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Everyone Needs a Running Coach

By on August 24th, 2011 0 Comments

By Vanessa Wells

I saw Life in a Day last night (http://www.youtube.com/user/lifeinaday). This is an extraordinary movie and one of historical significance. In publishing and in advertising, we constantly hear the buzz phrase “user generated content.” As customers become advertisers and as ordinary people increasingly become the focal point of extraordinary stories, the field of broadcasting is leveled so to speak. All of these thoughts swirled in my mind as I experienced Life in a Day last night.

For those who don’t know, here is the premise of Life in a Day. National Geographic and YouTube present a film directed by Kevin McDonald and produced by Ridley Scott. Life in a Day is the story of one day on earth. The thing about the film that’s so revolutionary is that it is filmed by you. User generated content has hit the big screen in an unprecedented manner.

So how do you digest a nonlinear film by the universal collective? It’s delivered in snippets, it’s disjointed, it’s uncanny but it works. As I sat in the movie theater alone watching everyone, it was a feeling I had never really experienced before. As human beings, we tend to think of ourselves as center stage with the world happening around us. This movie flips that. We’re in the dark theater; everyone else is on screen. The film is linear on some levels in that it covers a day from start to finish; it also grapples with life and death – birth in the morning and end of life toward dusk. I think violence and war are covered sometime around six o’clock in the evening; right around the time we settle in for the evening news. Throughout the movie, the pulse of humanity is almost rhythmic – this idea that in some ways our routines are automatic, primal and the stuff of mammals.

In the end, what I took away from a movie I will one day own is this: Everyone needs a running coach. One of the stories that struck me within this movie was a snippet of a cyclist from Korea who had spent more than nine years traveling the world on his bicycle. He had visited more than 190 countries and been hit by cars six times, five times resulting in surgery. While that’s an impressive feat, his extraordinariness didn’t strike me. What struck me was that he reminded me of my running coach. Everyone needs a running coach. Mine was Paul McRae. Two years ago, Paul took me from never running a mile to running 9.3 miles in six weeks. Paul’s a source of inspiration but he’s ordinary in that inspiration; someone who quietly changes the lives of so many around him through something as simple as running. Paul is the type of person who seems to inspire many of the people he comes in contact with and that quality is what I immediately saw in the cyclist. There is something beautiful there.

I think of all the people who’ve inspired me; who’ve been my running coach. I think of all of the people who I may have inspired. Then I think of everyone else. All of the people I’ve never reached and all the people who’ve never reached me. With this shift in broadcasting, we are closer to finding a connection. Life in a Day captures something everyone is experiencing right now. It chronicles the cultural shift humanity is experiencing at this very moment. And it does it humbly and makes you think.