How a 358-mile FKT was a 'journey of becoming' for mental health advocate Kim Levinsky
A new documentary from filmmaker Shai Ben-Dor covers Kim's incredible journey across New York State's Long Path
“It’s a running film that’s not really about running.”
Kim Levinsky is talking about ‘The Long Path, A Journey of Becoming,’ a documentary charting her - successful - attempt to set a Fastest Known Time (FKT) for a supported woman across New York State’s 358-mile Long Path.
While the physical accomplishment at the heart of Kim’s story is celebrated in the film, it is ultimately an exploration of mental health and being open about adversity.
In covering Kim’s 2023’s Long Path journey, a route which runs from Albany to New York City, the documentary delves into how it is human nature to pretend everything is ok in times of struggle.
It reveals how she went from reluctantly starting therapy to becoming a mental health advocate in her community.
Kim’s running journey started in 2010, but it wasn’t until 2017 that she ran her first trail race, the Mayapple in Milburn, New Jersey. It was when races stopped during the coronavirus pandemic, that she started to open up about her own mental health experience.
Having struggled with depression on and off for most of her life, Kim found solace in therapy. As Covid hit, she began to share details of her struggles, advocating for mental health wellness and working to create spaces where people could feel seen, heard and supported.
By that point, Kim had already formed Sassquad Trail Running in 2018. Having started as a grassroots event, it has grown into a full calendar of trail parties ranging from 5k to 100 miles, with each run sharing the over-arching mission of welcoming all people, paces and ages.
Her next goal became The Long Path.
◾ FURTHER READING: Taking the Long Path to success: How Kim Levinsky set an FKT on 358-mile route
◾BLACK FRIDAY DEALS: Path Projects offer some of the best running gear in the business, and today you can get up to 40% off in their Black Friday sale. Visit Path Projects via this link and back Running Tales in the process (affiliate link).
Vulnerability at the heart of an incredible challenge:
Passing through a wide variety of often brutal terrain, The Long Path takes in woods, a series of 2,900-foot peaks, and trails that pass over lakes and streams. It weaves its ways through both the Shawangunk and Catskills mountains, with parts of the trail being extremely technical.
Kim called the route “an incredibly diverse trail,” containing gnarly terrain in the Catskills, breathtaking views through the Shawangunk Mountains, and finishing with a run over the George Washington Bridge.
She described that final push into New York as “some whiplash after being on the trails for several hundred miles”.
Not only was the run an extreme personal challenge, Kim used it to raise vital funds for two charities close to her heart: Bigger Than The Trail, which uses trail running as a platform to advocate for mental health, and the New York/New Jersey Trail Conference.
It was a chance encounter with filmmaker Shai Ben-Dor that resulted in the challenge becoming a documentary.
An award-winning director, cinematographer and editor specialising in films about the human spirit and community, Shai was drawn to Kim’s story.
The pair met during the filming of another of Shai’s documentaries, the story of ultra runner Michael Ortiz who completed one hundred 100-milers in 100 consecutive weeks during a challenge dubbed the ‘Game of Hundos’.
Kim had been present at the end of the final leg and they had started chatting about her own extreme goal.
“I was attracted to Kim’s story because of her vulnerability and her talking about her mental health publicly through Sassquad for a number of years,” Shai told the Running Tales Podcast.
“It was very important for me to understand Kim’s boundaries, where she wanted to go, where she didn’t want to go.
“These massive scale FKTs and long distance runs are such a special mental headspace for those who are involved. To be a part of that, I needed to know where the boundaries were.”
The Long Path that never ends:
Along with producer Seamus Murphy, Shai accompanied Kim for the whole of the run, a decision she said left “no room for imagination on how tough it was”.
She added: “We had over eight inches of rain throughout the nine-and-a-half days, and the trails just really took a beating.
“There are trails in Harriman State Park that are still damaged from that. The film really captures everything that happened out there. Shai has described the weather as its own character within the film, which I think is pretty accurate.”
The Long Path route experienced record levels of rainfall during Kim’s FKT attempt, which almost brought the whole run to a premature end.
Storms and extreme rain meant many of the trails in Harriman State Park were closed, with some becoming little more than waterfalls. Ultimately, Kim had to get special permission from the New York/New Jersey Trail Conference to continue.
Not only was the extreme weather a challenge for Kim, it became one of a host of things Shai and Seamus had to contend with.
Part of Shai’s attraction to the project had been that he’d grown up on the route of the Long Path. It meant he had spent time both as a child and an adult exploring the wilderness it passes through.
That knowledge helped him to “build out a map of the places that uniquely represent the areas Kim was going to pass through”.
Despite that, he still relied heavily on a variety of cameras - including a trail camera and even his mobile phone - and had to walk eight to ten miles every day to get the footage he needed.
“The Catskills are these giant plateaus that are densely forested on top,” he said.
“When Kim talks about running through the mountains for 100 miles, you think of these beautiful vistas and pointy barren mountaintops.
“But it’s not like that. You’re in this dense forest and then you go up 3,000ft and you’re in another dense forest. There are three or four major viewpoints in the Catskills, it was important to catch her at those.”
That plan didn’t always work out perfectly, leaving Shai with images of those peaks without Kim there - “she was 10 miles away and I didn’t see her” - coupled with separate footage in which she would be talking about “how beautiful this place is and how incredible it was”.
It was one reason why the film took more than a year to put together in the edit. Another was Shai’s quest to find the balance between making a documentary about running and one about mental health issues.
