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

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

I realized that my efforts are related to my terror of aging. I finally understood, I think, that I keep running because it is the most concrete and effective way for me to feel alive, or at least the one way I know. In other words, I run because I’m afraid of dying.

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’

Psychologists call this ecstasy “peak experience,” a phrase first used in 1970 by the American Abraham Maslow to refer to the maximum gratification produced by the state of flow—runner’s orgasm, sort of. Once a runner comes down from this higher plane, he or she feels exhausted, undone by the emotion, the way we feel after sex, yet at the same time

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.”

According to sources, Arrichion died by strangulation while obstructing his opponent’s feet and forcing him to call the fight. Whatever really happened, we know that the victory laurels were placed on the dead man’s head. A statue of him was erected in the market of Phigalia, his hometown, to remind future generations of his feat.

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.

For years I asked every runner I know, from the most diehard to the least disciplined, why they run, but none was able to give me a clear answer. They all offered a generic response: “well-being,” of course, physical or mental. But one’s reason for running can’t be defined by that fleeting fistful of endorphins, since there are many human activitie