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

“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

In the end, running has also taught me that intensity, high or low, is worth nothing if you don’t practice restraint. That, on the road or in life, giving too little of yourself is as great a risk as giving too much.

Given my own puny training regimen, I don’t really know what to say about such an inexplicable, almost intoxicating need to keep pushing oneself. But I think I know what the Greeks would call it: hybris. In ancient Greek hybris was an idea with serious moral implications. It might be translated as “excessiveness,” an arrogant attitude toward nature

Philostratus,

Youth is the least democratic condition, and one day all of us will find ourselves evicted from it, kicked to the curb of adulthood, that tiring age of workouts and compromises.

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.

“There’s no such thing as a runner who comes home after a run and feels worse than when he left.”

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

I realized that my efforts are related to my terror of aging. I finally understood, I think, that I keep running because it is the most concrete and effective way for me to feel alive, or at least the one way I know. In other words, I run because I’m afraid of dying.