marathon

Considering its long history, the long haul marathon has an unusually short, well-defined history. The English word is a 1896 borrowing from French marathon, coined in 1894 by French linguist and marathon inventor Michel Bréal. Bréal was inspired by Pheidippides, a 1879 poem by English poet Robert Browning that retold the legend of the eponymous ancient courier. The poem established the version of the legend we tell today: a courier runs the 25 miles from Marathon to Athens to herald victory, then dies of exhaustion.

The story of Phedippides has some basis in history. Herodotus, writing around 440 BCE, describes a courier named Philippides at the 490 BCE Battle of Marathon. In that history, Philippides ran the 140 miles from Athens to Sparta in two days to call for reinforcements before the battle. The 25-mile run from Marathon to Athens and subsequent death from exhaustion originate from a different feat that Plutarch, writing over five centuries later, attributed to a runner named Eucles.

The Greek town of Marathon is named for the Ancient Greek word for fennel, μάραθον (márathon). It was likely borrowed into Greek from a local language that has been lost to history.

Photo of the start of the 1896 Olympic marathon, in the Greek town of Marathon. About 50 men and several horses are lined up on a road in front of a large one-story building in the countryside. 8 children watch from the roof of the building.

Inspired by the ancient Olympic Games held every four years from 776 BCE until 393 CE, French aristocrat and historian Pierre de Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee in 1890 to revive the quadrennial competition. The inaugural 1896 Athens Olympics lacked a headline event before Bréal suggested re-enacting the marathon run as a road race. The games and race were wildly successful, even attracting 14 athletes from the US. The marathon in particular was such a resonant idea that the annual Boston Marathon was held in 1897 and every year since (besides 2020).

The marathon’s status as the longest competitive distance inspired its metaphorical meaning of any really long event by 1909. -thon starts being used as a suffix with the same meaning in 1928 with walkathon. The first telethon was held in 1949; the first hackathon in 1985.

As with most international athletics, it was some time before distances and records were standardized. The marathon’s standard distance of 42.195 km (26.22 miles) was established in 1921 by measuring the course for the 1908 London Olympics. World records are now retroactively based on that distance, so the first marathon record time is 1908’s first-place time of 2:55:18. Over a century of accumulated improvements culminated in the first sub-2 hour marathon earlier this year, 1:59:30 by Kenyan distance runner Sabastian Sawe. That is over 26 consecutive miles at a sub-4:40 pace.