Marathon Bytes – 1

Since I am aiming at running a full marathon, I decided it would be good to start collecting a few interesting facts about marathons in the first place. The following has been mostly gleaned from Wikipedia, and is the first in a series of “Marathon bytes” that I will be writing.

The marathon is a long-distance running event of 42.195 kilometres (26 miles 385 yards) that can be run either as a road race or off-road

The name marathon comes from the legend of Pheidippides, a Greek soldier, who was sent from the town of Marathon to Athens to announce that the Persians had been defeated in the Battle of Marathon. It is said that he ran the entire distance without stopping and burst into the Senate, exclaiming “Νενικήκαμεν” (Nenikékamen, ‘We have won’ or ‘We are victorious’) before collapsing and dying of exhaustion.

The world record time for men over the distance is 2 hours 4 minutes and 26 seconds, set in the Berlin Marathon by Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia on September 30, 2007.

The world record for women was set by Paula Radcliffe of United Kingdom in the London Marathon on April 13, 2003, in 2 hours 15 minutes and 25 seconds.