![]() Skipping aheadįor the next few Olympic games, the race stayed around 25 miles depending on the local landscape. Afterward, Louis returned to the farm and never ran another race again. The first to finish, a 23-year-old Greek shepherd named Spyridon Louis, actually took a break halfway through the race to eat an egg and enjoy a glass of wine. ![]() Still, it kicked off the modern tradition of marathons in amazing style. At that original event, a French linguist named Michel Breal suggested an endurance event to commemorate the story of Pheidippides by literally running from Marathon to Athens, old-school style. ![]() That started at the 1896 Olympic games, hosted in Athens. While the story of Pheidippides had its place in Greek history and myth, the ancient Greeks didn't have an official marathon the way we know it now. How'd we get the additional 1.2 tacked on to the already challenging race? Bear with me, we'll get there - marathons are all about pacing, after all. Marathon to Athens in order to announce the Greek victory over the invading Persian army.īut, that's only 25 miles. The portion of his story that has a direct bearing on our modern marathon, however, is the last leg of his exploits: the trip he made from a small town named. One account has him covering some 155 miles through the Greek countryside in just 36 hours. Said to have lived between 530 and 490 B.C., Pheidippides had the very impressive job of being a hemerodrome, or "day-long runner," for the Athenian army during the Persian Wars.Īccording to the original stories, Pheidippides was really, really good at what he did. Why is a marathon 26.2 miles long? Thank PheidippidesĪlthough the exact details of the story - and precisely who first recorded it - is a matter of debate among historians, the length of the modern marathon can be traced back to an Athenian runner named Pheidippides. But, if you stop and think about it, that's a pretty strange number. We have short, half, and ultra varieties in addition to the standard 26.2-mile race we've all come to know and love. Many other races are titled based on their length relative to this classic event. In the world of endurance running, the marathon is sort of the gold standard.
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