Understanding The Marathon

I told you before about how your body can usually store only enough glycogen to fuel about 20 miles of running. And yet marathons are 26.2 miles long. What gives? The legend of the origin of the marathon goes like this: In 490 B.C., a Greek messenger named Pheidippides ran the 24 miles from the Plains of Marathon to Athens to announce that despite great odds, the Athenian army had defeated the invading Persians. Upon reaching Athens, Pheidippides said, “Rejoice. We conquer!” collapsed, and died. When the modern Olympics began in Athens in 1896, organizers included a 24-mile race from Marathon to Athens to honor this great moment in Greek history. Did this really happen? No one knows for sure, but the general consensus is that like any good story from antiquity, there’s some embellishment stirred in to the truth so well that it’s hard to separate the two, and it’s more fun not to bother anyway. There was a Greek messenger of the time named Pheidippides, but no contemporary record of him producing such a great deathbed quote exists. Nonetheless, the legend has its own resonance. At the 20-mile mark of his first marathon, Frank Shorter turned to a runner next to him and said, “Why couldn’t have Pheidippides have died at 20 miles?” The long race caught on after the 1896 Olympics. The first Boston Marathon was held the next year. Early marathons weren’t standardized—they were 24 or 25 miles, depending on how long a course turned out to be. Early in this century, the starting line of a marathon in England was moved back so that the Queen could watch from Windsor Castle. The resulting distance was 26 miles, 385 yards, or 26.2 miles, which is now the official distance for a marathon.