12.30pm, March 7th 2010

Between Godstow and North Oxford

“Feel free to listen to your music if you want.”

“It’s OK.”

“No, really, mate, I don’t mind.”

“It’s fine; I was just going through a wall back there, that’s all.”

I glared at the back of my training partner’s running vest. Anything rather than concentrate on the feeling in the backs of my thighs. You patronising Irish bastard, I thought, do you really think you’re in control here? We pounded on in silence through a gloriously sunny morning, oblivious to the light on the canal, to the couples on their Sunday strolls, and above all to the fun runners we occasionally passed. Then, grinning with my teeth gritted together, I quickened my pace and passed him. Two miles to go - what have you got for me? Past the bridge to St Edward’s School, I was leading by three or four yards. Beyond another bridge, a bridge that didn’t even have a name or a purpose except to mark out the distance between us and the finish. Then, at the bridge to Port Meadow, he drew a deep draught from some stygian reserve tank and pulled ahead. One yard. Two yards. Four yards. We reached the final straight and there was no way he could be caught, but I tried anyway. He finished seven yards in front of me. We shook hands, and staggered to the dining hall as though the preceding twenty-four miles hadn’t happened.

This - I thought - is what the marathon is about. People often try to extract metaphors for life from their sports, but a marathon is only ever itself, just a race. Marathons are not won by artistry, philosophy or any but the crudest forms of tactics. Instead, the marathon is a kind of hierarchy of brute physical fitness and mental resilience. The race is won before it has even begun, in little contests of will like the one that just unfolded. It is a pure, simple competition. To watch an athlete like Heile Gebreselassie or Sammy Wanjiru win a race is to rejoice in the aesthetic of absolute efficiency, in the kind of concentration that will not allow even the slightest slip. The ideal marathon is a mathematical aristocracy. You run to climb this ladder, to beat yourself, your friends, or just the man next to you. Or so I thought.

Oliver Moody

9pm, 28th Hecatombaeon 490 BC

Hill of Colonus Agoraeus, Athens

Shortly after sundown, exactly two thousand five hundred years ago. Standing on this hill, in the middle of the tense crowd, you can see a line of bobbing lights approaching the Gate of the Ceramicus. If you squint hard, you can see that two of the little fires have pulled apart from the rest, quickening as they come in sight of the Acropolis. Two aristocratic youths bearing torches and running as though all the cavalry of Persia were at their back.

The frontrunner has a lead of twenty cubits or so, but he’s tiring fast. Just after the shrine to Oedipus, as they head onto the final stade, his pursuer closes the gap. The look in his eyes proclaims that he owns this distance. Tachybiades may have wiped the grins off the faces of those nouveaux-riches boys from Acragas in the short footrace at Olympia last summer, but he won’t hold his lead over the longer course at Athens. The princeling with the long hair in second shifts gear effortlessly and tears past Tachybiades with a hundred cubits to go. One cubit ahead. Two cubits. Four cubits. Home.

He is in a state of rapture. Like all his young friends, in fact like anybody who’s anybody in Athens, he lives for two words alone: “tenella Kallinikos!”, the resounding cry of the victor. He’ll bring glory to his family name, glory to his community in Attica - we’re not quite in the age of the monumental praise-poetry of Pindar yet, but impromptu songs will still be sung in his honour tonight - oh, and -

“We want you to go to the Spartans, Phaedipides.”

For this is no ordinary race. The course at the Panathenaea has been specially extended to sixty stades (about ten kilometres) this year, to pick out the best endurance runner in all Attica. The winner will run to Sparta over jagged mountains, rocky valleys and goat-haunted crags, to ask them to send an army. Time is of the essence. The henchmen of the Great King of Persia are leading the biggest foreign force ever to invade Greece, and Athens is next in their sights. If the Athenians are to have the slenderest hope of survival, they must send for help. Soon.

Enter Phaedipides, the son of a minor noble, rich enough to devote his life to being the best distance runner in the world. He lives in a society obsessed with honour, where every religious festival has its own footrace, where the worth of a family is judged by its athletic prowess. In sending a runner like Phaedipides to cover the hundred and forty gruelling miles to Sparta, and not a messenger on horseback, the Athenians are making a statement. We are proud, strong people like you, and we are in the direst straits.

