The Real Pheidippides Story

On September 2, 490 BC, Pheidippides, Greek hero and inspiration for the modern marathon, died completing his run from Marathon to Athens. An excerpt from the article:

"Many runners are familiar with the story surrounding the origins of the modern marathon. As the well-worn legend goes, after the badly outnumbered Greeks somehow managed to drive back the Persians who had invaded the coastal plain of Marathon, an Athenian messenger named Pheidippides was dispatched from the battlefield to Athens to deliver the news of Greek victory. After running about 25 miles to the Acropolis, he burst into the chambers and gallantly hailed his countrymen with “Nike! Nike! Nenikekiam” (“Victory! Victory! Rejoice, we conquer!”). And then he promptly collapsed from exhaustion and died. Turns out, however, the story is bigger than that. Much bigger.

The whole idea of recreating an ancient voyage was fantastic to me. Looking for an excuse to visit the country of my ancestors, I signed up for the little-known Spartathlon in 2014, an ultramarathon from Athens to Sparta that roughly follows the path of the real Pheidippides. It felt like the right way to tell his story—the actual story of the marathon. Here’s what I discovered:

Pheidippides was not a citizen athlete, but a hemerodromos: one of the men in the Greek military known as day-long runners. What they did was considered beyond competition, more akin to something sacred. Much is written about the training and preparation of Olympic athletes, and quite detailed accounts of the early Greek Games exist. Comparatively little is recorded of the mysterious hemerodromoi other than that they covered incredible distances on foot, over rocky and mountainous terrain, forgoing sleep if need be in carrying out their duties as messengers...

...The story that everyone is familiar with is that of Pheidippides running from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to announce Greek victory, a distance of about 25 miles. But first he ran from Athens to Sparta, to gather Spartan troops to help the Athenians in combat against the Persians. The distance was much more than a single marathon, more like six marathons stacked one upon the other, some 150 miles.

At the modern-day Spartathlon, I’d supposedly retrace those steps. It is a demanding race with aggressive cutoff times. Runners must reach an ancient wall at Hellas Can factory, in Corinth—50.33 miles—within nine hours and 30 minutes or face elimination. For comparison, many 50-mile ultramarathons have cutoff times of 13 or 14 hours to complete the race in its entirety.

At the start, I was surrounded by 350 warriors huddled in the predawn mist at the foot of the Acropolis of Athens. For me the quest was deeply personal. I’d been waiting a lifetime to be standing in this place. I would finally run alongside my ancient brother, Pheidippides, albeit two and a half millennia in his wake. The starting gun went off, and away we went, into the streets crowded with morning traffic. Policemen were stationed at most of the main intersections to stop vehicles, but after crossing streets we runners had to run on the sidewalks, avoiding stray dogs, trash cans, and meandering pedestrians."