Steve the Owl's Blog

Hi, everyone. How has your day been? Things have been good here at Steve the Owl’s blog. Recently, I had a free movie night from Redbox, so my wife and I each picked out a movie from the kiosk. She picked The Life of Pi, a sleeper Oscar winner (it won the Movie of the Year from the American Film Institute, and Oscars for Cinematography, Director, Score and Visual Effects) based on the 2004 novel by Yann Martels.

Some Reservation

I am well aware of the notion that the book is almost always better than the movie. This is in part because of the nature of the medium. (After all, side plots are much more forgivable in a book of several hundred pages whereas a two hour movie does not usually allow such distractions.) I had read the book, and while I thought it was good in places, in others it seemed to lose me. (I definitely understood the notion of the father pointing out that believing everything is the same as believing in nothing.) There was one particular scene late in the book that did not seem to serve the plot very well, other than just another example of just how hungry the title character was.

I was concerned that this scene might make its appearance in the movie and I would be distracted again. I had that fear in part because of the fact that Ang Lee was the director of the movie. Lee also directed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (the movie that I still think should have won Best Picture 12 years ago) and Brokeback Mountain. I was interested in watching the latter because of how much I liked the former. However, when I finally saw the movie, there was a scene that completely took me out of the movie, and I really did not remember much else of the rest of it. (This is a family blog, so I really can’t give too many details, but if you have seen the movie, it involves spit.)

I told my wife that there was a chapter in the book that might take her out of the movie if it is shown, but I would not tell her what it was until after the movie, just in case Lee decided not to include it.

An Amazing Experience

So, I watched the movie, and that scene was not included. I was captivated by the entire movie. Whether you like the storylines or not, Ang Lee is a vey talented director and he and his cinematographers know to find great shots. It was a visually stunning movie and the story was emotionally compelling. The story examines such great questions as faith, reality, and the powers of human endurance and the human spirit.

Ultimately, I think that the only reason I was able to enjoy the movie so much better than the book (which, in all honesty, when I saw the commercials, seemed like an impossible venture) was because of the fact that nothing took me out of the experience. How many of us have that same experience where we have a great story, but something happens and we are forever removed from it?

How do you ensure that you don’t have distracting moments in telling your story?

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Hi, everyone. I hope you have had a good day. Today was my fourth wedding anniversary. Each year, I comment on something about married life, or my thoughts about the wedding itself. Today, I am going to write about the importance of ritual in the life of a married couple.

How Do You Pick a Ritual?

Today, I went out to dinner with my wife (today, we picked Red Lobster, where we split the Ultimate Feast and a warm chocolate chip lava cookie) and we came home to watch the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The restaurant varies year by year, but it’s usually somewhere that we have never been to or hadn’t been to in a while and we just wanted to try something new. We watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding because late on our wedding night, my wife was feeling a little under the weather (she had lost her voice the morning of the wedding) and we decided to watch it. In all honesty, it is not a movie that I would recommend to someone who is panicking about their wedding (unless they see it as a “there but for the grace of God go I” kind of thing), but it is a great movie to watch to laugh about all of the things that happen on the way to that important day.

Another big ritual for us is watching The Baxter on Valentine’s Day. The reason we watch The Baxter on Valentine’s Day is because that is the first movie we watched together as a couple back in the summer of 2007. It is a hilarious movie that never got a wide release or audience, but the town where I was living at the time of its release happened to have multiple video stores with art house sensibilities and quite a few good independent movies. The beginning of that trip went about as bad as it could go, and that seemed to be the big turnaround point for the weekend.

The Most Important Part of a Ritual

While people seem to focus on questions of the ritual itself, the most important part of the ritual is the person who you get to share it with. It is not just the act of watching those movies or going to the restaurant, but it is a chance to spend time with the woman who I love and get to spend the rest of my life with. These are events that commemorate important moments in our personal histories, so that is what makes the ritual so important.

How do you select your personal rituals?

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Hi, everyone. How have you been? Recently, I went to the library and rented a copy of Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life on DVD.

