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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

In short, to run, and continue running, one needs a reason tougher than any tendon, an unshakeable will to give it your all, without reservation or limits, to the bitter end—the same kind of will that led the first marathon runner in history to run to his death and beyond.

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.

“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