Flashes of Panic

I got sent a link today about Born to Run, which isn’t surprising given my known interests. However, it would probably be a surprise to the link sender to know that I finished watching the trailer feeling mildly annoyed.

Before I get started: Born to Run, based what I could work out from the trailer, is a film about several top-flight American distance runners training for the Olympic Trials Marathon held last November in New York City. It focuses on their training, their lives, and their backgrounds, tracing them up to the race itself. (It happens that one of their athletes, Ryan Hall, won the race.) The trailer is full of driving music at the interface of hip-hop and rock, lots of funky camera angles and shots out the windows of cars as the athletes go on their punishing training runs. It looks exciting; it looks like something that makes distance running, even marathoning, look kind of cool. So far, so good.

But this is where I apparently lose the plot. First, I had this feeling that I’d seen this film already, and within a minute I came up with not one, but two recent direct-to-DVD productions following the same path with different races: Five Thousand Meters (Nothing Comes Easy), about the men’s 5,000m final at the 2004 Olympic Track Trials (a curiously depressing film, since the athletes on screen spend so much time talking about how hard they work and how little return they see on that work), and last year’s Showdown, about the 2007 USATF cross-country championships.

Both movies followed the same pattern (apparently) that Born to Run appears to follow; I have to wonder if the different event (the marathon) is likely to make a notably different movie in any way. There’s the tantalizing offer of race footage from major races like the 10,000m at USATF Nationals in Indianapolis last June, but I honestly don’t have a whole lot of appetite, at this point in time, for more gaunt young men telling me how hard they’re working for their narrow chance to win an Olympic berth.

Second, and perhaps it’s Showdown that had me thinking of this: where are the women? That’s three movies about the men, from 5,000m to the marathon, and aside from Deena Kastor’s leading role in Spirit of the Marathon (which I have yet to see, incidentally), no focus on women. Showdown was an egregious offender on this score, treating the Boulder cross-country championships as though Goucher vs. Torres vs. Ritzenhein vs. Culpepper was the only race on the card, when the Olympic-medalist Kastor vs. new-American-Record-holder Shalane Flanagan promised to be equally thrilling, if not more. You could be forgiven if, after reading the entire website for Born to Run, you were unaware that there is also an Olympic Trials Marathon for women, and that it will be held in Boston in April.

(If you’d like to brand me as a hypocrite on this score, I had an article published in a recent issue of Running Times in which I called Bernard Lagat’s medal in the 1,500m in Osaka the first won by an American since 1908, or something like that; I should’ve said “by an American male”, of course. I don’t think this gaffe makes my point false, though.)

(It’s not just movies, either: all the good running novels are about men. Is there something about women’s running that makes it incompatible with the form? Or is it that only men are getting running novels published?)

Maybe this makes me a bad running fan, but I’m ready to move on from the interviews-and-races format in running movies. I’d be a lot more excited to see a Bud Greenspan quality film of the Trials race by itself. And I’d like to see it in a boxed set with the women’s Trials race film. And that means I just can’t get that thrilled about Born to Run.

Now Playing: Exit Music from Concert to End Slavery by Mutual Admiration Society

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