The Queen of Cocodona In 1896, the organizers of the first Modern Olympiad decided to honor a run that an ancient Greek courier named Pheidippides (maybe) made after the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. The newly coined “marathon” featured a distance that roughly mirrored the stretch from Marathon to Athens, around 25 miles (today, a […]
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Marathon Rejoice, we conquer! — Pheidippides, Robert Browning 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
States of Elevation On the topographical map of endurance athletes, one human stands alone on the top isopleth. It’s difficult to enter the realm of hyperbole when discussing the achievements of Kilian Jornet. Literally born to the peaks, Jornet grew up in a mountain hut his parents oversaw in the Spanish Pyrenees, near the triple point
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Failure I’ve been thinking a lot recently about failure. At the end of June 2025, I intently followed two incredible forays in the mountains. The first was an attempt at a fastest known time on the mighty Appalachian Trail; the second was the annual Western States Endurance Run, a 100-mile jaunt through the Sierra Nevada and,