It was the movie that did it, Bomba insists, alluding to the quirky little picture that juggles a hodgepodge of ideas such as quantum physics, spirituality, and mysticism.

Whether his metamorphosis from aquaphobic to aquaholic can indeed be attributed to something as mundane as a motion picture is perhaps open to debate. Bomba is convinced, however, that the lessons the movie taught him about himself and his life would be equally valuable to anyone else who pursues endurance sports.

A MUSICAL UPBRINGING

While Bomba was the only one of his siblings who was somewhat interested in sports, he admits that as a youth growing up in Pittsburgh he was never what you would consider an athlete. He detested gym class, mostly, he laughs, because he couldn’t get past the second knot on the rope-climb drill.

What he was, though, was musically inclined—particularly with wind instruments—and the first one he set about mastering was the clarinet.

“IT was the marching band guy,” he says. “And because I played classical clarinet and I was 6 feet tall, I had to come up with something that didn’t make me look like a geek, so I started to play drums.”

Sure, Bomba dabbled in skiing and a little pickup basketball every now and then, but for the most part the focus of his youth was on music.

He attended Carnegie Mellon and pursued degrees in both electrical engineering and communications while immersing himself in all types of musical genres and performers, from the Rolling Stones and Miles Davis to Mozart and Handel. He has since gone on to also learn guitar and, according to him, “some really bad piano.”

He had tried swimming lessons in the fifth grade, but they didn’t take. Though their father was actually a competitive swimmer in college, the Bomba children were never encouraged to pursue the sport, not even recreationally.

Bomba’s fear of the water understandably intensified after one of his brothers drowned in the ocean at the age of 16.

Over time, as Bomba set about parlaying his expertise and love of music into a career, he simply forgot about swimming. Or at least he tried to.

Initially, his background was in record production. But while putting together records for a wide variety of bands, he began to learn about song licensing. Some of his bands’ music ended up in David Lynch movies; another ended up in the blockbuster Twister. He has worked with the Rolling Stones and James Taylor and on such hit television programs as Sex and the City and Joan of Arcadia.

However successful his professional life appeared to be on the outside, though, there were underlying issues that would eventually need to be addressed.

WHAT THE BLEEP IS THIS ANYWAY?

What the Bleep Do We Know!? is surely one of the oddest movies to emerge in theaters in years. Sewn together using equal parts dramatic fiction, Ken Burns-ish documentary, and Shrek-like animation, it is message-laden intellectual fare that seems far more suited for the Discovery Channel or Nova than the big screen.

The film was the self-financed brainchild of William Arntz, a devout Buddhist who earned his fortune in computer software. Arntz admits that the project “started off like a little $125,000 documentary.” His intent, in a sense, was to bring his passion for quantum physics and spirituality to the mainstream.

Five million dollars later, Arntz and his team had managed to put together a film, or at least something that closely resembled one. It was not surprising, though, that theatrical distributors wanted nothing whatsoever to do with either Arntz’s vision or his product, which seemed to give new meaning to the word “niche.”

Truth be told, in fact, most distributors probably couldn’t even get past the film’s unconventional title.

Since the overriding theme of the movie is that modern science proves that human beings are very much in control of their actions and behaviors—and, consequently, their realities and futures—it only stood to reason that the filmmakers would need to take matters into their own hands in the distribution of their project. Perhaps, in the end, it was always meant to be that way.

Arntz, literally, distributed his movie to one theater at a time. He persuaded the owner of a theater in his hometown of Yelm, Washington, to show the movie for exactly one week. Because of the excitement and attendance generated during that trial period, one week became two, two became four, and four became about eight.

A theater in Oregon picked up the movie next. Then others in Arizona and California climbed on board. Moviegoers, it turned out, were clamoring for something more intellectually challenging than the usual Hollywood fare predominantly geared toward 12- to 14-year-olds.

With little more than word-of-mouth advertising, the provocative little movie that couldn’t was proving that it could, and in a big, big way. What the Bleep Do We Know! ? has thus far generated well over $10 million in the theaters, and sales of the DVD version show no signs of slowing down. Moviegoers are flooding the movie’s Web site with e-mails describing how the movie has improved their lives. Some, in fact, have written to say that the film has actually saved their lives, literally helping to replace suicidal feelings of despair with feelings of optimism and hope.

THE MAKINGS OF AN ATHLETE

Bomba looks the part of an endurance athlete. He has the Oakley sunglasses, the sports watch, and, on this particular morning, he’s wearing a tank top earned during a recent performance at the Nautica Malibu Triathlon.

Bomba ran his first marathon when he was 40 years old. He had taken up running after watching himself balloon to almost 200 pounds in the aftermath of a divorce. He had run exactly one 10K in his entire life, and trying to tackle a 26.2-miler had never even entered his mind until his grandmother died.

