Marathon History: Pheidippides' Myth, a Royal Box and Kathrine Switzer

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The marathon's founding legend says a messenger named Pheidippides ran from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens in 490 BC, announced the Greek victory and died on the spot. Herodotus, the main contemporary chronicler of the Greco-Persian wars, tells it differently: his messenger, Philippides, was sent from Athens to Sparta before the battle to ask for reinforcements, a trip of over 150 miles across mountains, and he is never said to have died. The fatal run first appears more than five centuries later in Roman-era writers such as Plutarch and the satirist Lucian of Samosata, and Robert Browning's 1879 poem Pheidippides fused the accounts into a version Victorian readers took as fact. For the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896, French philologist Michel Bréal pitched a marathon race to Pierre de Coubertin, and Greek water carrier Spyridon Louis won the roughly 40-kilometer run to the Panathenaic Stadium in 2:58:50 as Greek princes ran the final lap beside him.

The distance kept changing until the 1908 London Olympics, where a planned 26-mile course from Windsor Castle was stretched by 385 yards so the finish would sit in front of the royal box, producing 26.2 miles, or 42.195 kilometers. Italian runner Dorando Pietri collapsed several times, was helped across the line and disqualified, and the drama fixed the distance in the public mind before the IAAF standardized it in 1921. Women were barred from the Olympic marathon until 1984, when Joan Benoit won. Bobbi Gibb hid in the bushes to join the 1966 Boston Marathon unofficially, and Kathrine Switzer entered in 1967 as K.V. Switzer, then had to be shielded by her boyfriend and other runners when co-director Jock Semple tried to rip off her bib. She finished in about four hours and 20 minutes. The episode closes with carbon-plated shoes, energy gels and the sub-two-hour record it attributes to Kenya's Sebastian Sawe.

• The 1904 St. Louis marathon involved scorching heat, dust inhalation and runners drinking rat poison as a stimulant.
• Stamata Revithi ran the 1896 course the day after the men but was left out of the official results.
• Doctors claimed long runs would damage women's reproductive systems, echoing the Victorian idea of the wandering womb.
• The body stores about 2,000 calories of glycogen, which runs dry around mile 20, the point runners call hitting the wall.
• Fauja Singh completed a marathon at age 93, and Gladys Burrill finished one at 92.