Joy at the Battle of Marathon

Andrew Marshall

In 490 BC, a Greek courier stumbled into Athens and collapsed at the Athenian rulers’ feet. At the time, a courier was kind of the ancient world’s version of an ultra-runner with a sweet sponsorship deal (although being sponsored by Nike meant something different in those days).

This courier’s name was Pheidippides, and according to artist renditions, he’d just run a long, long way with no compression shorts, though he might have used some ancient Greek version of body-glide. Goose fat, perhaps? 

“Joy to you, we’ve won,” Pheidippides said, referring to the victory of the Athenian and Spartan army over the invading Persians at Marathon, a coastal town roughly 25 miles away. And then, before he could drink a post-race beer or check his splits on Strava, he up and died.

I don’t have a traditional “runner’s build.” I run anyway.

My thoughts turned to Pheidippides, and particularly his death, a lot as I gained my 3,000th foot of elevation roughly two-thirds of the way through my first marathon. The man ran himself to death essentially because he had an exciting day at work. It’s hard to match that level of dedication.

Unlike Pheidippides (who was doing his job) or most marathoners (who are running races), I happened to be marathoning only for the sake of marathoning. There are no formal races in the age of Covid-19, and anyone who’s ever raced will tell you that having other people around you is the best way to ensure you finish a challenging distance. And so I struggled to continue running, because in the end who would know or even care? 

But I finished my marathon, stumbling down the hill towards my beer-and-sign holding wife, five hours and four-thousand climbed feet after I set out. As I write this, I’m training for my second marathon, and beyond that, the specter of an ultra-marathon haunts my days. I spend a lot of time thinking about anti-chafing techniques, stack height, and tread design. Sometimes I have dreams about running. 

Nearing the halfway point of my first marathon.

That’s insane. Because I don’t exactly love running. I do not wake up excited to run. I do not subscribe to running magazines. I do not flit lightly over the hills with a grin on my face and high beat-per-minute music pounding in my headphones (I listen to Agatha Christie novels while I run. Try it. Start with And Then There Were None. You’ll thank me). It’s always a slog for me.  

I’m not put together for running. That’s one problem. 

I’ve got a short, stocky build. My liver thinks I’m one meal away from starvation on a tundra. It can and will miraculously turn 170 oatmeal cream pie calories into 20 pounds of nice, safe, insulating body fat. 

My genes were expecting me to bench-press sheep at sea level under cloudy skies. Instead, I’ve spent 35 years chugging along highways, trails, and golf-cart paths, trying to keep my skin from frying off my bones. I do not shed heat easily. And yet running has more or less been my sport of choice since childhood. I’ve picked up and dropped a dozen physical interests: soccer, racquetball, ultimate frisbee, and one memorably disastrous foray into the world of a “just for fun” men’s basketball league. 

I always come back to running. 

It always hurts. It always sucks. My feet blister and peel and blister again, seeming never to realize I’m in this for the long haul. My knees ache, the cartilage worn away from 3,000 long-distance backpacking miles. The bones in my feet get stress fractures. I have one Achilles tendon that simply will not loosen up, no matter how much yoga or cursing I throw at it. The day after a long run I roll out of bed and crawl towards the kitchen, hoping my wife will either kill me or pour some caffeine down my throat and then kill me.

The Soldier of Marathon, Luc-Olivier Merson, 1869. No compression shorts. Possibly some body-glide.

I’ve never been fast. My high-school cross country career had precisely one victory - a second-place junior varsity finish on a dirt course in south Georgia. A nineteen minute, four second 5K. Still my personal record. The marathon I just completed took me nearly ten years to work up to. The first three times I began marathon training I got injured. The last time it happened I’d worked my way up to 16 miles before a stress fracture put me out of commission for two months. 

So I can tell you this - I’m not in it for the medals (which I don’t win), or the abs (which never appear), or the Strava records (Kilian Jornet holds most of the records in my neck of the woods, so...yeah) or the health benefits (because this pastime seems to be slowly murdering me, actually). 

It’s taken me most of my life (and various doctor, therapists, and medications) to realize why I’m a distance runner. It’s because my lazy brain can’t be bothered to produce a normal amount of neurotransmitters on its own, so I have to go out and abuse my body in the sunshine until my brain gives me a shot of that sweet, sweet, feel-good juice. 

Then I have to do it again the next day. 

So my theory is I’ve been attracted to running because it helped me manage my depression before I even knew I was depressed (indeed, before phrases like “managing depression” came into the common language of American culture). Now I recognize my need to run as somewhere between the habits of a healthy, functioning human being and an addict in need of a fix. 

I can live with that. 

I can get a little squirt of feel-good juice from a five or six-mile run, but the real good stuff happens at about 14 or 15 miles. That’s super-interesting to me because evolutionary biologists and anthropologists have noted that traditional hunter-gatherer societies tend to run or walk about 14 miles as a part of daily life.

It could be placebo, it could be a correlation vs. causation fallacy, it could be all that time spent in nature, it could be a lot of things. But I know this - despite what it does to my body, running 50 miles a week seems to be necessary for my brain. That can be pretty inconvenient to a daily schedule - I live in the mountains, and I don’t cover 15 miles very quickly at 7,000 feet altitude and 3,000 feet of elevation gain.

If Pheidippides had only had access to a post-marathon IPA, he might not have dropped dead after completing his run.

My cat certainly thinks I’m insane, but my wife tells me I’m never happier - truly happier - than when I’m spending about three hours a day hauling myself up and down the trails. And as long as I’m running that kind of weekly mileage, I might as well start thinking about ultra-marathons. Not because I want to. Because I have to. Distance running, it seems, is essential to me. Whether I think it’s fun or not is irrelevant to whether it makes me joyful. 

Pheidippides was spreading the news of a military victory. He could have just said, “We won!” and then asked for a toga. Instead, he prefaced the news with “Joy to you.”  

So joy to you. And to me too. And to all of us. 

Now let’s go on a run.

Follow Andrew’s latest adventures: @andrewmarshallimages