The Art of Running: From Marathon to Athens on Winged Feet

Kairos is not a fixed point in time. It doesn’t have a beginning and an end. Instead, it is a continuous action. The Greeks, with their sublime, punctilious conception of grammatical tense, could say it better than I can. Kairos isn’t “I run” or “I won” or “I love” or “I weep.” It’s a kind of motion photography, its focus blurry: “I’m running,” “I’

Psychologists call this ecstasy “peak experience,” a phrase first used in 1970 by the American Abraham Maslow to refer to the maximum gratification produced by the state of flow—runner’s orgasm, sort of. Once a runner comes down from this higher plane, he or she feels exhausted, undone by the emotion, the way we feel after sex, yet at the same time

Duty and honor came from the courage to fill the gap between our limitations with remarkable feats and the laurels of glory. In short, an athlete who stretched his body ultra its limits was not greeted by the sound of cheers in the stadium but by the sound of the Titans’ broken nails as they crawled to the heavens and were immediately driven back d

In short, after a lifetime of agonizing about what time is, thanks to running I was liberated from this inescapable, crudely Proustian obsession and quickly turned to another obsession. I wanted to know what’s inside time.

According to sources, Arrichion died by strangulation while obstructing his opponent’s feet and forcing him to call the fight. Whatever really happened, we know that the victory laurels were placed on the dead man’s head. A statue of him was erected in the market of Phigalia, his hometown, to remind future generations of his feat.

For years I asked every runner I know, from the most diehard to the least disciplined, why they run, but none was able to give me a clear answer. They all offered a generic response: “well-being,” of course, physical or mental. But one’s reason for running can’t be defined by that fleeting fistful of endorphins, since there are many human activitie

“See how lightning falls on the highest buildings and tallest trees, because heaven brings low all things that surpass greatness,” writes Herodotus in Histories (Book 7, 10). Hybris was synonymous with craven behavior, small-mindedness, the inability to accept the human condition which, compared to the perfect and immortal condition of deities, is

When I run, I’m alive, physically and biologically, doing what I was programmed to do: pushing my body to its maximum physical potential. It’s objective and observable, and it can easily be measured by the tools of science.

Philostratus,