Racing Ahead of Ourselves

Poor Pheidippides, the Greek messenger who dashed to tell the Athenians of their victory over the Persians at Marathon, then promptly died, thereby engraving his name into running lore.

I say ‘poor’ not just because he died – though obviously that qualifies him of being worthy of no small measure of pity, the poor sod. Not just because he likely had to run the 40 kilometres in what was, no doubt, chafing attire. And not because he’d run about 240 kilometres in the previous couple of days to fetch help.

No, I feel sorry for him because I’ve got a hypothesis about why he died. It would be easy to think he collapsed from exhaustion. But the bloke was clearly a decent endurance man or they would never have given him the task.

What if he was the first – and one of the most dramatic – victims of a curse that continues to afflict runners thousands of years later?

You can picture the