Long Road to Boston. Mr Mark Sutcliffe
finish line in Copley Square.
CHAPTER 2
The marathon is ubiquitous today. There are races all over the world, covered live on television and profiled in human-interest stories. Even non-runners understand what a marathon represents, whether or not they can cite the precise distance. The meaning of the word has expanded to describe not just an organized long-distance footrace, but any extended or arduous task. Marathon talks yielded no resolution to the teachers’ strike. The dance marathon will raise money for the new gym equipment. The expression “It’s a marathon, not a sprint” is routinely applied to political campaigns, business ventures and other sustained endeavors.
But until 1896, Marathon was merely a town in Greece, the site of a famous battle 24 centuries earlier. In 1870, Marathon achieved brief international infamy as the place from which four English and Italian tourists were kidnapped and eventually murdered.
The profile of Marathon was changed permanently when, as most runners know, the organizers of the first modern Olympics were inspired by the legend of a Greek messenger. A man named Pheidippides, it was commonly believed, ran from Marathon to Athens, announced a glorious victory in battle by shouting “Nike!”– Greek for victory, not a reference to his trendy footwear – and then dropped dead from exhaustion.
Olympic organizers obviously saw more glory than tragedy in the fate of Pheidippides. They planned a race over the same route on the final day of the Games. Since then, the story of Pheidippides and the first Olympic marathon in his honor has become part of the lore of running. But the truth isn’t so simple.
Did such a Greek messenger really exist? Was his name Pheidippides? Where did he actually run? And did he really expire at the finish line? There’s almost as much debate about the story of Pheidippides as the Kennedy assassination or Babe Ruth’s called shot in the 1932 World Series. And, naturally, there is a lot less evidence to rely upon from the fifth century B.C. There are no closed-circuit tapes to review from that time, no electronic newspaper archives to browse. So how much of the story is true? How much is myth based on some loosely assembled facts? How much of it is pure fiction?
There’s no doubt there was an epic Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. When the smaller Athenian army fought off a Persian invasion about 26 miles from Athens, it was a turning point in European history. The victory strengthened the resolve of the Greeks, who won subsequent battles that protected their culture and set in motion two centuries of Classical Greek civilization. All that Greece gave the world – in politics and philosophy, scientific thought, theatre and literature – was preserved by the triumph on the plains of Marathon.
Naturally, much was written about this pivotal and unlikely victory. Herodotus, who established his place as the father of modern history by meticulously documenting politics and conflict in the Western Asia, Northern Africa and Greece of his time, wrote of Pheidippides in his masterpiece The Histories. Although it is considered the first history text of Western literature, the epic document was both factual and allegorical, and the story of the Athenian messenger was mostly the latter.
According to Herodotus, Pheidippides ran 150 miles without stopping, arriving in Sparta the day after he departed Athens, his mission to secure help from the Spartans in battle. He then ran back to Athens to complete his round trip. Along the way, if you accept this version of events, Pheidippides encountered the Greek god Pan, who offered to help the Athenians win the Battle of Marathon.
Apart from the bit about seeing Pan (which perhaps could be explained by a lack of proper hydration), the journey is not entirely far-fetched. Almost 2,500 years later, members of Britain’s Royal Air Force attempted the trek themselves. Five men left Athens on October 8, 1982. Three of them arrived in Sparta less than 40 hours later. Every autumn since then, a Spartathlon race has been staged to replicate the feat. The course record, set in only the second race, is 20 hours and 25 minutes. This is no ordinary road race: according to the official Spartathlon website, the course travels through vineyards and olive groves, climbs steep hillsides – often in rainy, muddy conditions – and takes runners on a 3,500-foot ascent of Mount Parthenio, where Pheidippides saw Pan, in the dead of night. No assurances are given by race officials that Greek gods will appear to any modern runner.
How did Pheidippides’ epic run transform from a two-day, 150- mile ultramarathon between Athens and Sparta to a mere 26-mile journey from Marathon to Athens? Some historians believe that his heroic journey was combined and confused with the return of the Athenians after their victory in Marathon. In the second century A.D., the Greek writer Lucian became the first to describe the now-familiar myth of Pheidippides having run from Marathon to announce the triumph, only to drop dead after delivering the news.
Lucian was a satirist, a Jon Stewart of his time, who scoffed at the serious writing of his contemporaries. So his version of events shouldn’t have been taken at face value. Yet Lucian’s account of Pheidippides somehow became the standard, replicated in the writings of Plutarch (although he gave the messenger a different name) and captured in sculpture and on canvas by two French artists centuries later. A nineteenth-century painting by Luc-Olivier Merson depicts an almost-naked Pheidippides in the prone position in front of Athenian leaders. There is no sign of any volunteers rushing to his side with a foil blanket and a bottle of water, or offering to take him to the medical tent. Perhaps they knew it was already too late.
All of this art and literature sustained the legend of Pheidippides but did little to popularize it; it was still largely an obscure piece of Greek mythology that stirred the creativity of only a handful of artists. But when Robert Browning was inspired to write about Pheidippides, everything changed. The British poet adapted the legend of the doomed Greek messenger into a compelling, 1,300- word piece broken into 15 stanzas, including this one:
So, when Persia was dust, all cried, “To Acropolis!
Run, Pheidippides, one race more! the meed is thy due!
Athens is saved, thank Pan, go shout!” He flung down his shield
Ran like fire once more: and the space ’twixt the fennel-field
And Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs through,
Till in he broke: “Rejoice, we conquer!” Like wine through clay,
Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died – the bliss!
Whether or not he had ever experienced it himself, Browning captured the joy a runner feels when finally able to stop running after more than 26 miles. But while most marathoners relish the elation of a finish line, they prefer to escape the “bliss” of having their hearts actually burst.
Browning’s tribute to Pheidippides likely would have been just another piece of art devoted to Greek history, if not for Michel Breal. A French semantics expert, Bréal was friends with Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who was then creating the modern Olympic movement. Bréal suggested that a 40-kilometer race be added to the first Games in Athens, as a way of adding a tough physical test and celebrating Greek history. De Coubertin liked the idea and placed the event on the final day of the Olympics, a tradition that lasts to this day.
Determined to see an athlete from the host nation win the special event, the Greeks ran a trial exactly one month before the Olympic marathon, a race that is believed to have been the first-ever marathon. The winner, Charilaos Vasilakos, finished in three hours and eighteen minutes. A few days before the Olympics, a second trial was organized. This time the winner was Ioannis Lavrentis, who finished in about three hours and eleven minutes.
A photo taken by Burton Holmes shows Greek runners training for the Olympics in 1896. It’s not clear whether the picture was candid or staged, but it shows three men running in long pants along deserted roads.
At 2:00 in the afternoon on April 10, 1896, the first Olympic marathon was launched. A total of seventeen athletes started the race. Rather than rest for the endurance test, some of the runners had already competed in other distances in the same Olympics, including the 1,500-meter. Because of their unfamiliarity with the distance and perhaps due to fatigue from other events, seven men didn’t finish.
As