Phaedipides’ task, to cross the Peloponnesian massif and return in the space of four days, with the dead weight of his city’s liberty chafing on his shoulders, is serious, possibly even lethal. If you cannot imagine what it is like to run two hundred and eighty miles, read Haruki Murakami’s account of a mere ultra-marathon on Hokkaido in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and multiply it by five and a half. Yet in a way it is also a game, a race like any other. The prize is the kind of glory that Olympic victors can only dream about: an immortality more absolute than that won by any modern athlete.

This is what the classical world is all about. Achilles was a runner, and when he reasserts his authority in the Achaean camp at Troy, he does so by holding athletic games to mark the funeral of his lover Patroclus. Centuries later, runners at the Nemean or Olympic games were gunning for kleos, the same glory for which the Homeric warrior would give his own life.

The poets who wrote for the victors aimed to make their names echo for all eternity. The entire natural universe is thought of as a struggle for supremacy. “Water is best,” begins a famous poem of Pindar, “and gold, which shines forth as a blazing fire in the night, a glory of superb wealth. But if you wish to sing of contests, my soul, look for no star in the lonely heavens of the day that blazes more brightly than the sun, nor claim that any games is better than the Olympic.”

This spirit burned with a hard, gemlike flame even in democratic Athens, and so on into the Roman Republic, where public life was a vast pyramid soaring up towards the two consuls. A young man would enter the cursus honorum, the treacherous track that led to what Cicero called laus et honestas: the honour that others give you, and the honour you give yourself. Onwards and upwards.

9am, 21st March 2010

Piazza di Porta Capena, Rome

The sun has not quite broken through the cloud yet, and in this light Rome looks like a grainy photograph of itself, snapped by a disgruntled tourist. To my left, the Circus Maximus hares off towards the Tiber, rounds a hairpin bend on the inside, and recurves tautly back at me. But I’m here for another race today. This is the day of the twenty-first Rome Marathon, and Rome is out in force to watch the race. Tribes of white-shirted runners have been trekking past me for the last hour, with children - Christ! - even dogs blazoned with race numbers.

“Are they running, too?”

“Of course,” smiles a mother herding her two sons, who must be six and eight respectively.

“All forty-two kilometres?”

“O Dio, no! Just five.”

She lines up her kids for a family photograph and I turn away, feeling a little low. I’ve done some unspecified mischief to my right knee a couple of days before and can scarcely walk, let alone run. I’ve come to Rome to cheer on my training partner Anthony - for the patronising Irish bastard is a good friend of mine, after all, and should run a very respectable time.

The band strikes up, and a there is a peppering of applause as the disabled athletes zoom past on those incredible machines, all wheels and sinew. Then come the kings of the course, in a cavalcade of brilliance – Siraj, Benson, Nixon, Kedir, then a gap of a minute or so. A little way behind, the courtiers jostle for precedence, grand dukes, earls, plenipotentiaries and brigadier-generals. Anthony passes somewhere around the barons, his face a mask of concentration. Two helicopters circle overhead like vultures waiting to pick off the stragglers.

Then the sun comes out. The crowd’s mood lifts visibly, and fifteen thousand bodies stagger past in a blind mass. Many are gazing ahead like grim death already. Some still stop to hi-five the spectators over the barriers. Some, against all the odds, are smiling. I see one hero dressed in the full gear of a Roman legionary, complete with his spear and two stone of wooden shield.

“Vai, Maximus!” beams the lady next to me. “Bravo!”

There is a tiny Japanese man with an enormous banner which declares that he is Yoshi the Barefoot Runner, out to run a shoeless marathon on every continent. And still they come, the broken, the beaten, and the power-walkers. And now, for the first time in my life, I ask myself why they do it.

Why? Some of them are already entrenched in their own personal hells, bodies spent after two kilometres. Why would you run a marathon if the winner is finished and guzzling his post-race Lucozade four hours before you? Why enter a race that is lost before you have even begun? Why hit wall after wall after bloody wall only to finish a hundred places from the bottom?

