Educational Media Reviews Online

In 2010 high school runner Holland Reynolds captured the imagination of the American public by battling severe dehydration and mild hypothermia to crawl across the finish line of the California state cross-country championship race to win a record-breaking eighth championship for her coach Jim Tracy, who had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) earlier that year. Her story was featured in both the New York Times and on ESPN, and was used by NFL head coach Tom Coughlin to inspire his New York Giants team during their run to the Super Bowl two years later. Where did she find the strength to, as per Coughlin’s one-word summary of her story, “finish”? How did her coach forge such a strong bond with his team?

Running for Jim sets out to answer these questions. The opening and the twenty minute-long biographical section which follows are well-paced, skillfully blending professional-looking dramatizations, running scenes, and on-location interviews with period photographs and archival footage to paint a portrait of Tracy as a man for whom running was a way of life. They chart his growth from a barefoot child who could beat all of his peers in any race longer than half-mile to a self-described “professional runner” who never made much more than $4,000 in a year, but was nonetheless content to drift from odd job to odd job and live out of his car while he spent more time running than working, until he finally found his calling as the cross-country and track coach at University High School in San Francisco.

At this point, unfortunately, the film misses an opportunity to delve into what made Tracy successful as a coach. Although it does capture the essence of his coaching philosophy through interviews with his current and former runners (“we run farther than we race, so the race feels short, and we run faster than we race, so the race feels easy”) it mostly glosses over his first fifteen years at University, opting instead to skip ahead to the mid-2000s when his health began to decline. The final two-thirds of the film cut back and forth between vignettes from Tracy’s life with ALS and brief profiles of Dr. Richard K. Olney, a prominent ALS researcher who was himself diagnosed with the disease, and Corey Reich, an ambassador for Young Faces of ALS, an organization for people living with ALS who were diagnosed before age 35, before ending with a more detailed account of the state championship race it began with.

The benefit of this approach is that it is establishes how hard the immobility which accompanies ALS must have been for Tracy, who ran at least ten miles “nearly every day of his life.” Even more impressively, it parlays this into a sense of what a tragedy ALS is generally. The profiles of Olney and Reich drive home the film’s message that the disease strikes randomly, occurs earlier in life than most people realize, and can kill at any time, and a scene in which Tracy watches Lou Gehrig (the individual person most associated with ALS, which is also known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease”) give his famous farewell speech at Yankee stadium conveys wonderment that more than 70 years could have passed between Gehrig’s diagnosis and Tracy’s without a cure being found.

The drawback is that the film ultimately tries to be too many things for its own good. It’s undeniably moving, as its many festival awards attest, but it’s hard to imagine how it would fit into an educational media collection: it doesn’t explore why we haven’t found a cure for ALS yet, for instance, which limits its effectiveness as a social-issue documentary, and although as a running film (movies about runners are rare enough; movies about their coaches are virtually unheard of) it has some appeal as a curiosity, it never penetrates very deeply into what a cross-country coach actually does and what made Jim Tracy so good at the job. As such, Running for Jim probably has greatest value to collections serving populations of people who have been diagnosed with ALS and their families as a model of how to remain active and positive in the face of such a devastating disease.

Awards

• Best Documentary Film, Soho International Film Festival 2013
• Best Film Character, International Festival of Sports Film, Krasnogorsky, Moscow, 2013
• Audience Choice Award, Tiburon International Film Festival, 2013
• Audience Choice Award, San Francisco Independent DocFest, 2013
• Best Documentary Feature, All Sports Los Angeles Film Festival, 2013
• Audience Award, Big Bear Lake International Film Festival, 2013
• Festival Prize, Central Florida Film Festival, 2013
• Audience Choice Award, White Sands International Film Festival, 2013