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Painting by Luc-Olivier Merson: Pheidippides announcing the victory at the Battle of Marathon in Athens
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The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky.
Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007)
Jo and I talked about running one morning when we ran on the Acropolis hill. We met many early-bird-cats. And we decided to run from Marathon to Athens, which is roughly 42 kilometres 195 metres.
When we talked about running, we noticed we shared pretty similar attitude towards running. For us running means kind of a way of living, the way how a body moves in a city and in different environments. One can run to school or to work, one can run along the long corridors between offices, one can run up and down the stairs. Running is the most natural and easy way to get oriented to the new places. In bigger cities running is also fast way to move from one place to another and understand the structure of the city. One can run for clearing the mind or calming the rotating thoughts. On can run for getting rid of too much energy. Or just for fun, of course. The core thing is that running doesn’t need any specific gears, equipment nor outfit. Just feet and the attitude.
I had been thinking of running the “real” marathon – the legendary route from Marathon to Athens, which has given the name to the 42, 195km race run – just for curiosity. The legend tells that a Greek messenger called Pheidippides was told to run from Marathon to Athens in order to announce about victory at the Battle of Marathon, in which the Greek beat Persians in 490 BC. The poor runner collapsed and died after the run with the last whisper on his lips: “We have won!”
Actually the idea for running the route came to my mind from Haruki Murakami’s famous book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007), which is probably the only book I’ve read about running. I’ve read it several times and I love it. It’s not a novel, it’s not a documentation, not a diary. It is a book about learning and living. The book tells, obviously, running, but it tells also about addiction, passion, pain and pleasure, writing, getting older and still running. The text runs with the reader. Sometimes the sentence is short and stepping, sometimes it rolls free. In my opinion Murakami mystifies running a bit, but maybe running is worth it. For Murakami running seems to mean elevating oneself both metaphorically and practically. I think running as more natural and practical thing. For me running doesn’t mean raising my own level, but it is really basic thing in life: “To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm” as Murakami writes.
We talked with Jo about Murakami’s book, we called our way of running as ‘free running’ or ‘free run’. Maybe I proposed that term, but I need to correct it now. ‘Free running’ is actually not a correct term, as revised. ‘Free running’ means an action close to parkour. Nevertheless, parkour emphasizes efficiency, where as free running is about freedom of movement with acrobatic moves and action, kind of form of urban acrobatics (In turn, the term free run is capitalized by Nike sports firm, which is annoying.)
Our running is just speeding up walking, moving forward. We simply wanted to run from Marathon to Athens without any specific things, wearing the shoes we wore (well, both had kind of everyday sneakers), wearing casual clothes and carrying the things we would need in back bags. Move from Marathon to Athens by running.
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The bus to from Athens Marathon departed at 8.15 o’clock on Monday morning 22nd May. After some missteps, we finally found the right bus at 8.14. At that time, we had already run a pretty stressful sweaty warming up tour before the bus to Marathon even left.
The trip lasted much longer than we supposed. It was warm in the bus and I drank already half of my water. We discussed about Fernando Pessoa’s book Anarchists banker and the difficulties to define left and right. It’s interesting that Pessoa’s book was first translated in Finnish 1992, which in Finland was the deepest year of the 1990’s depression and the year of a massive unemployment. The new translation came out 2014, which was on the threshold of the crisis of euro and European economy.
In Marathon. Finally, after more than one and half hour, the bus driver left us at a cross roads in Marathon. There was nothing else on the cross road, but a memorial with a statue of Nike and a logo of European Union. No kiosk, café, bar, shop just the bus stop and the statue.
Ouch, we had hoped to have found a toilet, but no, so we started our ‘free’marathon by peeing behind the Nike statue. We also noticed that we had some drastic lacks among our equipment. No sun lotion (thanks Ruben for the first aid), nothing to eat, no toilet paper, not even caps to wear on our heads. The two bottles of water we had bought from the bus station in Athens were already half empty. Before ten it was already warm, hot and sunny. The temperature was 28 Celsius degrees. My long trousers were a wrong choice with no doubt. I made a miniskirt out of my extra shirt. And my trousers I tied for a turban. We were ready to go.
