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

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

Given my own puny training regimen, I don’t really know what to say about such an inexplicable, almost intoxicating need to keep pushing oneself. But I think I know what the Greeks would call it: hybris. In ancient Greek hybris was an idea with serious moral implications. It might be translated as “excessiveness,” an arrogant attitude toward nature

On Gymnastics is clear on this point: “Drinking wine, overeating, agitations of the soul and many other voluntary and involuntary things are harmful to sports.”

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.”

“See how lightning falls on the highest buildings and tallest trees, because heaven brings low all things that surpass greatness,” writes Herodotus in Histories (Book 7, 10). Hybris was synonymous with craven behavior, small-mindedness, the inability to accept the human condition which, compared to the perfect and immortal condition of deities, is

Kairos is not a fixed point in time. It doesn’t have a beginning and an end. Instead, it is a continuous action. The Greeks, with their sublime, punctilious conception of grammatical tense, could say it better than I can. Kairos isn’t “I run” or “I won” or “I love” or “I weep.” It’s a kind of motion photography, its focus blurry: “I’m running,” “I’

In short, after a lifetime of agonizing about what time is, thanks to running I was liberated from this inescapable, crudely Proustian obsession and quickly turned to another obsession. I wanted to know what’s inside time.

Philostratus,

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