Marathon
Rejoice, we conquer!
One of the most ubiquitous automobile decals is a simple outlined oval with the number 26.2 emblazoned within it.
It means, depending on one’s viewpoint, that the driver is crazy, impressive, smug, masochistic, or some mixture of all four.
The sticker signals the car’s owner ran 26.2 miles, otherwise known as a marathon. Along with the 100-meter dash and the mile, the marathon is perhaps the world’s most well-known racing distance, and it’s certainly the most famous long-distance race.
Twenty-six and two-tenths miles is a strange number to peg for a contest. How did this bizarre number end up as the premier distance for endurance runners?
Adjusting the figure to the International System of Units doesn’t answer the query: a marathon is 42.195 kilometres long.
The answer comes from a labyrinthine mix of ancient history, geography, poetry, and modern athletics. By the time we run through the story’s marathon maze, your brain might feel it deserves its own 26.2-mile sticker to slap on your car.
Fans of the Ancient Greeks or running aficionados might think the number comes from the distance a soldier ran during the first Persian invasion of Greece.
And these people would be kinda right, but not entirely right.
The marathon story does begin during this 5th-century-BCE clash. By 500 BCE, the Persian empire had begun expanding into Europe, though its efforts faced continuing uprisings. One major instance was the Ionian revolt, which threatened to unravel Persian hegemony. Eventually, the city-state of Athens lent support to the Ionians, angering the Persian leader Darius I. When the revolt was finally crushed, Darius turned his ire toward Athens and the rest of Greece.
In 490 BCE, the mighty Persians sailed to Greece. At the time, famously, Sparta was the city-state with the greatest military renown. Though Athens was no slouch, its citizens did not have confidence that they could fend off the Persians on their own. When the Athenians saw the Persian fleet approach a town called Marathon, they worried they might be overrun immediately.
So, they sent a professional courier – i.e., a pro runner! – to Sparta, asking for help. A person named Pheidippides (in some sources, it’s Philippides), motored approximately 75 miles to Sparta to deliver their plea, then ran back, so the story goes, in two days.
Unfortunately, Pheidippides brought back bad news. The Spartans were in the middle of a long religious ceremony, and their law dictated that they couldn’t fight during the festival of Carneia. His 150-mile (240-kilometer) sojourn wasn’t completely wasted, though; on the road, he met the god Pan, who told Pheidippides to have the Athenians call to him during the upcoming battle.
When the runner returned to the Athenians, he imparted the Spartan “no” and the godly offer of intercession. Perhaps buoyed by the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, rustic music, and impromptus, the Greeks inexplicably held off the Persians at Marathon. They used the local topography to employ staunch defensive tactics, along with a dose of “panic” sown to the Persians by Pan.
Pheidippides might have lived out the rest of his days as an Athenian icon, simply for bringing the blessings of Pan to Marathon.
Many scholars believe the run of Pheidippides to Sparta might have occurred, or, at the very least, that the hemerodrome (Greek word for courier, roughly meaning “day-runner”) existed, because the historian Herodotus noted the event in the decades that followed the Battle of Marathon (in other words, he didn’t rely on oral history for the story).
But, you’ll notice, a marathon is 26.2 miles, not 150 miles.
After the battle, the Athenians couldn’t assume their rout of the Persians would send the foe home. As the fleet left the bay, the soldiers assumed the Persians were making a strategic move toward Athens itself. They feared the Persians might sail to the city and claim victory at Marathon, causing those in Athens to surrender without a fight.
So, they sent a runner from Marathon to Athens to deliver the news of the success. The hemerodrome raced to Athens, shedding his weapons, armor, and clothing along the way to move lithely; he burst into the assembly and proclaimed a massive win. Unfortunately, he ran so hard that, upon delivering the message, he collapsed and died.
Today, the legend states that the runner to Sparta and the runner from Marathon are the same person, Pheidippides.
It’s this second run that we honor today with the word “marathon.”
But our race to 26.2 isn’t over yet, as it has a few loose ends.
