As I have been marathon training, the TikTok algorithm tends to know what’s up and shared this video with me by Ali Gallop about the London marathon. It is 3:31 long, and I encourage you to watch the whole thing.
@thealigallop Marathons aren’t about running. #londonmarathon #weruntogether #humanenergy ♬ original sound – Ali Gallop
It brought me to tears…
And not only because of my impending marathon.
But because I thought about schools while watching the video.
Here is the transcript of what Ari said in the video. As you read it, the connection to education is pretty evident:
“This might sound strange, but for the first 35 years of my life, I thought the Marathon was about running.
When I was a kid, it was just this sports event that was on TV.
I just thought it was this thing for people that like running a really long way.
But that changed 5 years ago in 2018, when, it sounds stupid, but quite simply, I went for a walk. I lived like 10 minutes from Tower Bridge, and I remember a few streets away, I could kind of hear this sound. As you come around the corner to this piece of road that I’ve seen thousands of times straight away, and just realized exactly what this Marathon is all about.
The moment you get to the side of that road, you see that every single one of these 58,000 runners is running for something or someone else.
Maybe someone else that’s fighting a battle.
Maybe it’s a battle that they’ve been fighting themselves.
Or, a lot of the time, in remembrance of someone.
That lost that battle.
Then you realize that the whole way along, the whole of the 26 miles, there’s a crew for every single one of those people.
And that their friends, their family, know exactly why that person is running.
They know why it’s important, they know why it’s special. So after hours of waiting, they see that person coming.
Up this road, from however far away, they just start to emit the most insanely beautiful amount of human energy.
And what happens next is even more crazy, even more special, because the people next to the crew, can’t help but join in.
It’s infectious.
This energy is infectious.
And before you know it, you’ve got a million people lining the streets of London, cheering for complete strangers.”
Ari Gallop
A few easy connections to school here…
School is a marathon, not a sprint. And with marathons, there are ups and downs, and times where you don’t know if you can make it through the obstacles. Yet so many persevere.
Why?
Because they are often not just running it for themselves.
As a kid, school was important to me because it was important to my parents who saw education as a way to a better life than what they had growing up. They didn’t have the chance to “complete” the marathon, which made it all the more important for their kids to not only get into the race but have the chance to finish it.
The school experience is often more than the hopes of the student; it is also the dreams of their family.
As it is for many teachers who entered the profession to be a part of something bigger themselves. Many educators are not only cheering their students from the sidelines but are often doing so while running their own race.
And if this story is told outside of the walls of our schools, can we bring in that same “infectious” energy for education? To realize behind every student and every teacher is a “crew” cheering them on. We are all somebody’s kid.
And it is the last caption that is written, but not said, really brought it home for me.
If we did that, in and out of education, the world would be a better place.
As many of you are finishing your “race” for the year, or maybe even longer, I encourage you to watch the video. There’s a bigger message here that applies to much more than a marathon.
