Flashes of Panic

Last night I went to the “encore presentation” of Spirit of the Marathon down in Hadley. I’ve read a lot of rave reviews of the movie, but I came in with a somewhat more skeptical viewpoint.

The positives are many. The characters followed in the movie are fantastic: Deena Kastor displaying her “relentlessly positive” nature, training for Chicago ‘05 through a stress fracture in her foot; Daniel Njenga, twice third and once second in Chicago; graduate student Lori O’Connor, who probably could have convinced theaters-full of spectators to run marathons just on her own; and several other less speedy runners whose marathons went somewhat less smoothly. (One didn’t even start the marathon.) I liked seeing many of my friends and colleagues up on the screen, talking about the things they know best. (I never realized that the founders of the Boston Marathon drew a parallel between the legendary Pheidippides and Paul Revere, the rationale behind the great race’s Patriots’ Day scheduling.) And the movie made Chicago itself look spectacular; it’s like an hour-and-a-half advertisement for the Chicago Marathon and should go a long way towards repairing the damage done by the disastrous 2007 edition.

The filmmakers do a very good job presenting the essence of a big-city marathon: the crowds of otherwise non-athletic people dedicating hours and months to training, the sweep of the thing (there’s a spectacular aerial shot of the race start which just keeps panning up and up, looking farther and farther back in the crowd, and the crowd - just - never - ends.) They capture the scale of the undertaking very, very well, right down to the joke I always make about how the people who run the marathon are swearing never to do another and the people who watch are promising they’ll run next time. And I liked picking out faces in the “crowd,” like the men running around Deena Kastor in the marathon.

My problem with Spirit is with the tag line they use, a direct quote from an interview with Dick Beardsley in the opening minutes. “Once you cross that line, no matter how fast or how slow, your life will change forever.” Maybe so. But I’ve crossed the finish lines of three marathons (and the start lines of five, for what it’s worth) and I think it’s fair to say that none of them have changed my life.

I think the reason for this is that I’m not really the target audience for this film. I don’t need to be sold on the marathon; I bought in a long time ago (and then bought out when I realized that marathons aren’t for me.) I bought in on many of these ideas back in junior high school, when I first started running cross country; they’ve been part of my way of thinking for twenty years. My life was changed forever some time in eighth grade when I realized that the longer the race was, the more likely I was to outrun the other kids my age; there was no change left for the marathon.

I think this is one of the problems with the way the movie has been marketed in the U.S. The pattern has been promotion through running publications, running websites, and the running community; the only non-runners or non-marathoners (the ones who will really be seeing something new to them) who see the movie are ones brought to the showings by runners. Maybe that’s fine, but it seems like the audience the film speaks to and the one which actually turned up in the theater are a bit different.

The theater was about half-full (A said when she went, last month, it was almost completely full) and only six or seven of us sat through the credits for the “extra” features at the end. I can’t say they missed very much, to be honest, although it was fun to see a bit more of the work that went in to making the film at all.

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