Espiens, France 23-07-09
What a difference a day makes. A day of rest that is. Also a bottle or two less of red wine the night before a run. Odile (I am her husband) and Joanna went to the beach to visit a friend so I only had a couple of glasses of wine at dinner with the kids last night. The 12k run today was enjoyable. It was a pace builder and I managed it well.
Since I had just written the piece about running technology, I was trying, as I ran, to recall if I had forgotten to mention anything else that Pheidipides could have used to survive his run.
It turns out that the run from Marathon to Athens was probably not what killed him. What few people realize is that he was sent as a messenger to Sparta 120 miles away a week or so before the battle of Marathon. He arrived at Sparta in less than 36hrs they say. It was hilly terrain and a horse could not be used for much of the way. The Spartans were involved in a religious party of some sort and declined to help out the Athenians. So Pheidippides ran all the way back with the bad news and then immediately joined the battle against the Persians.
The Persians had a cunning plan. Draw the small Athenian army out to Marathon, wipe it out there and proceed to an unprotected Athens. Despite being out numbered something like 10 to 1, the Athenians beat the Persians on the plain and drove them back to the shoreline. Another battle ensued and finally the remaining Persians (still a lot of them) made it back onto their boats.
Plan B for the Persians was to sail for Athens anyway. After all, the Athenian army was now 26 miles away. On observing this, the Athenian commanders called upon Pheidippides once again and sent him running to Athens to warn the mostly non-combatant citizens that the Persians were arriving by sea but that the intact Athenian army would be not far behind, via land. Upon delivering the news of the victory at Marathon, the impending threat by sea and the imminent arrival of rescue by land, Pheidippides finally gave into exhaustion and died.
So Pheidipiddes succumbed not to a mere 3hr, 26 mile run but to 240 miles of running and two major battles in the space of 6 days. The trot from Marathon to Athens was only a minor contributing factor. Having known only parts of the Legend – ‘man runs 26 miles to deliver news of victory and promptly expires’ – I, like Michael Clark who wrote about this in Runners World, was always suspicious. Why run yourself to death to deliver good news? Could 26 miles really kill a hardy Athenian?
Provided that I keep the training to less than 240 miles in the six days before Nov 1, and if I refrain from joining in on any large scale, hand-to-hand battles on October 31, I think I stand a decent chance of finishing the NYC Marathon alive.
