I love sports movies.
Challengers, Bull Durham, Cool Runnings, Chariots of Fire, Rocky.
My favorite part of a sports movie? The training montage.
You know, the exactly four minutes in Rocky that feature the titular character jogging up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in (dear God) a cotton sweatsuit?
I love the training montage because of how deftly it collapses the hard work of being an athlete into a few slickly soundtracked frames. Rocky’s runtime is 120 minutes, making the training montage exactly 3.36% of the movie’s content. A more accurate depiction of an athlete’s life would likely be the inverse: 117 minutes of training and four minutes of glory.
This tension is captured perfectly in one of my favorite songs, “Training Montage” by the Mountain Goats.
It feels like it takes forever. It’s maybe five minutes on-screen.
A lot of times, that’s what training feels like to me. 117 minutes of running through the streets of Philadelphia, doing one-armed push-ups (I wish), and training on the heavy bag, all under the soaring notes of Bill Conti’s Gonna Fly Now. All for just four minutes in the ring.
I love a training montage because it lets you indulge in the fantasy of an effortless breakthrough. It lets you experience the security of a narrative arc, a hero’s journey, with just a few seconds of effort.
But, real life isn’t a movie. There’s no guarantee of payoff. No showdown in the ring. It’s just you, and the trail, or the track, or (God forbid) the treadmill. And whatever meaning (and soundtrack) you bring to it.
Life is all about learning to live in the montage. It’s about finding joy in the in-between moments that aren’t exciting or sexy and probably don’t need an instrumental version of Eye of the Tiger to spice it up.
Training, especially for ultras, becomes a whole lot easier and a whole lot more joyful if you really just love running up those museum steps (would Rocky have been a killer uphill runner?) and if you make friends with the heavy bag. Getting better at running requires one hundred tiny shifts that aren’t particularly heroic: imagine a Rocky-style montage of subtle glute activation exercises or hiking up a hill to bring your heart rate down.
It’s easy to romanticize the montage when you’re not in it. We all love the idea of hard work until you’re actually faced with the sheer number of miles, and gels, and calf raises that it usually entails. The types of transformations that make a movie meaningful tend to take years, and years, and years in real life. All those proverbial laps around Philadelphia, or pushups, or whatever it is that your training montage consists of, make those four minutes in the ring all the more meaningful.
Will it be worth it? Hard to say. But at least you’ll get a killer montage.
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