Event Tracking:   https://track.trail.live/event/spartathlon/leaders?fbclid=IwAR2_ZgxbwG8jzCx5AxZslNcuFdvVDtefyG33SXdFPeuyrdAhm6KYbTq8i34

On Friday 24th and Saturday 25th of September ​I will be running in the "Spartathlon" in Greece (https://www.spartathlon.gr/en​). Spartathlon is a footrace starting in Athens and finishing 153 miles away in Sparta. It is based on the legend of Pheidippedes, yes that same soldier who ran 26-ish miles from the Bay of Marathon to Athens to proclaim "Nike, Nike" (victory) over the Persian dictator Darius I. The Athenians were "free" people governed by demos, or democracy, the first iteration of this concept in the world. The Battle of Marathon was therefore kind of a big deal! If the Athenians had lost, the Western World as we know it may not exist. Pheidippedes' victory claiming run is the reason we have the distance of "the marathon". But what's less well known about Pheidippedes is that he was also sent by Athens before the battle to the city-state of Sparta, to request an alliance with their legendary king Leonidas against the Persians. The legend (according to Herodotus) has it that he set out at sunrise and arrived by sunset on the second day. At the time of year he ran this is equivalent to an unbelievably fast 36 hours.

For many hundreds of years, no one was strong enough, crazy enough or indeed perhaps desperate enough to do this again. That all changed in 1982 when a four strong team of runners from the British RAF, backed up by a small RAF Expeditionary Grant and a couple of jeeps, attempted the feat. Their motivation was to discover whether this legend really could be true. Three of them - John Foden, John McCarthy and John Scholtens - were successful, and in the process they created the modern day Spartathlon race. It has since become a coveted "ultramarathon" race, almost an unofficial world championships of long distance road running, with athletes from all over the world testing themselves against the distance, tight time limit, heat and hills.

Next Friday i'll line up at the Acropolis with 350 fellow runners to attempt this run again. It'll be my fourth attempt at it, so not my first rodeo, but i'm very nervous all the same. It's not the kind of thing that gets any easier, especially not as age seems to keep advancing on me more rapidly that Pheidippides' sandals! People who run this race have all kinds of motivations, some very personal and some that are more based on charitable endeavours or perhaps to make statements on how we all behave together in this world of ours. As well as some personal athletic ambitions (mostly getting to the end in one piece!), some recent commentary in the UK has given me quite a lot of charitable fire and led me to choose the RNLI as the charity i'd like to try to raise a little bit of money for this year. The ancient Athenians might have invented democracy, but they didn't always get things right. In some ways, they forgot their Gods. Justifying themselves in the sack and pillage of the small neutral island Melos during the 30 year Peloponesian war, Thucydides records:

“we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice only enters where there is equal power to enforce it, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

Or in other words, "might is right".

This goes against the exceptionally ancient Greek concept of Xenia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenia_(Greek)), or guest-friendship, a set of laws deemed to be so fundamental to civilized human life that their patron was Zeus himself:

The Greek god Zeus is sometimes called Zeus Xenios in his role as a protector of strangers. He thus embodied the moral obligation to be hospitable to foreigners and guests. Theoxeny or theoxenia is a theme in Greek mythology in which human beings demonstrate their virtue or piety by extending hospitality to a humble stranger (xenos), who turns out to be a disguised deity (theos) with the capacity to bestow rewards. These stories caution mortals that any guest should be treated as if potentially a disguised divinity and help establish the idea of xenia as a fundamental custom.

Personally speaking, Thucydides sounds like a bit of a snake to me! I'm with the big man Zeus on this one, and that's why i'm raising money for the RNLI. In the long run, Xenia wins, the weak do not need to suffer what they must and nobody should be left to die in the sea.