Oliver Moody

5pm, 8th April 2010

East Oxford - After the Rome Marathon

I took up running six years ago. Since then, I’ve done over ten half marathons, and none of them fast. I don’t consider myself gifted at running. I often run-walk or just jog, but considering the world of good it has done my stress levels and waistline I stick with it.

Since I had experience in half marathons I knew 13.1 wouldn’t be a problem, it was after. So what I did was to “reward” myself by saving all the best podcasts and music until after 13.1. Everyone says marathon running is mind games, and I worked on playing that angle when I trained. I did as much training as I could alone so I learned to be completely without outside support. I stuck the mileage I needed to run on a calendar and set my clothes out to run in so I couldn’t weasel out. All my short mileage I ran with no music so I could listen to my body and breathing. Finally, I stationed my family and friends at the very end of the race so I had a definite reason to finish.

There was also one extra kicker - I decided to fundraise for the National Autistic Society as more incentive. My brother is autistic (and a runner himself) and I wanted to set a good example for him. When those packets and your jersey show up, along with all the encouraging emails and donations... if that doesn’t guilt trip you into running, I don’t know what will!

Running the Rome Marathon was a wonderful experience. The course is beautiful (though not fast with all the cobblestones). I will definitely run another marathon, and will most definitely return to Rome to run again in the future.

Cristin Merritt

10am, 21st March 2010

Isola Tiburtina, Rome

Just past the seventeen kilometre mark, by a broken Roman bridge in the middle of the Tiber, Cristin’s husband Tom is telling me about running. He was once an all-American sportsman, he says, but now he has resigned himself to being “that fat bastard.” In a month’s time, he will run the London Marathon, in spite of a chronic injury. He literally just wants to get round the course.

“But why?”

Anthony has long been and gone, running solidly somewhere in the top five hundred. He looks set to finish in three hours. We’re waiting to cheer on Cristin, who seems to be running a little more slowly than she’d hoped, and is on course for six and a half hours or so. Meanwhile our Roman legionary comes past, bent double with agony. His once-proud spear occasionally slips to Mussolini’s tarmac and drags there for a moment. Tappity-tap tippity-tap RRRRR tappity-tap.

“Look,” says Tom. “One time Cris and I set out to run a 5k in the States. We had trouble finding the start, though, so by the time we turned up they’d already been going for twenty minutes.”

He pauses to cheer on a fellow American with a whoop. Go USA!

“Well, since we’d gone all that way, we figured better late than never, so we ran it. And pretty soon we caught up with one of the biggest ladies I’ve ever seen. And I mean, big. She must have been, what, three hundred-fifty, four hundred pounds. And right there we decided that there was no way this woman was going to finish last. No matter how long we had to run behind her. That way maybe - just maybe - she’d have the confidence to run another race.

“She was just running to finish. Well, that’ll be me in London. I’ve got it all worked out: I won’t cause myself any lasting damage. Just inflammation, and pain. But the inflammation will die down, and what’s five, six hours of pain?”

6am, 25th April 2010

The Oxford Tube Bus to London Victoria

It’s D-Day, and I’m still injured. Still, seven hundred pounds of sponsorship money are riding on this race, and it’s not often that you get that much money for four or five hours’ agony, so I will run it regardless. It will be humiliating. After nearly a thousand miles of “specialist” training, I’m going to be just another average 18-60 Male struggling to drag his body around the course. So why am I grinning?

One thing you don’t often hear about the London Marathon is how much fun it is to run. For some London neighbourhoods, this is their biggest opportunity to show off in the year. During the first thirteen miles you cannot run a thousand yards without coming across a new live band - morris dancers, kettle drummers, jazz - or at the very least a pub with ludicrously big speakers. Children stick their hands through the railings to offer the runners hi-fives or jelly babies; one house is even turned into a pirate ship for the day.

It is one enormous party. It’s hard not to smile when you’re running between a man in a Borat thong and a group of spectators dressed as emperor penguins. Stiff upper lip and all that. Laughter and pain. Sex, charity, fitness, vanity, recovery, emancipation; a hundred reasons good and bad surge and meld and surge again in the crowd. In spite of all the reasons people articulate for running the London Marathon, however, I don’t think they can give voice to the real impulse. They could not tell you the real reason why, any more than Zorba the Greek could tell you why he cut off half his index finger for love of the potter’s wheel, for love of life, for love... “Why! Why! Can’t a man do anything without a why? Just like that, because he wants to?”

