The Runners

[El Gordo]

Good spot, MD, thanks. I tried the Guardian Running Blog for a while but found it a bit dull. This item is much better.

Beyond the act of running, races always strike me as great raw material for film. Glaconman's talented wife has done this sort of thing pretty well, as we've seen. When I used to do those small, local 10K races in rural Berkshire I was always struck by their filmability. That mixture of athletic endeavour and Women's Institute-style bustling organisation to ensure everyone had safety pins and the chance of a nice cup of tea at the finish line. It was weird; I would wander through those events, from arrival to departure (and the race in between), with a sort of imaginary camera strapped to my forehead, picking up on all those tiny incidents that a skilled editor could stitch together. My role was to provide the droll voiceover, of course.

It's always the small local races that seem to offer richer raw material, not the big city marathons. Same idea as the runners shown in this short film. It's the very ordinariness of the runners that makes them interesting.