Watch ‘The Long Path, A Journey of Becoming’:
You can watch ‘The Long Path, A Journey of Becoming’ and find out more about the documentary by visiting www.thelongpathfilm.com
From there you can download the film for just $3.58 - it may seem an odd price, but it’s significant as it represents a cost of $0.01 for every mile Kim covered on the 358-mile Long Path.
It’s a fantastic film and I highly recommend it. Check out the trailer below:
He said: “I liked the metaphor of the Long Path as a road that doesn’t end. There is no completing it, but you learn how to handle the struggles along the way.
“We always had a concept of what we wanted the film to be, but we couldn’t have known what we were going run into. Because of how disjointed what we actually got was, it took about a year-and-a-half in editing to have those two stories lay into each other really nicely.
“We bounced back and forth between an artistic mental health film that left the ultra marathon stuff in the dust. And then things got very detail oriented and ‘ultra marathony’ but we lost a little bit of the mental health stuff.
“For us it was finding that balance, where it was a journey and you couldn’t zone out while it was happening, but you could feel and place your own experiences in life and inlay them with Kim’s.
“Kim shows a lot of vulnerability. But we did a really careful job. It’s not a trauma laden film. It’s not, ‘oh my God, these are the dark things that happened in Kim’s life and she persevered’.
“It was about the processes she went through to get from a dark place and the support she had that allowed her to do that exploration. Our friends, at their core, are people who make us feel safe and comfortable, regardless of what we’re doing physically and otherwise.
“When you boil the film down, it’s a friend - one person - going through something very hard and her friends, joining her, and helping along the way. Kim did every step herself, but she didn’t really do any step alone.”
‘Observational, not intrusive’:
The friendship Kim and Shai developed during the project was essential to making sure she remained comfortable with what was being filmed, particularly at a time when the stresses of running a 358-mile challenge were also present.
“It really came down to having a really great relationship with him,” Kim said. “We’ve become close friends through this whole process.
“The underlying thing was the trust I had with Shai and the producer, Seamus. There were many talks before the film, before any cameras started rolling around what I was comfortable with, and what my expectations were.
“When we were out there, there was really very, very minimal interaction between me and the cameras during the actual FKT. I really only remember Shai asking one direct question. I think it was at the finish line, something like ‘how are you feeling?’
“Other than that, it was him and Seamus, moving around, taking video. But, to be honest, after the first half a day, I didn’t even notice those two. They really, truly, became a part of our crew.”
Shai said the aim of the film was observational rather than intrusive, although as the challenge unfolded Kim increasingly broke the fourth wall with the camera crew: “At the end of the first day she went around, saying ‘you’re supposed to be invisible’ but on day eight, she was screaming ‘Long Path’ and high-fiving the camera.”
One of his favourite parts of putting the film together was pairing big, panoramic shots with an “absolute pile of cell phone videos from the crew”.
“So much of the story is actually told through those little cell phone snippets,” he said. “It’s what makes you feel like you’re a part of the crew, stuck at the RV.
“It’s a totally different feeling running these long distances and crewing them. When you’re running X amount of miles, you’re on this adventure, in a shrunken headspace. Then there are the people who care about us.
“For them, the runner is so far away and they only ate two gummy bears before they went out there. These people are so worried. To have those simultaneous things was exciting.”
Are the answers to life’s questions on the trails?
One underlying message of the film is that while doing hard things and challenging yourself physically can help address mental health problems, it is not a complete answer in and of themselves.
Throughout, Kim talks about the benefits therapy has provided her and how running is just one part of her journey.
There is a particular scene when one of Kim’s crew members turns to her and questions if she would find what she was really searching for in the depths of the Long Path.
“The name of the film comes from that scene,” Kim said. “That was something I was processing for a couple of hundred miles.”
For Shai, filming ‘The Long Path, A Journey of Becoming’ also provided a window into his past and personal mental health challenges.
“I grew up with fairly severe anxiety,” he said. “I learned to hide it really well. For the longest time, I thought there was something wrong with me.
“If I’d have had someone to have that conversation with, to say this is what X, Y and Z is, and these are some of the feelings you can experience, that would have made a big difference.
“In my household growing up, mental health wasn’t a priority. You kind of grin and bear it, you get through it.”
“This project has changed my life for the better in so many ways and forced me to be more vulnerable,” Shai added. “There was no hiding how tied and rooted this project was in my life and where I came from.
“Visually it’s a love letter to the area I grew up in. When you say you’re from New York, people imagine Manhattan and at the time I was living in Brooklyn. I had been there for six years, so this was like travelling through my childhood in some strange way.”
Kim’s final message, meanwhile, is that while it may not be the complete answer, exercise is a fantastic tool when it comes to people’s mental health - and you don’t have to run across New York State to do something life-changing.
“People can experience the transformational aspects of ultra running by doing a 5k or by starting their running journey and crossing their first finish line,” she told Running Tales.
“It doesn’t even have to be a race. It could just be going out, starting to walk by yourself, and walking a mile when you’ve never walked a mile before.
“It’s about seeing what you can do to change as a person. It’s really cool and it is relative. Even though I know 360 miles is very extreme, I do think people can find that in their own spaces and places.”
◾You can watch ‘The Long Path, A Journey of Becoming’ here. It costs just $3.58 to buy, with the price set at $0.01 for every mile of the Long Path.
◾BLACK FRIDAY DEALS: Path Projects offer some of the best running gear in the business, and today you can get up to 40% off in their Black Friday sale.
I love this kit and it looks really cool even on a 48-year-old, decidedly average runner like me!
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Such an inspiration. It shows that running is more than just running 😊