This Isn’t What I Expected

When I looked at the box, it seemed like an action-adventure movie that might have a little bit of kitsch value. The front picture includes the four main actors, and one of them wears what looks like something a pilot would wear. The back cover mentioned a mysterious box that the title character receives shortly before his thirteenth birthday and his efforts to find out what is in it.

It Was Even Better

I must admit that the movie seemed like it might have a certain kitsch appeal when I rented the movie. However, the movie was a very funny, very sensitive coming of age tale where he ends up working for an eccentric man who is giving things to people, and each of those things teach Jeremy a valuable life lesson. I don’t want to give away the ending, but I will tell you that it was a journey that I am glad that I got the chance to witness.

This got me thinking of how many times we go into things expecting to get one thing, but we end up actually getting something better than we aimed for in the beginning.

How have you been pleasantly surprised?

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Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Steve the Owl’s Blog. I hope things have been going well for you lately.

This is a post that I must admit I was very reluctant to write. I have been thinking about it for a month. I had originally planned to write something upbeat on the day of the Boston Marathon, but with the tragic events of that day, I realized that it would not be in the best taste to do so (I had the idea for a couple of months, but decided to shelve it until a more appropriate time, perhaps next year’s running.), so I thought of this post for my thoughts about what the Marathon means in general, and a few thoughts about what happened a month ago.

“Who Would Run 26.2 Miles?”

This is a question a lot of people seem to ask. As someone who has run two marathons (albeit very, very slowly), I think I have some insight into this question.

According to legend, Greek messenger Phidippides ran the roughly 25 miles from Marathon to Athens following a victory over the mighty Persian Empire (the strongest in the world at the time) in 490 BC. When he made it to Athens, he said, “Rejoice, we conquer,” collapsed, and died. Nearly 2300 years later, the Olympic Games were revised in Athens in 1896. The Marathon was not part of the original games (the longest footraces in the Ancient Olympics were somewhere between 1500 meters and 3000 meters, and the most famous race was the Stadion, or once around the 192-meter track), but organizers saw this as a way to connect to the ancient Greek spirit. The first Marathon was won by Spiridon Louis, a 23-year-old Greek shepherd, covering the 40,000-meter course in 2:58:50.

At the time, the term “marathon” referred to any race over 20 miles. The 1896 Olympic Marathon was the first marathon race, but a lot of towns decided to host their own marathons after Athens captured the imagination of the sporting world. At the 1908 Olympics in London, the princes (who would become King Edward VIII and George VI) could not attend the games because they were sick. So, the race started in Windsor Castle so they could see the start of the race. It was exactly 26 miles from Windsor Castle to the Olympic stadium. Instead of the customary finish line at the end of the home straight, the race finished in front of the royal box, 385 yards from the starting line. Italian runner Dorando Pietri entered the stadium first, but he was totally exhausted. He collapsed several times on his way to the finish line, but he was determined to win the race. When American Johnny Hayes entered the stadium, officials hurried Pietri to his feet to deny the American the victory. Pietri was disqualified, and Hayes won the race in 2:55:18. A few years later, 26 miles, 385 yards (or 42,195 meters) would become the standard Marathon distance, and Hayes’ time was recognized as the first official Marathon world record.

Why Boston

Boston was one of the cities that started Marathons in the wake of the Athens Olympic Marathon. In April 1897, they started a 24 1/2 mile race. Ten runners finished the course, stretching from Ashland to downtown Boston. John J. McDermott was the first winner. In 1924, the course was extended to accommodate the now-standard distance of 26 miles, 385 yards. Three years later, it was discovered that the race was a few yards short, and the course was lengthened. It now begins in Hopkinton, and includes such icons as the Citgo sign near the finish (it used to be the finish line) and Heartbreak Hill in Newton (not particularly long, but a series of two hills, its position in the course is brutal). In 1970, in response to the field eclipsing 1000 for the first time the year before, race organizers added qualifying times. Ironically, this gave the race an even more mythic role in running circles, and more than ever wanted to run this race where one had to be good enough to run rather than simply submitting the fee.

