My vote for best running movie of the year goes to "Saint Ralph." It's an intelligent coming-of-age film that inspires us to run and encourages us to put ourselves on the line at least once in our lives.

Making the movie of more interest is that its writer and director, Mike McGowan, won the 1995 Detroit Free Press Marathon. He told me that winning the Free Press - his only marathon victory - helped him put the movie together.

"I won a Mazda 626, sold it and used the money to fund my freelance writing career after graduating from the University of North Carolina," said McGowan, who earned a degree in English.

In "Saint Ralph," McGowan has crafted an adorable comedy/drama with an emotional soundtrack. Awkward yet straightforward, Ralph Walker (Adam Butcher) is a fatherless 14-year-old with a mother who falls into a coma while being treated for a serious illness.

A series of incidents inadvertently puts Ralph on rocky terms with headmaster Father Fitzpatrick (Gordon Pinsent) at the Catholic school he attends. As penance, Ralph is conscripted to run with the cross country team. He soon thinks it will take a miracle to save his mother's life.

He asks a teacher (and soon-to-be running mentor) if you have to be a saint to perform a miracle. Father Hibbert (adeptly played by Campbell Scott), often the iconoclast, answers that logic would say that it requires only faith, purity and prayer.

Desperate for a miracle that will prevent him from being an orphan, Ralph is told that winning the Boston Marathon would be just that.

McGowan chose Boston because "winning it would mean something to the casual sports fan," he said. "In part because it would have been possible back then for someone to come from complete obscurity to win the race.

"In 1954, only 176 runners entered Boston. What also worked well for the story is that Boston sometimes falls on the day after Easter."

Competitive running is familiar territory to McGowan, and he makes the running scenes seem authentic. He serendipitously infuses North America's oldest race, Hamilton, Ont.'s Around the Bay 30K, into the script. That was another race McGowan won.

By taking on Boston, Ralph makes all around him feel they are part of something big, something that doesn't happen every day. That connects him to the audience and film's cast.

McGowan, a Canadian who now lives in Toronto, framed the movie in Hamilton in 1953-54 because of nostalgia for that less-complicated time. In running, he finds similar traits to his own - dedication, concentration and a remarkable capacity for work.

"It was an era of relatively-unsophisticated approaches to the sport," McGowan said of the early '50s. He uses quotes from an obscure training book Ralph discovers, "Secrets to Marathon Success," as part of the film's narrative.

"As the race approaches, it is paramount that all distractions disappear," decreed Ralph's guru Tom Longboat, Canadian winner of the 1907 Boston Marathon. "It is equally important that all doubts be cast aside. Remember, the marathon is not without adversity and pain."

McGowan, 39, also explores the notion of faith by drawing on his own religious background.The film is interspersed with gracefully-crafted stained-glass title cards between scenes, such as "September 1953: Feast of Michael Angelo the Archangel - Patron Saint Against Temptation." Or "March 1954: Feast of Christina the Astonishing, Patron Saint of Lunatics."

"Even though I wrote 'Saint Ralph,' the process still seems mysterious," McGowan said. "How characters, worlds, conflicts and dreams can be transferred to the page, then filmed in a way that makes audiences suspend disbelief, seems miraculous."

But as Father Hibbert says, "If you're not chasing after miracles, what's the point?"

Writer Doug Kurtis, of Livonia, holds world records for the most sub-2:20 marathons (76) and marathon wins (40). He may be contacted at dkurtis@earthlink.com. MR