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

When I run, I’m alive, physically and biologically, doing what I was programmed to do: pushing my body to its maximum physical potential. It’s objective and observable, and it can easily be measured by the tools of science.

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

“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

“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

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.

In short, to run, and continue running, one needs a reason tougher than any tendon, an unshakeable will to give it your all, without reservation or limits, to the bitter end—the same kind of will that led the first marathon runner in history to run to his death and beyond.

In his book Les jeux et les hommes (Man, Play and Games), French sociologist and esteemed translator of Borges Roger Caillois analyzes human play and draws a distinction between games that emerge spontaneously, or paideia (from Greek pais, child), and games with clear rules, or ludus, from Latin, fun games, from which we get the word ludic. The lat

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

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