There are now waivers for those who raise money for charity, but Boston is the world’s second oldest continuing Marathon, the second oldest road footrace in North America (the Around the Bay in Hamilton, Ontario, a 30K race, began in 1894), and the footrace that has been run the most (in response to World War I, the 1918 Boston Marathon was a military relay, but the race has never been cancelled in 117 years; Around the Bay has been canceled 15 times over the years). For a lot of runners, qualifying for the Boston Marathon is their version of qualifying for the Olympics.

A Celebration of Life

One of the things that made the attacks last month particularly cruel is the fact that the marathon, more than anything else, is a celebration of life. It is a distance that forces you to respect it, or punishes you harshly if you don’t. I learned this the hard way.

I ran the distance twice: at the age of 18, six days after my high school graduation; and at the age of 19 as a college freshman. The first time I ran the course was a very challenging course in West Virginia. This was two weeks after the end of the track season in high school, so I had been preparing for the mile and two mile. This usually meant about 35-40 miles a week, and the longest run I had finished before the race was 15 miles. My time was slow, but I was one of only two under the age of 20 to finish the course. Out of the 104 who started, 82 finished. I was 70th. The next year, I barely trained, and I hit the wall at about 18 miles. I didn’t hit it the first time (but because I had slowed down so much and the 20-mile marker was missing, I kept thinking I was lost), but I hit it with a vengeance the second time and found out what it was the hard way: running out of sugar. I became so hungry that a melted PowerBar at a station at mile 19 was one of the best things I had ever eaten (if you’ve ever eaten PowerBars, you understand the extent of my hunger). I was amazed that Long Island managed to find such a long (albeit slight) hill for the course, but at mile 21, I realized that I was hallucinating, because you can’t go uphill both ways. (Later, some had commented on my exaggerated lean, which is typical for uphill running.) Another run had slowed down desperately after making the mistake of eating a steak dinner the night before and we talked to each other after mile 22. His son had a bottle of Gatorade for him at mile 23, and we split it. Immediately, I realized just how flat the “hill” turned out to be. I learned my lesson and vowed to never run another marathon until I was truly ready, and to this day, I have never done so.

Why do I bring up these stories from my running past? Because this is what the bombers did not realize about the people who participate in this event. Even the ones who go painfully slow give themselves to a discipline that few can truly understand. We may be fairly skinny people, and not too muscular, but you cannot begin to imagine our spirit and determination. There will be another Boston Marathon next year, so they have failed in their goal of chaos. As 1968 champion Amby Burfoot reminded us so eloquently, we will not be intimidated. No one will ruin this celebration of life! When my time comes to give the distance the respect it deserves (once I am finished with my mile dreams), I will be there to join you to celebrate.

Hi, everyone. This is a post I wrote two years ago for my friend Stacy Clafin’s “Grow with Stacy” blog. Earlier this month, she has announced that she is closing her blog down in order to focus on her passion of writing novels. She has written two with the third on its way. I would like to thank her for her great and good work in the blogosphere and for the chance to get to know her over the last three years, and wish her the best of luck. Without any further ado, here is that post:

I’ve been thinking about one of the biggest areas of debate in the worlds of both personal development and business: whether one should seek teachers or gurus. There are people who call themselves either one, perhaps interchangeably, but there is a difference between the two, and this is very important in seeking your personal development and business education.

What is a Teacher?

A teacher is someone whose primary goal is to provide information. He/she, by virtue of opening a business, clearly cares about making a profit, and will focus more on providing a lot of value, but there is more to a teacher’s role. A teacher will be focused on helping someone get to a point of self-sufficiency and finding ways to become a teacher as well.

What is a Guru?

A guru is someone whose primary goal is to promote him/herself as a leader. You know the people I am talking about. The ones who have a new product launch literally every few months. The ones whose teaching is primarily a step-by-step “do what I do, or use my links, and you will become rich,” and most of them talk about big paydays in a very short period of time. Some of the biggest gurus have autoresponders and videos where they appear and tell your prospective business partners about why the business is so great, or give the free lessons promised in the subscription form and capture page.