Then we ran. I really like GPS and all kinds of down loadable maps, but I’m really bad in using them. After running approximately a kilometre on a really narrow hay path, we thought: “no no no, this cannot be the right way”. Fortunately we met bunch of nice young people who told us to go back, to run to completely opposite direction.
Then we ran again. It was warm and nice. We discussed about families, all kind of families, and we discussed about love. Many loves, different kinds of loves. I tried to quote feminist and theorist bell hooks, whose book I had recently read, but I didn’t know if I managed well. I had been impressed by her remark that loving is not for the faint-hearted. Loving, day after day, requires the courage to face the disappointment of how everyday love and the various miscellaneous things in the world around us are far removed from the ideal of love. It requires even more courage to extend love to the societal structures that need repairing.
Now in this text I can add couple of sentences about her thoughts, which we talked about. In her book All about Love. New Visions (2000), bell hooks reflects on the possibilities of love in our society. Hooks writes that is much easier to understand love and learn how to love if, instead of using the noun “love”, we would primarily – and always – see love as a verb. Instead of “love”, we would say ”loving”. She quotes a definition by the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck in his life-skills book The Road Less Travelled (1978), in which Peck defines love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth". Hooks quotes Peck: "Love is as love does. Love is an act of will – namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love."
While talking we had run uphill without being absolutely sure about the way – enough though – according to my navigation. The landscape was beautiful, green hills, shadows of the "clouds of all different sizes" wandered on the surfaces of the hills, fresh air, almost no cars. We ran up hills, sky seemed to come closer all the time, until the road ended to a fence guarded by soldiers. They told us to turn back because it was a military area, no trespassing and “it is the dead end for you, ladies”. I said we were supposed to go to Athens and if they could kindly tell us where to go. “Just turn around, go back for four kilometres and you’ll find the cross roads to the high way to Athens.” We waved our hands to the soldiers.
Then we ran again. Downhill. Sour sweet four kilometres downhill.
When we found a cross roads where we had turned to the wrong direction, we noticed that yes, actually there were a red path and a sign in every kilometre counting down the running kilometres to Athens. The sign announced it's 41 kilometres to Athens.
Well, if someone someday will run from Marathon to Athens, FYI, there is a marked red path with signs. Don’t trust your GPS, google maps, or any other sorcery, just follow the red path and take the most boring, most noisy straight road from the Marathon cross road directly to Acropolis in Athens.
So we ran again. This time the way was right, but not even close as beautiful as our first lost eight kilometres. We ran on very narrow shred on the street shoulder. Most of the time the route was difficult. Not in a sense that we wouldn’t have known where to run, but the pavement was uneven and bumpy. It was actually pretty much rail running, since the path was mostly grassy. We jumped over the stones, pavements, over the pile of rubbish, ran in front and behind the pee-smelly bus stops, jumped over the animal corpses hit by cars. All the time the traffic was heavy and noisy. We ran kilometre after kilometre in industrial areas, with international supermarkets and enterprises.
It was very very warm. It was hot. Sun was burning my shoulders and face. We ran out of water and we had to buy more. At some point muscles wanted to rest and I felt that my feet started to swell in my shoes. I guess it can be called pain. But light and bearable and self-made pain. “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.” Murakami
We stopped only if we needed to buy more water. At the same time we bought sun cream, coke, potato ships and chocolate. Otherwise we ran.
We stopped talking about after 20 kilometres. We just ran silently one after the other. “I'm often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.” Murakami
Jo was amazing. This was her first marathon. In heat, with no rules, no timing, no service, no supporters waving by the street. Just running.
After 42 kilometres we stopped running. It was done for that day.
We stood still in hot, heavy air with fumes smell. The noise of traffic was around us. We wanted to sit down for a while but the only possible place was a garden markets entrance. There we sat on a fake grass mat in heat discussing about the practical details how to find our way to the hotel. Both sweaty and sun burned.
