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London olympic images12/24/2022 Cartographers and historians now theorize that his run was actually closer to 20 miles. This course was repeated in the 2004 Athens Olympics, and again in 2010 when 10,000 runners commemorated the 2,500th anniversary of Pheidippides’ trek. Runners followed a 24.85-mile (40-km) route beginning in Marathon and ending at the site of a stadium used in ancient times. The modern marathon is entirely a creation of the organizers of the inaugural Athens Olympics in 1896, who used Pheidippides' legend as inspiration for a headline-grabbing gimmick. Our modern understanding of the figure comes from the 1878 poem “Pheidippides” by Robert Browning, which was most likely a composite of the runner mentioned by Herodotus and that of the two latter historians. Olympic Marathon, 1908 London Games/Getty Images Other historical accounts by Plutarch and Lucian in the 1st and 2nd centuries, respectively, tell the story of a runner by a different name who ran from Marathon to Athens. Herodotus mentions a professional running courier named Pheidippides in his account of the Battle of Marathon, but says he ran from Athens to Sparta. While some scholars argue that the story of Pheidippides is merely historical myth, he does appear in a number of incidents in recorded history. He then died of exhaustion, becoming the first of the estimated eight-per-1,000,000 marathon-related casualties. ![]() In 490 BC, a soldier named Pheidippides supposedly ran from the battlefield at Marathon to the city of Athens to alert the troops of a Greek victory. ![]() In honor of today's Olympic marathon, here's a look back at the origin of the race, plus an explanation of the whole ".2" business.
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