I added Just. One. Mile. to my watchlist after podcaster Jeff Cannata gushed about it emotionally on The Filmcast. There it sat for a year until it qualified as the least watched movie in my list. Which is a little sad but, hey, something’s always gotta be in last place.

The documentary is about one hundred runners who enter the Mid-State Mile… an endurance race for the certifiably athletic. The goal… run one mile in 20 minutes or get cut. Then keep doing it over and over again for days until there’s one athlete standing.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. Here I was vegging out in front of my big screen, eating a quickie cheese sandwich for lunch as these guys run for 12 hours, 24 hours, 36 hours straight. I managed to keep my recliner from flying up into the sky by sitting on it while they ran two+ marathons, day and night with only short 20 minute breaks every 12 hours. 12 HOURS?!

It’s a good doc about a good group of people doing the incomprehensible. It follow five or six of them closely as they run, some of them going through life-changing events, some just accountants out to prove themselves.

But mainly it follows Chadd… a giga-beard who looks scarily like Forrest Gump running across the country. Chadd is… well, Chadd’s a lot. He’s a talker… and he’s weirdly intense to the point I just wanted to tell him to chill the f out. At which point this former Navy Seal would pulverize me and then do the running man on my corpse for 36 hours straight.

But, yeah, he can be a bit of a detriment to the doc since he’s so focused and intense… and egotistical. So intense, so borderline, so able to run forever and brag about it to the camera like it was no big deal. He’s both the hero and the villain of the movie.

This is a fun and exhausting doc that shouldn’t work since it’s about just one mile… yet it does. Sometimes the human body and spirit can do a lot and that’s worth noticing. Me? I’m all out of cheese and need to run to the grocery store.

Score: 86