I don't often do movie reviews unless someone specifically asks for my thoughts on a movie. There are so many people who are better than I at distilling the worth of a film that I don't find it worth my time. Having found a very niche movie that I love makes it worth my time.
Hood To Coast is a documentary about the relay race of the same name. It follows four of the 1250 teams, each of them with a very different reason for running and each giving us a very real reason to be moved. Honestly, two of the more moving real moment only come across in deleted scenes, so the filmmakers dropped the ball a bit there...but I'll get to that.
The first team we meet is Dead Jocks, these guys are all struggling with the reality of advancing age sapping their athleticism. Jim, their team captain has a lot of interesting insights on running, aging and this race in particular. He pretty much sums up the draw of these epic relay races: "On your own, you can't do 'epic' but with a team of 12 people...you can do anything." In the DVD features you find out that after taking a year off, Jim failed to qualify for the team and has since pretty much given up running... age won.
The next team we meet is Heart n Sole. Their story centers around Kathy, the ultimate survivor. The previous year, this veteran of 75 marathons collapsed dead on the course. Since CPR was administered very quickly, she was dead and got better. This is her comeback on the course that killed her once. She struggles to balance her new limitations, the concerns of her team, her passion for running and her doctor's advice. The most profound scene regarding them was cut from the movie. It's an interview with her son. He's a grown man and as he discusses his mom, what happened and how he feels about her going back to the race. When he starts talking about the possibility of her having to give up running he breaks a bit. I've never seen pure love exhibited so plainly before. This young man has made peace with the idea of his mom dying but he grieves at the notion of her no longer being able to do the thing she loves.
Team R-Bowe is the most emotionally charged of the teams. This team formed out of the friends and family of a life long runner who died from a heart defect at the age of 30. Watching his widow and his mother in particular dealing with the still raw wounds is a bit painful. They are running for some peace. They want to know more of his spirit and be involved with another aspect of his life and celebrate it with his friends. Theirs is a moving story as you watch them search for and ultimately find what they need as exhaustion and pride replace grief.
The last team we meet is Thunder N' Laikaning..and make no mistake they are the stars. This team is a bunch of co-workers at an animation shop who are running the race. Two of them are decidedly not runners but are doing it for the experience. Following these two captured an amazing moment...we get to see a runner being born. Rachel not only grossly underestimates the effort involved but managed to volunteer for the second most difficult leg of the entire race. Grossly under trained she finds the courage to conquer a horribly brutal leg of this race and as she passes the chip, her face is aglow and she tells the camera: "Dude...it was awesome. It was completely the weirdest, coolest experience... It was FUCKING awesome. It was BRUTAL, it was so hard but...it's totally indescribable." She's still grinning, ear to ear as she gets back in the van and you know that a runner was just born. It's no shock at all in the "where are they now" feature that you find she's currently training for her first marathon.
All in all, this is a very well done documentary and I think anyone would find the very human stories to be interesting. If you are a runner... you will be utterly sucked in and find yourself looking for an adventure relay race near you or a ticket to Mount Hood.
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