different sidebars on page.php

I modified page.php so that to display a different sidebar on a page titled “The Runner”.

This works fine, but then I want to display the default sidebar for all other pages. I can’t the code below to work:

<?php if(the_title() == “The Runner”) get_sidebar(‘therunner’); ?>
<?php if(the_title() != “The Runner”) get_sidebar(); ?>

In fact it doesn’t seem that any php functions work on page.php – I am beginning to doubt my sanity.

For example I set $str1 = the_title() and do strlen($str1) it returns zero. I do strlen(“The Runner”) and it returns zero.

There must be something basic about the WordPress environment I don’t understand.

Thanks