Running gave Aisha McAdams a refuge from a childhood marked by abuse. In Max Lowe’s documentary Learning to Fly, she describes an alcoholic adoptive mother and the relief she found in a sport that allowed her to exercise some control over her life.
Her account gives physical effort a meaning that distance and finishing times cannot supply. Difficulty chosen on a course carries a different significance from suffering imposed at home. McAdams’s candor allows that distinction to emerge without requiring her athletic history to serve as evidence that everything has been repaired.
Her subsequent work photographing ultrarunners extends this relationship with the sport into the making of images. She can recognize something of herself in people whose motivations remain their own, a useful position for a documentary moving between intimate testimony and extraordinary public feats.
Lowe includes her photographs alongside her narration and his footage of training and competition. Those different forms of attention suggest an inquiry into how people understand their exertions and how they want those exertions seen. The film struggles to sustain that inquiry as it moves away from McAdams’s specific history toward declarations about courage and perseverance.
Its opening quotation from John Bingham locates achievement in having the courage to begin. Placed against McAdams’s account, that sentiment has substance: starting can mean claiming the right to act on one’s own behalf. Applied across a field of elite athletes, it becomes a less useful explanation.
Observations about overcoming fear and accepting failure offer reassurance without distinguishing one person’s attachment to running from another’s. McAdams’s disclosures carry emotional force because they identify the circumstances that made running valuable. The interviews with other competitors often arrive at principles broad enough to leave those circumstances unexplored.
Jim Walmsley offers a productive exception when he describes his reclusive nature and the connection he finds through running. The familiar image of an athlete alone against the terrain acquires a social purpose. His exchanges with friend and competitor Rod Farvard put that purpose into practice: they share race transitions, encourage each other, and sometimes alternate the lead.
Competition permits forms of cooperation that a simple account of personal conquest would struggle to accommodate. These moments answer the question of why someone might run an extreme distance through the behavior of people doing it together. Their companionship has a specificity that the film’s statements about running and relationships lack.
Family support gives this account of achievement further substance. Walmsley’s wife, fellow runner Jess Brazeau, belongs to the practical network sustaining his efforts; Eszter Csillag’s young daughters greet their mother at finish lines. These presences have different meanings. A child’s welcome and a partner’s race support cannot be folded into one undifferentiated image of encouragement.
Lowe makes room for both, allowing the finish to become a reunion and the athlete’s effort to acquire witnesses with a personal stake in it. The documentary is less attentive to the organization behind such support. Crew, pacers, and nutrition enter the picture, but their responsibilities receive only brief explanation.
The races themselves supply an abundance of visual interest. The Western States Endurance Run in California and Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in the Alps place athletes in landscapes whose scale makes a hundred-mile undertaking physically legible. Uneven trails, elevation, and exertion continuing through the night give distance a texture that statistics could never convey.
Lowe’s varied angles and framing resist the repetitive spectacle of bodies moving forward. McAdams’s still photographs introduce another register of attention, holding individuals within a film repeatedly drawn toward expansive terrain. The beauty is persuasive because the difficulty remains visible within it; the mountains are places people must negotiate on exhausted legs.
Yet this variety of images is better sustained than the connections among the film’s subjects. Personal recollection gives way to training, an interview, a race transition, or an injury without each strand developing the questions raised by the others.
A community portrait has good reason to distribute its attention. Here, the shifting emphasis repeatedly reduces the time available to pursue a motive or relationship once it has been introduced. McAdams’s history deserves its place alongside the races. The unevenness comes from asking her testimony to establish an emotional depth that the shorter athlete profiles seldom match, leaving the film moving between different levels of inquiry.
Conspicuous HOKA gear adds to the promotional impression created by the attractive athletic imagery and familiar language of aspiration. The brand’s visibility gives that aspiration a commercial surface: a particular company becomes part of the picture of what such a life looks like.
The promotional quality lies in the alignment of product visibility with reassuring ideas about personal growth. This makes the film’s limited questioning felt more sharply. The footage can communicate effort, pleasure, and belonging with considerable force, while the interviews leave much of the appeal at the level of encouragement. Admiration comes readily; understanding the different commitments being admired requires longer attention.
The acknowledgment of injury and withdrawal offers an opportunity to give failure a weight beyond its usefulness as motivation. Some runners have to leave a course they desperately want to finish. These brief appearances qualify the celebration of endurance, but the idea that failure belongs to the process makes disappointment available as another reason to persist.
That attitude can help an athlete return. It leaves less room to examine the decision already made, including the judgment involved in recognizing that continuing has ceased to be sensible. The documentary gives limited time to how a runner identifies a limit and carries that knowledge into the next attempt.
Learning to Fly premiered in limited theaters across the United States on August 21, 2026, through Unreasonable Studios. Directed by Max Lowe, the sports documentary follows former competitive runner turned photographer Aisha McAdams as she documents elite ultra-marathon athletes tackling grueling 100-mile mountain races, while confronting her own painful past that forced her to step away from the sport.
Where to Watch Learning to Fly (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: Learning to Fly
Release date: August 21, 2026
Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes (103 minutes)
Director: Max Lowe
Producers and Executive Producers: Evan Hayes, Katy Chevigny, Ayesha Rokadia, Max Lowe
Cast: Aisha McAdams, Jim Walmsley, Eszter Csillag, Rod Farvard, Vincent Bouillard, Jess Brazeau
The Review
Learning to Fly
Learning to Fly finds its strongest account of endurance in Aisha McAdams’s testimony and the cooperation surrounding its runners. Those details complicate the fantasy of achievement through willpower alone. Max Lowe’s striking race footage makes the effort tangible, but the film’s shifting attention and familiar encouragement leave its athletes unevenly understood. Conspicuous branding reinforces the sense of a sporting world being celebrated with insufficient curiosity about its commitments and limits.
PROS
- McAdams’s candid, emotionally specific testimony.
- Striking landscapes and expressive still photography.
- Cooperation and family support enrich the athletic portraits.
CONS
- Fragmented movement between personal history and athlete profiles.
- Inspirational generalities limit the exploration of individual motives.
- Conspicuous branding reinforces a promotional tone.