Bomba and his grandmother shared the same birth date, December 29. A Hungarian native who lived to be 100, she had overcome a litany of challenges in her life, including surviving two world wars.

Bomba decided on the plane ride back to Los Angeles after her funeral that he would run the upcoming Los Angeles Marathon.

“T guess you could say it was in her honor,” he says. “It just seemed like the right time to run my first one.”

With little or no preparation time, Bomba struggled through a very painful 4:25 effort.

“T made all the usual mistakes,” he recalls. “I went out too fast. I didn’t drink enough. I did everything wrong you can imagine. I was too stubborn to take advice. I thought that I knew it all, but I didn’t know anything.”

The experience, though, proved to be a turning point of sorts for Bomba.

Though he disavowed the idea of ever running another marathon, he has since gone on to run over a dozen more. It isn’t that Bomba is a glutton for punishment, it’s just that he very much appreciated what the challenge had taught him.

“At some point, you are stripped down of emotions,” he explains. “You’re stripped of inhibition. You are down to your core persona. And when I was void of any inhibition—when I was into mile 23 or 24 and my body was basically done and my mind was driving me to the end—that’s when I began to see my innermost thoughts. And it was anger.”

The more Bomba ran marathons, the more he began to realize that his life was limited by his very own persona.

“My predominant reaction was the emotion of anger,” he says. “I was angry at the people on the side of the road, the well-wishers, because they didn’t know what I was going through. I was surrounded by 20,000 other people, and they’re all running this same thing. And yet I was focused on my anger toward the people who were on the sidelines.”

Bomba, like many other long-distance athletes, was running for all the wrong reasons.

DESTINY CHANGED

Ironically, Bomba was not hired to be a part of What the Bleep Do We Know!? until well after the filming was under way. “T didn’t know anything about the film,” Bomba says.

Harold Jablonski

Initially, his job was to help work on the sound side of a pivotal wedding scene and reception in the middle of the movie. Later, after that commitment was completed, he was re-upped to help with other aspects of the film’s music.

It was not until months after he came on board, during a sound mixing session, that Bomba had an opportunity to watch the movie in its entirety.

“T’m sitting there in the mixing studio, and I’m going, ‘I get it,” Bomba says. “I’m actually seeing the film for the first time, and I’m understanding the concept of quantum thought.”

Call it the proverbial illumination of a lightbulb, or the toll of a bell, or simply label it an epiphany. However you choose to describe it, Bomba drew parallels to what he was watching and what he was feeling.

In a pivotal scene, the film’s main character, Amanda, a professional photographer who is angry at life, works a wedding and reception where little or nothing is as it appears. The sequence, the climax of the story on many different levels, forms the synthesis for all of the filmmakers’ theories on human consciousness.

“The thing that kept sticking in my mind was that Joey, the chiropractor, was saying how certain characteristics that we develop are cemented,” explains Bomba, describing the sequence. “And the animation showed actual parts of the brain cementing your emotion or your dependency on emotion.”

Perhaps even more important, though, what the movie illustrates is that those very same characteristics can also be uncemented.

“You can create the life you want by your thought processes,” Bomba says of what he had learned. “How

<4 Tim Bomba training for the 2005 Florida Half Ironman Triathlon.

your thoughts go is how your actions go, and how your actions go is how your destiny goes.”

What Bomba finally came to realize while watching the film unfold was that the emotion he had been dealing with for the majority of his life was an overriding sense of fear. He feared rejection professionally, he feared rejection in relationships, and to compensate for such feelings, he subconsciously adopted anger.

“T would always see the negative response to a situation,” Bomba says.

Much as Amanda, the protagonist, continually lashed out at a world that to her forever seemed unpredictable, chaotic, and heartless, so too did Bomba. The real epiphany for Bomba, though, was that the movie showed through empirical science that he did in fact have control over how he perceived the world and how the world treated him in return.

The realization was sobering. As he sat in the studio, though, Bomba was flushed by a wave of optimism.

“T said to myself, ‘Ican start to change that,’” he says. “I had come to the point of realizing that I’m not going to have that approach to things anymore. And the most tangible thing that came to mind was the fear of water and drowning.”

HIS LIFE AS A FISH

It’s one thing to recognize self-destructive behavior, but it’s another thing altogether to actually find the wherewithal to do something about it.

In Bomba’s mind his swimming, or lack thereof, became ground zero of his ability to empower himself and change his life for the better. For decades his fear of drowning had lingered, almost infectiously, somewhere deep in his consciousness, and now he rolled up his sleeves to confront it head on.

“T had to start to see myself as a swimmer,” Bomba explains, “and I had to believe I was going to be a swimmer. I couldn’t just wish it.”

