Hi Kal-- Thanks for the question. I think the question here is one about orientation. I don't mean to suggest athletics as a means to political possibility directly, simply that sport is most often imaged in our culture as a celebration of victory and/or virtuosity. What is lost is the sacrifice, training, and discipline needed to accomplish goals. What is interesting about this film is how it places emphasis on labor, and how that labor produces results. Although the post above is limited in its length/scope, what I find interesting about endurance as a result of this labor, here using athletics as a means to think this idea through the images provided, is how this conception can help us understand that bodies are often seen as a point of orientation in the world. Orientations, I think, are about how we begin to act, how we proceed from this moment, this place. The starting point as it concerns this athletes is the place from which they understand their bodies in the world: the “here” of the body, and the “what” of its will to act. By reading the images that appear in this film, we get a sense of how being is directed towards some objects and not others involves a more general orientation within the world. That is, what you come into contact with is shaped by what you do: bodies are orientated when they are occupied in time and space. What comes into view, or what is within our horizon, is not a matter of what we find here or there, or even where we find ourselves, as we move here, or there. What is reachable is determined precisely by orientations we have already taken. Or we could say that orientations are about the directions we take that put some things and not others in our reach. I want to suggest that thinking about this relationship, which seems to me so apparent in endeavors like athletics, can help us think politically when we so often seem to think otherwise. In other words, we can orient ourselves toward new conceptions of possibility like these athletes have oriented themselves to winning Olympic gold through their training, which opens that goal as a possibility in this clip.

Hi Elena--thanks for looking at my post, I'll try my best to respond. For me, training must first be understood as separate from performance. Images of sport interest me almost solely for how they deny the spectator the opportunity to witness the labor involved leading up to the performance. Training, therefore, is a specific set of acts that work together for the purposes of a goal. It is, in other words, a way of building a virtual capacity to be actualized at the right time. Here, temporality is crucial, as you suggest, because the body serves as an aggregation of its training. We can think of this almost as an embodied duree, each training session creates a bodily/mental adaptation advancing toward a threshold for peak performance. The injuries imaged here I don't see as failures so much as a process. Injuries almost always occur when the individual's threshold is crossed too severely or too often. That is, their body was not able to support the training, and this in turn must alter the planned training moving forward. The delicate balance between these two, injury and optimum performance, serves as an interesting lesson for achievement. Largely this is the case because it places an emphasis on preparation and labor for a concentrated goal. And, it suggests that a body oriented--to get to your first question--through training can will itself to perform. Often I think the first half of this equation is neglected, we want quantifiable outcomes without having to put in the countless hours of labor that go unnoticed in preparation. The body of track athletes I don't think serve politics, they serve the sport they train to compete in. But this doesn't mean that training to act is relegated to sport. Rather, I think there needs to be considerable thought put into how we train ourselves to act politically, to will ourselves to action. The subject needed for politics might be "ungainly" for track and field, but why would they be held to that standard? It wouldn't make much sense to train to run, jump, or throw if your goal was to change policy, or bring social injustice to light. That would entail an entirely different type of training altogether. This film though puts emphasis on the difficulty of training, the failures and long process it takes to prepare oneself to act, to cultivate a will to action. For me, this is a a thought worth thinking about.