The definition of insanity? 5,649 laps of a single NYC block.
I speak to Sanjay Rawal, director of 3100: Run and Become, one of my favorite films about running.
I watched 3100: Run and Become again back in September. It’s one of my favorite films about running. It might be the only film about running that I truly enjoy. With a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I daresay I’m not the only one.
It begins by scanning what are likely New Yorkers cavorting in the street. It immediately feels like summer, and that’s confirmed by the news audio that’s overlaid, warning residents not to exert themselves in peak summer heat. The camera cuts to a runner.
Run and Become is centered around The Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race, which takes place around a single 0.56-mile city block that houses a high school in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, but it’s so much more than that.
This film is about what it takes to be an endurance runner when the course is painfully repetitive, taking in four 90-degree turns over 100 times a day for up to 52 days. This is not a ‘simple’ 200-miler, after all. This tests one’s endurance of mind as you do the same thing in the same place with the same people over and over and over again.
It would be the definition of insanity, but nobody is expecting different results.
I thought I’d look up the director, and sent a speculative email searching for Sanjay Rawal. I got a reply, so I suggested we meet when I visited New York in November. Sanjay asked if I’d come to Queens from where I was staying in Brooklyn. He said he knew a spot.
We’d have lunch at Smile of the Beyond, New York’s first vegetarian diner, formed in 1972 by students of Sri Chinmoy, the Bengali1 spiritual leader who founded the 3100 Mile Race. Situated less than a mile from that block that a few hopeful humans run around every year, this short trip was something of a pilgrimage for me.
