#1 Running Brave Pre-Movie Reflection

Billy Mills went through both an internal and an external journey in order to overcome his adversities and succeed in what he had proposed to himself. The first external journey Mills experienced was the fact that he was a member of an Indian reserve where nobody before him had gotten a scholarship or even went to college, this is something that puts everyone’s eyes on you and makes you feel pressured by the need to succeed. This makes it both an external and internal journey because it is something that was brought by the society but it has to be overcome only by him. Another important external journey Mills went through was the fact that when he got to college he was only used to life in the reserve, where there are customs typical to the Indians, and the fact that the people that surrounded him at college had none of these customs could've been really shocking to him. An example of this is be the fact that he was not used to running on tracks, instead he ran around the reserve in an open space surrounded by nature. The external journey of the differences in classes or customs can be also an internal journey given the fact that Mills cannot let this superiority get to him because it can affect his outcome in the races and even in his grades. A very important internal journey Mills experienced was the fact that the first days of practice his coach tells him to forget humility and start thinking in terms of competition, he has to start thinking on winning the races instead of letting others win thinking its alright, this was challenging to him because he brought with him from the reserve a large sense of humility towards others, something that the coach apparently didn’t believe in. The outcome of his winning race happened that way mainly because of the decisions he made, as it says in the video about Mill's winning race in which he narrated thee fact that he had to remove two whole minutes from his final time in order to win and he did this by taking less time finishing each lap. Since there were a total of 25 laps he just had to improve 2 seconds per lap and he would then probably win the race. The fact that he won the race shows a lot of perseverance from Mills given the background he had and also reflects that he made good decisions.