First, Herodotus says nothing about this run from Marathon to Athens (in his tale, the entire army marches back to the city). A second run is not mentioned until the first century AD/CE, when Plutarch quotes an annal, now lost, by Heraclides Ponticus. Second, the guy doing the jogging in this tale wasn’t named Pheidippides; he was Thersipus of Erchius or Eucles. Later, a satirist named Lucian changed the name, for some unknown reason, to Pheidippides.
This second run was likely concocted or embellished in the half-millennium that passed between the battle and its arrival in print.
Second, the possible routes from Marathon to Athens are not 26.2 miles long. Between the battlefield and the big city is Mount Pentelicus. Historians map possible pathways at 22 or 25 miles.
How did we end up celebrating a run that probably didn’t occur, at a different length, by a courier who did run a longer and harder route?
The story’s next aid station strangely moves 1,700 years into the future to the English poet Robert Browning.
In 1879, Browning penned Pheidippides, a poem that mashed the historic and the (likely) mythological runs into one epic ultramarathon.
So, when the modern Olympic Games began to take shape at the end of the 19th century, Browning’s work had put the niche Athenian character back on the public’s starting line.
For the inaugural Olympiad in 1896, the organizers wanted to wow the world with an event that would elicit the laurels of ancient Greece.
A Frenchman named Michel Bréal, who was also the founder of modern semantics, sparked an idea to mix Browning’s hero with competition. Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, loved the idea, and the newly coined “marathon” was added to the first games in Athens.
The first race at marathon distance was run on 22 March 1896, as a qualifier for the official race in the upcoming games. A Greek athlete named Charilaos Vasilakos ran 25 miles in 3 hours and 18 minutes. A few weeks later, he finished second at the Olympics to Spyridon Louis, who completed the course in 2 hours and 58 minutes.
Fittingly, the first two winners were Greek, and they won following the mileage from the longer route Pheidippides would have taken to Athens from Marathon.
After thousands of years of history, mythologizing, and running, we were still at 25 miles.
Even after the notion of a marathon caught on worldwide, the idea of 26.2 miles didn’t exist. Different races established varying lengths. The Boston Marathon, for example, was 24.5 miles long from 1897 to 1924.
In 1908, England peeked into this tale a second time. When the Olympics came to London, the organizers decided to route the race from Windsor Castle to White City Stadium, a tidy sum of 26 miles. Then, they opted to append a lap through the stadium, so it would end at the Royal Box.
Add it up, and we get 26.2 miles, or 42.195 kilometers.
Even after this point, the next two Olympiads featured distinct lengths (24.98 and 26.56 miles). But the International Olympic Committee, for some reason, loved the London distance, standardizing the length to 26.2 miles in 1924.
Today, more than 800 marathons occur each year, with hundreds of thousands of competitors. In 2016, Running USA estimated that more than half a million Americans had completed a marathon. They happen on roads and trails; they are run by children and centenarians; they are tackled by those in wheelchairs and with prosthetic limbs. The very fast and the very slow attempt to follow in the footsteps of Pheidippides.
On 26 April 2026, Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe became the first human to break the two-hour mark in a marathon, finishing in 1 hour, 59 minutes, and 30 seconds. That’s 26.2 at 4:33 pace!
Robert Browning would be proud, as he did it in London.
Of course, crazy people haven’t slowed down at 26.2 miles.
Popular ultramarathon distances include 50 kilometers, 50 miles, 100 kilometers, and 100 miles. Some truly insane runners line up for races over 200 miles, through mountain ranges, deserts, and forests.
As intense as those distances sound, it’s not a new phenomenon. We can view Pheidippides as history’s first ultramarathoner. His jaunt to Sparta and back set the tone for long-distance fanatics a long time ago.
History is funny. The most popular endurance distance is based on a run that probably didn’t occur.
If you want the true ancient experience, you can join the annual Spartathlon or the Authentic Pheidippides Run, both of which explore more than 150 miles of the Greek countryside.
And when you finish, you can proclaim, “Rejoice, we conquer!” Hopefully, without the collapsing and dying part.
Further Reading and Exploration
History of the Marathon – Association of International Marathons and Distance Races
The Real Pheidippides Story – Runner’s World
Pheidippides by Robert Browning
AUTHENTIC PHEIDIPPIDES RUN – Official Website
Battle of Marathon by Herodotus
De gloria Atheniensium by Plutarch
