When he first started ultra running, Martin Johnson, or MJ, was often the only Black runner on the start line. Covering almost superhuman distances, ultramarathons span any length longer than a marathon’s 26.2 miles. MJ has been working to bring greater representation to the sport, and helped form the group Black Trail Runners in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police in 2020.
In Run to the Source, filmmaker Matt Kay follows MJ as he attempts a feat of extreme human endurance. The challenge is to run the 184 miles from the mouth of the Thames in London, to the source in Oxford – all while beating the fastest known time (FKT) of 40 hours and 47 minutes.
Setting off on the first anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, MJ is running for, in Kay’s words, “something greater” than his own personal achievement. Kay’s documentary speaks to this: splicing archival footage alongside MJ’s run, he seeks to rewrite the narrative of Black people in Britain and explore the lack of representation in the country’s rural spaces.
In the film, Kay tells the “hidden histories” of the Thames colonial past, using the river to thread different stories together. As we follow MJ on his journey to the source, a three-part poem from Safiya Sinclair, narrated by Adjoah Andoh, talks of the people that came to Britain on the tide of the river – from slaves to the Windrush generation.
Run To The Source also provides a portrait of MJ the man. His family come into his training practice, as we see him pushing his son Ned in a pram while running along the Thames path. As he travels from the heart of the city into the Oxford countryside, we see not only the physical brutality of running 184 miles in less than three days, but also the human struggle. In the following interview, Kay shares how he went about documenting it.
When Patagonia approached you to make this film, why did you say yes? I knew very little about ultra running or trail running beforehand, but associated a marathon as being a really long distance – let alone these runs of 50 miles, 100 Miles, or in MJ’s case, 184 miles. So it was a combination of this amazing feat that he was trying to accomplish, but then also trying to shed light on an issue that I also try to shed light on within my work.
What were your main influences making the film? When I first started making it, I thought of the film like Free Solo meets I Am Not Your Negro. Free Solo [depicts] another amazing feat – climbing without any harnesses, so very dangerous. I Am Not Your Negro is a film about James Baldwin which also uses archival footage in a very interesting
