The Art of Running: From Marathon to Athens on Winged Feet

Running has awarded me an accelerated degree in bodily intuition, thorough knowledge of all my vital functions—physical and psychic—and how they vary from context to context. I started out corporal-illiterate, accustomed to talking about my body and perceptions with childlike inaccuracy and approximation. Ever since I began to run, “I’m tired” has

It seems like no big deal, like a biological fact, but the discovery of this outmoded classism that divides runners into one of two categories—the born-to-run nobility and the shapeless mass of plebes who are born to do something else but who still strive to run—unsettled me.

The Greeks had a word for this animal attachment to life: philozotéon, an adjective that means something like being a friend and ally to existence. Though for years I was my body’s own worst enemy, the person most responsible for its aches and pains, thanks to running I now find myself cheering my body on, no longer rowing against the current and

Pherenice

Two thousand years ago, Philostratus presented a portrait of the ideal runner that borders on discrimination against those of us who are not ideal: To run well, one first needs to know how to stand upright. For the body to be in perfect proportion, the legs must be in line with the shoulders, the chest smaller than average and able to keep the stom

Health is better than strength and beauty because health lies in the moist and dry, the hot and cold, in all the essential parts of the body, whereas strength and beauty lie in the secondary elements, in the muscles and bones and in a certain symmetry of the limbs. —ARISTOTLE, Topics, Book 3, Part

“Health [hygiene in ancient Greek], they say, exists when the functions are in harmony with nature; wellbeing [eutaxia, literally good constitution] exists when all these functions enjoy a certain robustness. The common condition is that both are not ruled by illnesses; this state is also characterized by a body that functions perfectly well and re

It isn’t just about admiring trees and the countryside but reawakening and retraining the senses. Increasingly shackled to the comforts of our domestic walls and phone screens, we drown out our sense of hearing with noise-cancelling earplugs, clog our sense of smell with artificial deodorants, anesthetize our sense of touch with lotions and sunscre

Not infrequently, sheer tenacity makes up for bad running genes. And there are days when the designs of nature are overtaken, which Philostratus describes as “something wonderful, not to be talked about as a natural but as a rare phenomenon. You are seeing the work of a god who wanted to demonstrate something great to mortals.”