Race Report:
Sangyaw Adventure Race 2025

Reported by Nick Aguilos, Navigator for Team Dirt on June 01, 2025
All photographs used with permission from Tribu Harbat Mountaineers

Sangyaw Adventure Race has become a fixture of Tacloban City’s fiesta season. With La Routa now stepping up to the expedition racing category (and expanding its reach), Sangyaw has taken over the space it left behind—offering a local, middle-distance race with a mix of urban routes, open water, jungle terrain, and hardcore navigation.

We’ve joined Sangyaw for six editions now (we only missed the first one in 2017), and we’ve seen how it’s gotten tougher every year.

It can be intimidating to newcomers—and even for us, who’ve been racing for years, the course still throws surprises that push us to our limits.

Stage 1: Orienteering

The race began at 11AM in Tacloban’s northern barangays with an orienteering stage across the settlements. One of the slides here shows just how blank the map was—we had to rely on compass bearings and a bit of guesswork to get through it.

Stage 2: Trek

Next was a 22km trek toward Brgy. Tagpuro and Old Kawayan. It was long and hot, but this is where we started to gain some separation from the rest of the pack.

Stage 3: Bike

As the sun began to set, we started the only bike stage of the race—a brutal 80km ride.

Even with a solid lead, we treated this as a practice run for our terrain-cutting skills. We attempted two alternate routes that looked like they’d save us around five hours if successful. They involved hike-a-bikes over summits to reach the farthest checkpoints.

Unfortunately, road widening projects had turned those supposed trails into sheer cliffs—cut off entirely due to slope protection work. So yes, we lost time. But we proved to ourselves we were willing to take those kinds of risks.

This was also where we lost our way. I navigated poorly to CP7 and missed by a few hundred meters. Old’s Cool / Caloy Traders caught up, and we raced neck-and-neck from CP7 to CP12.

Stage 4: Trek

At 3AM, we left our bikes at Brgy. Salvacion and began another long trek through V&G, Marasbaras, and San Jose.

This section should’ve been easier. But we were drained from the last stage and sleep deprivation started creeping in—we began seeing “sleepmonsters.”

This 18km stage was straightforward navigation-wise, but physically punishing.

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Stage 5: Swim

The trek ended with the iconic Kankabato Bay swim—2km of open water. We’ve done this before in past races, but it never gets easier.

This year, we swam from Cataisan Point to FLET in Leyte Park. After everything we’d been through—heat, dust, mud—this swim was actually a relief.

Stage 6: Finale

After the swim, we ran a short stretch to the BFP headquarters for a rappel section—honestly, one of the most fun parts of Sangyaw.

We were even greeted by friends waiting at the checkpoint.

The final push? A quick sack race toward Tacloban Youth Center and finally, the finish line.

Summary

Brutal—Sangyaw 2025 tested us across all aspects of adventure racing. It’s a more compressed version of La Routa in terms of intensity, and proof of how far the local scene in Eastern Visayas has come.

We crossed the finish line in 25 hours flat.