3100: Run and Become - the documentary that films running as an inner journey

There is a race whose ranking interests no one. No official world record, no sponsors, no race bib shining under the spotlights. Just runners going round and round, day after day, around the same city block in Queens, New York, for fifty-two days. It is this race—the longest certified footrace in the world—that the 2018 documentary 3100: Run and Become, filmed by Sanjay Rawal, captures.

A 3100-mile race, or 5,649 laps around a city block

The concept can be summarized in one dizzying sentence: cover 3,100 miles (nearly 5,000 km) by running about 100 km per day, for 52 consecutive days, on an urban circuit consisting of a single city block. The race is officially called the Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race, organized every summer in New York since 1997 by the disciples of spiritual philosopher Sri Chinmoy, for whom running could be a path to inner transcendence—the "self-transcendence" of the title.

The film follows two figures who seem like total opposites: Ashprihanal Aalto, a Finnish mailman and the event's record holder with fourteen participations, and Shamita Achenbach-König, an Austrian cellist entering for the first time. Through them, Sanjay Rawal does not seek athletic performance but rather the question that precedes it: why, exactly, do we run when the distance exceeds everything the body is supposed to endure?

Three cultures, one single quest

What distinguishes Run and Become from a simple sports film is its detour into other traditions of running. The documentary travels to film the San hunters of the Kalahari in Botswana, who still practice persistence hunting—chasing an animal to exhaustion, over several hours, through pure endurance. It also follows the monk-runners of Mount Hiei in Japan, who perform the kaihōgyō: a thousand days of ritual running spread over seven years, a Buddhist practice where running becomes a form of prayer. And it traverses the Arizona deserts with Navajo runners, for whom running has always been a sacred act before being a discipline.

This common thread—running as a spiritual experience rather than a stopwatch exercise—is precisely what brings this film closer to the Spiridon sensibility. Since the origins of free running, without bibs or rankings, the idea has never been to run against others but to run for oneself, to feel, and to endure. 3100: Run and Become films this idea on the scale of entire cultures, far from podiums and finish times.

Why this film is worth your time

One might see the 5,649 laps around a city block as an absurd stunt, or conversely, as a perfect metaphor for what many runners feel over much more modest distances: beyond a certain mileage, running ceases to be a matter of legs and becomes a matter of spirit. The film never chooses between athletic feat and mystical experience—it lets both coexist, which is what makes it a rare find in the (still limited) landscape of running documentaries.

3100: Run and Become (2018, directed by Sanjay Rawal, approximately 1h 22m) is available to rent or purchase via VOD on international platforms such as Apple TV or Amazon Prime Video. It did not have a theatrical release in France, but the film remains accessible in its original version with subtitles on any on-demand streaming platform.

To further explore this reflection on the history and philosophy of free running, our article Free to Run traces fifty years of this same quest, on the Western side this time. And for runners who want to dig deeper into the subject on paper, our selection of running and trail books gathers other accounts that pose the same question: why do we run?

Franck Tuil - Author - Running culture specialist