, who wasn’t feeling well, at a pace I couldn’t sustain for long even in an actual race. But all three of us finished together, sprinting to Waterfront in time for a group photo.

We spent two great hours running about 19 kilometers last Thursday. With Noy around, I felt we could have run a full marathon.

But a sumptuous buffet breakfast was waiting for us at the Waterfront.

With Noy Jopson, Superman.

The race is organized by the Lapu-Lapu City Government and the Lapu Lapu City Tourism Cultural and Historical Commission.

This year’s edition of the race is being organized by elite triathlete Noy Jopson and veteran runner and race director Raffy Uytiepo.

GREAT LAPU-LAPU RUN. The Great Lapu-Lapu Run will be using RFID chips to time runners of its 21K and 10K races. The website printed above, however, is still not live.

Jopson told CebuRunning that the race will start and finish at the Mactan Shrine in Barangay Punta Engaño. He said they will be using RFID chips that will be deployed by Finishline of renowned runner and coach Rio dela Cruz. Finishline also deployed the timing chips during the Cebu City Marathon last Jan. 10.

The Cebu City Marathon was the first time that timing chips or RFID (radio frequency identification) chips were used to time runners in Visayas and Mindanao. The chips, which are attached to runners’ shoes, activate once these pass special mats placed on the race course. They provide not only the finishing time of the runners but also their split times.

The chips provide organizers quick and accurate finishing times of runners.

Uytiepo said that Hembler Mendoza, Waterfront Airport Hotel and Casino general manager, is considering collecting P450 as registration fee. Uytiepo said, however, that it is still being finalized.

Jopson said they are still finalizing the race routes but there is a “big chance” it will include the iconic Mactan-Mandaue Bridge. (Make sure to keep checking this site because we will be putting up an interactive virtual map of the route once it is finalized.)

Jopson and Uytiepo also confirmed that the top male and female runners in the Great Lapu-Lapu Run will be sent to the Standard Chartered Hong Kong Marathon.