Run to Win

You may have read about the Nova Marathon Challenge at this year’s Boston Marathon. Tufts University coach Donald Megerle and 3-time Boston winner Uta Pippig took a dozen people off of the street and trained them for the marathon over a span of 9 months.

Throughout the entire process, one person who was diabetic sustained multiple stress fractures and had to quit. She was replaced with a former NFL lineman, Steve DeOssie. Of the 13 people who were involved in the program, 12 of them made it to the starting line, and all 12 of them finished the race. All of the participants were sedentary and (technically) overweight before starting the program, and other than DeOssie none had spent much time exercising since college, if ever.
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Last week, John Parker spoke at the Maine Running Company about his book, Once a Runner, and the upcoming sequel. During his talk, he mentioned that the easiest money in the world is to sell the options to your book to somebody interested in making a movie about it. Up to this point, he has optioned the book 3 times, and has only seen one script that was apparently pretty bad.

With that in mind, you need to realize that the following trailer is not real. It may look like a professionally produced movie trailer, but it was created by Patrick Mouser as part of a student project.
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Chariots of Fire is a movie about Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, two very talented runners in the early 1920s. Two men with the same goal but who have vastly different approaches to attaining that goal and to living their life.

Eric Liddell is a devout follower of his faith who thinks that his running brings him closer to god. Harold Abrahams seeks to overcome the prejudice he encounters by being Jewish and to attain fame by being the fastest man alive. Both want to win the gold medal at the 1924 Olympics in the 100 meter dash.

Chariots of Fire is an inspirational story that is worth a watch for anybody that enjoys racing.

Breaking Away is a dated movie. It reeks of the 70s. Not that that is a bad thing, but I don’t think that it really translates very well for younger folk. Maybe the younger folk will watch it and disagree with me.

The basic story is about a kid who graduates from high school and tries to figure out what to do with his life. He is a very talented cyclist, and has an unhealthy obsession with his Italian cycling heroes. He tries to turn himself into an Italian until he actually meets some.

It took me about half of an hour to get into the movie. I eventually enjoyed watching it through, but it did not seem too relevant to my experiences so I had trouble relating to any of the characters.

The Long Run is a movie about an old coach in South Africa who is obsessed with the Comrades Ultra-Marathon. After getting fired from his job and losing the right to coach his four runners, he discovers an illegal immigrant with the raw talent to win the race. He attempts to control everything about her life in order to get her ready for the race, but she it is too much for her and she tries to break away from his control.

I enjoyed watching this movie, but it is not something I would ever bother watching again. You really get drawn into the characters and learn what makes them tick. You relate to their problems and root for them. The running in the movie is secondary, despite being the underlying theme behind everything. It is always there in the background, but the audience does not have to watch endless hours of it. Not that that would bother me.

I like how the characters are not two dimensional. There are no characters that you can just like or hate; they are all real people with virtues and flaws. The four men who run the race are a little bit underdeveloped, but they do not play as important a role. The story really centers around Barry (the coach) and Christine (the runner), with Barry’s politically correct black replacement playing a fairly prominent role as well.

The movie does drag on a little bit, and the racing scenes are very predictable. I still enjoyed watching it, though.

Running on the Sun is a documentary about the Badwater ultramarathon. This race traverses 135 miles of desert, climbing from a few hundred feet below sea level to the top of Mount Whitney. The runners have to climb over 13,000 feet mixed in with about 4000 feet of descent throughout the course. The cut-off to be considered a finisher is 60 hours.

I enjoyed watching the documentary. It follows about a quarter of the people in the race as they prepare themselves in the months leading up to it, and then follows them as they struggle through the ordeal. Some of them finish, and some of them drop out. You get to see people passing out and hallucinating on the side of the road, or just throwing up now and again as they go along.
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Without Limits is a story about Steve Prefontaine, a runner for the University of Oregon. I enjoyed the movie much more than Prefontaine, which was released a year earlier. Donald Sutherland does an excellent job narrating the story as Bill Bowerman, the eventual founder of Nike and Pre’s mentor.

As a running story, it is well told and will hold the interest of people outside of the running and athletic world. You have the grand epic of a cocky summabitch striving for a gold medal and having to deal with various hardships, you got the kindly old man helping him along no matter how much he resists, you got the hot lady interest that plays hard to get, and you got a fairly good looking guy staring anywhere but forward while he is racing on screen.