Which One is Better?

I am not writing this to say that there is nothing that can be said by one type or another that has value. Pretty much everyone who has worked to build a business and a blog over a long enough period knows something that will help out. However, the primary focus for this post is showing which one is better as a primary mentor.

I think that the biggest thing to remember for someone who seeks a mentor is the question of where you eventually want to be, and whether your mentor can help you get there. The subjects of “You, Inc.” and “build your brand” have been discussed to death on the online world, almost to the point where they have lost their impact from repetition. So, rather than go on a lengthy description of each one, let us ask ourselves whether a teacher or a guru is better equipped to help you get to where you want to be.

There are some teachers who will give very patient and detailed lessons, and others who prefer to focus on basic principles. Each one has its own value, depending on one’s prior knowledge and learning style. There are some people who don’t know as much coming in, or there are little things that they tend to miss. For these people, the former might be better. If you are someone who prefers to get the basic gist of things and then tinker around until you find the answer, the latter might be better.

However, I think that gurus are not going to provide that value, for the simple reason that everything that they do “for you” really ends up promoting themselves. When I first started my blog last year, I didn’t know anything about building a blog for business, autoresponders, capture pages, or anything. My own experience blogging was limited to posting on a friend’s blog talking about politics, so I didn’t have to worry about anything administrative or building a business. It was just something that I thought was fun and did whenever the muse came upon me. So, I wanted to learn as much as possible about how to build the best blog that I could for anyone who come by.

However, once I signed up for literally dozens of subscription lists (and cluttered my e-mail way more than I care to think about at any given time), I started to realize a pattern: the vast majority of people had the exact same autoresponder campaign. The only real difference for some of them was the fact that their name was listed in the signature. For about a quarter of them, there was a link to a video series (I won’t say which one, but most readers who’ve been around the Internet will know what I’m talking about) where it was the exact same guy giving the exact same presentation about how to build an online business. This got me thinking: who sticks out, the person whose website I visited, or the guy who keeps showing up in my inbox over and over again? Who are most people going to sign up with, the person who sent me to this page, or to the guru?

This told me that there had to be a better way. Rather than looking for gurus to follow, I have instead looked for teachers. I would not say that my blog has been perfect, or that I have everything figured out, but I know that I have learned a lot more about how to present myself and my vision to you, the reader. I would not trade my own learning curve for any guru or any amount of money.

What are some of your experiences with teachers and gurus online?

If you like what you read, please leave your comments below and share with your friends using the buttons on this page. I look forward to continuing the conversation with you.

Hi, everyone. I hope you have had a good weekend. Yesterday, I participated in the Stroehmann Bakeries 5K Run Against Hunger in Philadelphia. This is my second time running this course. The first time I ran this course was two years ago as I was getting back into shape. I wanted to do the race last year, but I had an Achilles industry that kept me sidelined for most of the winter, so I was looking forward to doing the race this year.

Rituals and Goals

Based on my running as well as my goal for the mile, I decided that my goal for this run would be 20:39, or 6:39 per mile. I had never broken 21 minutes for the distance on any surface, or 22 minutes on the road. Since my comeback in 2010, my fastest 5000 meter time on any surface was a 22:00.95 that I ran during a time trial on the track two years ago. (Needless to say, if I had realized how close I was to breaking 22 minutes that day, I would have run a little bit harder at the end.) So, with this in mind (as well as my somewhat disappointing 2012 season), I knew that I would not only have to run the distance faster than ever before, but I would have to do it on the roads as opposed to the track where I could gauge my pace every 100 meters.

I also knew of the importance of ritual and doing things that were familiar on the run. Before the race, I had worn my light blue race T-shirt from my comeback race in three 5K road races. Twice, I set a road personal record, and the other time, I won my age group. I also practiced visualizing the event, going to bed with visions of racing going through my head and seeing the final time when I finished.