Bomba knew he had reached a turning point when he was able to clearly picture himself stroking through the ocean.

“In my mind, I saw myself bilateral breathing while swimming in the ocean daily for a mile,” he says, “and I envisioned this so vividly and so effortlessly.”

Instead of reacting to his mind’s image in a negative way, “Oh, I’ll never ever be able to do that,” he approached it in a positive way. “OK, how do I get this?”

“T honestly believed I would do it,’ Bomba says. “I believed it would be part of my life.”

And today, ocean swimming is a part of Bomba’s life—a big, big part of his life.

Those who are comfortable in the water may fail to appreciate the full significance of this accomplishment, so it bears repeating. Up until very recently Tim Bomba would break into a cold sweat if he was knee-deep in a kiddie pool.

Curiously, once he was able to conquer his fear of the water and began to swim on a regular basis, Bomba started being approached by others with identical fears. Many, in fact, knew absolutely nothing about the tremendous hurdle he had overcome. They simply detected his incredible calmness with the ocean and entrusted him to help them achieve a similar type of familiarity.

So far, Bomba has helped nearly a dozen people overcome their fear of the ocean.

“T wish I had a camera, because of the look on their faces,” Bomba says. “Afterward, I tell them that the ocean hasn’t changed. The water hasn’t changed. The sky hasn’t changed. What’s changed is you. You’ve done what you didn’t think you could do simply because you thought you could do it.”

THE POWER OF THE MIND

Visualization and positive imagery have been applied to the world of athletic competition for generations now. Roger Bannister, for instance, would have never been able to run a sub-four-minute mile unless he was absolutely convinced that he had the ability to do so. Scott Jurek doesn’t close his eyes and envision himself losing an ultramarathon; he pictures himself crossing the finish line first.

And so it was with Bomba. His breakthrough came after he convinced himself beyond doubt that he would get in the ocean and swim.

“When you get to the point of not only seeing yourself accomplishing something, but you actually believe you’re capable of doing it, that’s the key that takes you past the people who just wish it,” says Bomba.

What this unique gem of a movie does better than any other, however, is clearly delineate the common ground between the power of the mind, the power of science, and the power of spirituality.

“Endurance sports teach you so much about your mind,” says Bomba.

Bomba, for one, doesn’t think that it’s merely a coincidence that both the marathon and the triathlon were essentially created by people with militaristic mindsets. The former, he points out, was made famous by a Greek soldier/messenger, and the latter was devised, in part, by a couple of Navy SEALS.

“T think there is a certain type of philosophy in that militaristic thinking of stripping down ‘can’t’ and only dealing with ‘can, ‘do,’ and ‘will,’” he explains. “And you will find that you’re capable of so much more in your life when you concentrate on those other things.”

He urges other long-distance runners and endurance athletes to spend as much time training their minds as their bodies. He points out that in addition to his exploits in the water, his own running has improved dramatically since his revelations and today he is convinced that after overcoming his greatest fear anything is now possible.

Doug Stanny

<4 Tim Bomba taking a break from work in his sound studio.

Bomba was once an unhappy runner, then he became a swimmer, and now he is a triathlete— and a happy one at that. Not all that long ago, such a notion was unfathomable to him.

“The biggest enemy we all have is in between our ears,” says Bomba, who has his sights set on completing his first half Ironman in 2005. “And the enemy that’s easiest to overcome is the one between our ears. If you can’t convince yourself of a worthiness, how are you going to convince someone else that you’re worthy?”

HOPE RUNS ETERNAL

As Bomba and I put the finishing touches on our chat, I’m feeling invigorated. I’m impressed, yes, that he is now a fellow swimmer. But I think I’m more moved by the fact that his fresh optimism for life’s possibilities is infectious.

If Bomba’s tale helps even a handful of people, I ponder, and each of those people positively affects just a few more people, and so on, then how can the world not be a better place in the end? And maybe that’s exactly what the bleep this whole movie phenomenon is about in the first place.

Bomba, for one, has not only applied these newly learned concepts to his running and triathloning but has also begun incorporating them into other areas of his life.

“T started applying the lack of fear to other aspects of my life,’ Bomba explains. “That started working for me professionally, and it definitely started working for me personally with relationships.”

What Bomba’s story illustrates is that oftentimes when it comes to endurance sports and to life in general, the way our mind has been programmed is what determines whether we succeed or fail.

It would probably be foolish to imply that a movie such as What the Bleep Do We Know!? can honestly change people. And even Bomba would be the first to acknowledge this.

“The movie didn’t change me,” says Bomba. “The only way a person changes is from within. But a person can, in fact, change, and I definitely think that the movie was a catalyst for flipping a switch.” th