The sum total of all these motivations is all that matters: an iron endurance that puts twenty thousand bodies through what no human body was designed to achieve. The runner knows no why, just as the rain knows no why. It’s like watching a phenomenon of nature; I’m reminded of Charles Sorley’s Song of the Ungirt Runners:

The rain is on our lips,

We do not run for prize.

But the storm the water whips

And the wave howls to the skies.

The winds arise and strike it

And scatter it like sand,

And we run because we like it

Through the broad bright land.

It’s the will to life. These athletes are running not to beat their fellow men, but rather to wage a blind war against everything that is bad in their lives. In this, they put the elite runners to shame.

And so we arrive at that most stomach-churningly British of commonplaces: it’s the taking part that counts, not the winning. But now I realise that what I once took for an empty platitude - the sort of thing you would say to a rugby team of midget schoolboys about to face fifteen giant mutants from the Welsh valleys - is essentially true, vitally true. It lies at the heart of our society. The modern world is one which not only tolerates the weak, but loves and values them, and recognises that they can outdo the strong in their heroism.

If you want to see the truth of this, go and watch a big city marathon. The top hundred go past in their moment of thunderous glory, and then the rest of the world comes tumbling by, stumbling on in a stream of humanity, mothers and daughters and brothers and cancer victims, men dressed as Darth Vader and the Ugly Sisters, and it is these runners whom the crowd are really here to see. Listen to them cheer. Pageantry, solidarity, sentimentality, call it what you will, this is a force, a force that makes people greater than themselves.

The marathon turns out to be a microcosm of modern life, after all. It shows that we have achieved what the Greeks and the Romans never did: we have made goodness and excellence two different things. The anonymous face in the crowd, punishing his middle-aged body to cover twenty-six miles in five and a half hours, and raising two thousand pounds for the MacMillan Cancer Trust - this man is the hero of the twenty-first century. He gives all he has, unstinting. His feet drum their unceasing, unwavering rhythm on the road, and it is lost in the symphony of thousands. And he, like me and like every man and woman around him - will claim his winner’s medal at the end.

Oliver Moody

4pm, 5th Metageitnion 490 BC

The Areopagus, Athens

Tension, hotter than the August sun. The general Miltiades has taken every man fit enough to grasp a lance to make a last stand against the Persian hordes. The Spartans have not come. The Thebans are overrun. Athens and tiny Plataea fight alone this afternoon.

In the Areopagus, meanwhile, an ancient court open to the heavens and set in the heart of Athens, all those who cannot fight have gathered to wait. In some ways, the waiting takes more guts than the fighting. Their men have gone out against impossible odds. At every hour they expect a messenger bearing news of a crushing defeat.

At last, a forlorn little figure on the road from the north-east. Stripped of armour, streaked with sweat and dried gore, and running with that steely lope of a man who has gone through his last wall. Not a word is spoken as he climbs the Pnyx to the Areopagus. As he approaches the sacred ground he slows to a walk. All eyes are on the runner. A sharp observer might notice a trickle of blood running from his lips.

“What news, Phaedipides?”

The world draws its breath.

“Centre - broken. Callimachus - slain. Stesilaus - slain.” His body is wracked by a cough. “Wings - held. Persians - fled - round - Sunion.”

A child points to the south, where black sails bob on the horizon.

“Army - whole army” - cough - “whole - returning. Running.” Phaedipides falls to his knees. “Race - to Athens. I’ve - won. We’ve... won.”

Then, in the ringing silence, an old, old man begins to clap. It catches. The whole assembly of women and children and men so infirm that they have been carried to the Areopagus is alive with applause. The clapping rises to a storm, and does not end until hours later, when the last overweight, balding hoplite comes puffing home, and the Persian fleet fades away into the East.

And there, in the middle of the debating floor that will one day resound with the voices of Pericles and Sophocles and Demosthenes, young Phaedipides coughs up his last mouthful of blood.

Let him die. Hell, let the Persians return. The city survives. The race goes on.