Play video: Split the MittenSplit the Mitten
The brief
Max had one goal: run the length of the Lower Peninsula, Michiana to Mackinaw City, on foot, from May 23 to May 30, 2025. The run raised money for AYA Youth Collective, a Grand Rapids nonprofit serving young people experiencing homelessness or housing instability. My goal was smaller and harder to define. Make a film that people who don’t run would watch to the end.
A 400-mile run is a bad subject for a highlight reel. Nothing “happens” for hours. The story is in the boring parts. Blisters at mile 140. The gas station breakfast at 5 a.m. The look on a support crew’s face when the day’s mileage gets pushed back again. That is what I built the shot list around.
The shoot
The run set the schedule, not the camera. I chased a man doing about 50 miles a day.
The kit was deliberately small. Two cameras, one drone (I hold a Part 107), a wireless lav on Max, and a shotgun for the crew. Audio-first, always. If I have Max’s breathing and his crew’s radio chatter, I have a film. If I only have pretty B-roll of a runner on a county road, I have a screensaver.
The drone did the work of showing scale. Michigan is flatter than it looks on a map, and a person on a two-lane road is invisible from 400 feet up. That was the point. One runner, one state.
The cut
Final runtime: 72 minutes. Edited in DaVinci Resolve.
The structure is mile markers, not days. Days blur together on a run like this; the numbers don’t. Every act break lands on a distance. It gave the audience a scoreboard, which is the one thing endurance sports usually forget to give people.
I cut the interviews last. The interviews explain the run. The footage is the run. When the two disagreed, the footage won.
Result
- The film premiered on October 23, 2025 at the Wealthy Theatre in Grand Rapids, to about 60 people.
- It is public on YouTube, on Max’s channel: Split the Mitten: My 400-Mile Run Across Michigan in 8 Days.
- The Grand Rapids Marketing Co. write-up: Split the Mitten: watch the feature-length documentary.
- Short-form from the run: a reel on @maxpolakovich and the reel MLive posted on @mlivenews.
- Press coverage of the run itself (not the film): MLive coverage of the run, WZZM 13 on the finish, and FOX 17 before the start.
What I took from it: long-form documentary is mostly logistics. The camera is the easy part. Knowing where the runner will be at 6:40 a.m. on day six, and being there with charged batteries, is the job.
If you have a story that takes more than a weekend to tell, that is the kind of work I want. Get in touch.