Having read about visualization in race prep, I also decided to try it two days before the race. To my surprise, I began to realize that I was actually mimicking my breathing pattern on hard runs while visualizing the race. I set two timers: one for the total time, and one to let me know when my kick began. Things were going well, but then I got a phone call seven minutes into the visualization. I made the mistake of starting over again from scratch and actually hyperventilated a little bit over the last four minutes. Still, with that, and a practice run the week before where I ran five 1000-meter repeats 1-3 seconds faster than my anticipated race pace, I knew I was ready for Saturday morning.

On Race Day

Saturday morning came, and I was ready for the race. I did my warm-up and I felt ready to go. I also knew that I needed to avoid one of the biggest pitfalls of going out in such races: going out too fast because of the adrenaline of the event. Not only did I avoid going out in a near-sprint, but I was actually in the lead pack early in the race. Admittedly, with the winner of the race usually finishing in just under 16 minutes, I did not expect that to last. However, I made it to the half mile mark in 3:19, right on my goal pace. I knew that I usually slowed down a little bit, and I tried to put a little bit more effort into avoiding slowing down. I did this a bit too well as I finished the first mile in 6:22.41. However, I hit the turnaround in 10:20, so even though it didn’t feel like I was slowing down, this made me think that the marker might have been off. I made it two mile to at 13:19.54 (6:57.13 for the second mile), right on the pace. This seemed to confirm my suspicions about the first mile marker, but when I went to the 2 1/2 mile point in 17:10 (or 3:50 for the half mile), this told me that the first mile marker was right, and I was in danger of fading. At 19:30, I started my final drive, and when I got close to the finish line, I did the final drive to the finish, crossing the line in 20:55.18 (averaging a 6:11 mile over the last .6 miles).

I was very excited to break not only my road record, but my overall personal record for the distance. To my even greater surprise, I finished eighth out of 374 entrants. I celebrated the moment, and I also looked forward to the future, knowing what worked (focus on the race, refusal to give in when my pace fell off with a mile to go) and what didn’t work (accelerating too much in the first mile). I did all of this because I had a plan, and I knew what it would look like to go into new ground.

How have you moved forward to go to new heights?

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Hi, everyone. I hope you had a good Easter. This past Friday, I participated in a Seven Last Words service, giving the sermon for “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” The service went pretty well, and this is the first one that I participated in directly. This is something that made me think about how different messengers can have a different effect on people.

Understanding Different Traditions

I have noticed one of the big differences between churches I attended here is that even those of the same denomination have a more formal liturgy in Protestant circles. Churches I grew up in practice what is known as a “free church” tradition with a very minimal liturgical calendar (usually including Christmas, Holy Week, Easter, and possibly Advent). However, the churches that I have attended here have a “low church” liturgy. For Good Friday, this includes what is known as a Seven Last Words service on Good Friday. For those of you not familiar with this, each preacher gives a mini-sermon based on one of the seven things Jesus says on the cross as recorded in the Gospels.

My first Seven Last Words service came five years ago. I was an intern at seminary and my then-girlfriend (now wife) was visiting for her Spring Break. I remember seeing the various preachers and noticing the different ways that they responded to the texts. The one that still sticks out the most to me was a preacher responding to the Third Last Word (“Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother.”) because of his style of preaching.

What made his style of preaching stick out was the fact that he had a style of speaking where he would repeat a word as he used that as a way of moving to another part of his message. While some of the people in the church did not appreciate the style, it was something that I recognized from someone of a similar age. The preacher who employed this style was in his 80s, and I noticed Robert C. Byrd often used a similar rhetorical device. While it is something that has largely faded out of fashion, it can be a powerful one when someone does it right and the audience is ready to hear it.

Just like other things in life, the messenger plays an important role. There are various ways of reaching out. Some will go for something that has more of a mass appeal, and others will work to blaze their own trail. If you have a style that doesn’t have a huge mass appeal, that’s okay. You might just be what someone else needed.

If you like what you read, please leave your comments below and share with your friends using the buttons above.

If you would like to learn more about the principles of personal development that have stood the test of time, please fill out the form for my Seven Day eBook Giveaway in the upper right-hand corner of this page.

