The solitude is real, but Sheehan notes the invaluable gift of community in running. He writes, “For me, no time passes faster than when running with a companion.” This is perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned about myself in the past couple years.

Running led him to the insight: “compared to what I ought to be, I am only half awake.” The experience he writes about here echoes the experience of self discovery we can have in the work of recovery. Free of the numbing and needy constraints of our delusional solution, we’re finally free to feel, to think and to look at those thoughts and feelings as messages for us to do with as we will. 

Watching film for him wasn’t just looking back on good or bad times; it was a serious analysis of his timing and movements, a return to a past performance with a clearer and more removed perspective than he had in the moment of play so that he might learn from it.

As prophets in their own way, Abrahams and Montague witness and testify to the power in running a straight race, a phrase we hear from Liddell in one of his sermons in the film. Liddell tells his audience of the similarities between running and faith, and we see these parallels lived in real time in the lives of Liddell, Abrahams, Lindsay and Montague. Each in his own way serves not only as an ambassador of England to the Paris Olympics, but also as a prophet of the truths of life as enacted in running.

“The music of a marathon is a powerful strain, one of those tunes of glory. It asks us to forsake pleasures, to discipline the body, to find courage, to renew faith and to become one's own person, utterly and completely.” - George Sheehan

We don’t like pain or difficulty, but they’re part of life. We have to believe they’re part of a plan greater than we can orchestrate if we’re going to find the way forward, and we can’t do that alone.