It’s gotta be the shoes! Spike Lee as Mars Blackmon

Hi, everyone. I hope you have had a good week. Yesterday was Michael Jordan’s 50th birthday, and a lot of the sports world was examining his role in the world of sports and looking for calls about who the greatest athletes were. The Fanatic wanted the five greatest athletes of all time, and WIP wanted the top 50 of the last 50 years. Hearing their track list only included sprinters, naturally I called to defend a distance runner: in this case, Haile Gebrselassie, as one of the top 50. The hosts agreed that he should be part of the list, but had trouble remembering his name. (Most sports coverage in the United States tends to be America-centric, and an Ethiopian distance runner wouldn’t be on the radar of a lot of people.)

That being said, I had an incident last week that had me thinking a little bit about an old Michael Jordan commercial. Being a Knicks fan, I don’t like to do that very often (the Bulls beat the Knicks five times in the playoffs on the way to their six championships), but I remembered one of his first commercials:

If you don’t remember this commercial, Mars Blackmon was trying to figure out the secret to Michael Jordan’s success, eventually deciding that “it’s gotta be the shoes.” I started to think about this last week when I ordered a pair of racing flats for the first time in my life. These are not shoes that you often wear, but you tend to wear them on fast days. However, I wanted to wear them on a regular run to test them before wearing them for speed workouts.

To my surprise, my easy run was a full two minutes faster than my fastest six mile easy run of the season. (Not only that, but had I run the extra lap to make it an even 10,000 meters, it would’ve been the third fastest 10K I ever ran.) The only thing that changed was that I was wearing shoes that weighed about 9 1/2 ounces on each foot as opposed to the pound and a half or so that I usually wear when running. As I ran, I noticed that my strides were longer than usual because of how much easier it was to lift my legs when there was less weight on them.

This started to get me thinking about what it means in order to have the right tools for the job. How many times do we hold ourselves back because we are not using the correct tools, whether physical, mental, or technological. I’m not saying to go out and buy everything under the sun, but to actually look at what is needed for the task at hand.

How has getting the right equipment helped you improve in life?

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Hi, everyone. I hope you have had a great week. On Saturday, I went for a four mile run, and much to my surprise, this run was two full minutes faster than a run the day before that was supposed to be a much harder run. Ultimately, I noticed that things worked very well because of correcting some small errors in my stride.

One Little Change

I was reading a book a couple of years ago by marathon coach Hal Higdon on the nature of strides. Higdon argued that most sub-elite and average runners make one fatal mistake in their running stride: try to run with a roughly even stride length, but speed up and slow down the actual steps. He insisted that the best pace for anything slower than a sprint ranged from 180-190 steps per minute.

Well, I was curious how I was doing on this measure the week before. This was very important to me because I was assuming 180 steps per minute to determine my breathing pattern (on easy runs, I tend to favor a 2-4 breathing pattern, or breathe in for two steps and breathe out for four, or 30 breaths per minute on an easy run to 45-60 on hard runs). So, during a long run, I decide to count the number of steps that I ran for 100 meters and the time that it took me to do it. For my long run at an easy pace, I noticed that I was running at between 150 and 155 steps per minute, and breathing 25 or 26 times a minute. Both of these numbers were far lower than they should have been.

Then, when I was doing a speed workout a few days later, I noticed that what was a nearly full sprint for me only had a pace of 186 steps for minute. On the hard run the day before, when I went to my tempo pace (just below the level where you build lactic acid), I was only running at 164 steps minute.

To my surprise, my feet were not moving fast enough at any speed. One of the big dangers with a stride that is too slow is that you are in the air a little bit longer than you should be, which means that you are both running too vertically, and you have a greater risk of injury because of the increased force.

So, the next day, as I went along, I tried to be much more aware of my pace, and I knew that one of the most surefire ways to increase leg speed was to shorten my stride. To my surprise, I was running at the 180 steps per minute, and my pace was going faster and faster, until at its peak it was a full 13 seconds faster than my slowest lap.

How much shorter was my stride (the distance for two steps)? Eight centimeters, or slightly less than 3 1/4 inches. A very small difference in stride meant that I was running much more efficiently and much quicker. My strides were 20% faster, but they were only 3% shorter. I don’t have to tell you how that would be so much more effective.

Small Changes

In the book The Slight Edge, Jeff Olson argues that big, dramatic gestures are not necessary to succeed, but the discipline to do a few basic things every day. Shortening my stride a little bit made a dramatic impact on how fast I could run on my easy days. (Now, it’s just a matter of figuring out how to build my legs up so I can run the longer strides necessary for my key events.)

What small changes have made a huge difference in your life?

Also, what times have you found that you were overdoing it, and found success by scaling back?

If you like what you read, please leave your comments below and share with your friends using the buttons above.

If you would like to learn more about the principles of personal development that have stood the test of time, please fill out the form for my Seven Day eBook Giveaway in the upper right-hand corner of this page.

I believe that God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure.– Eric Liddell (played by Ian Charleson) in Chariots of Fire

I’m forever in pursuit and I don’t even know what I’m chasing.– Harold Abrahams (played by Ben Cross) in Chariots of Fire

Hi, everyone. I hope you have had a good week. I am glad you came to Steve the Owl’s Blog. Last week, I rented a copy of the movie in the title of this post from the library. It was the first time my wife had seen it, and it was the second for me. (I first saw it in 2002. I saw the second half of it on TV last summer, but while it is true that the first half of the movie is extremely slow and the second half is worth it, you really don’t get the payoff if you don’t watch the whole thing.) Most people tend to focus on the A story of Scottish sprinter and Presbyterian missionary who refused to run the 100 meters in the 1924 Olympics because the semifinals were held on a Sunday, but in many ways, the story that speaks more to me is the story of Harold Abrahams, the determined Jewish sprinter who runs in order to prove himself in British society. However, in the story of both of these sprinters, as well as Abrahams’ best friend, Aubrey Montague, who serves as the narrator, we see what the determination to make them Olympic sprinters can teach us about the race of life.

Having Trouble Fitting In

While my situation was not the same as that of Abrahams, as a man from central Appalachia with a heavy accent, I have felt that shock when I meet a lot of people for the first time when I am academic settings. (More than one person even suggested that I go to a dialect coach to learn how to speak with a more neutral accent while I was doing internships in a church and a retirement home.) Seeing someone have to work twice as hard in order to get the same level of respect as other colleagues really does hit close to home when others do the same thing (and this is the same reason why so many West Virginians feel a sense of pride when someone else from a state of 1.8 million people breaks big on the national and international stage).

Continuing on the Course

Something that every runner knows is the importance of continuing on the course. There has often been a rivalry between distance runners and sprinters, because many of us have felt that they tend to get the glory, but speed comes far more from natural talent while our ability comes far more from effort. However, this movie shows just how each of the sprinters work extremely hard (and, for Abrahams, in ways that were frowned upon by many of the advocates of British amateurism) in order to harness their talent to the greatest extent possible. The biggest example of the determination in the film comes not from the training montage, but from this scene where Liddell is in a 440 yard race in Scotland:

However, such determination is not the sole province of the two leads (or the hero and the anti-hero, as it were), but from the third character in the movie, Aubrey Montague. He was a distance runner who made it to the Olympics in the 3000 meter Steeplechase. For those of you not familiar with the Steeplechase, it is a race with several jumps, including one jump every lap over a water obstacle. At the time the movie takes place, runners tend to jump over the obstacles, but today, runners tend to step on them. Unlike the others, Montague is not destined for fame, and he falls in the race, but he ultimately completes the race in fifth place; not worthy of a medal, but something that those of us at the middle and back of the pack can respect.

When listening to the commentary, the director noted that Montague is like most of us, because very few people get their moment in the sun on the world stage (or, as one of the chapter cards says in the movie Endurance, “a thousand others, all with the same dream”). However, it is in the fight and drive to be the best that they can be that those not at the front of the pack end up leaving their mark.

How has determination helped you in life?

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