• Ancient Origins of the History of Marathon Running?
  
• The First Modern Olympic Marathon: 1896
  
• The 1908 London Marathon: Men of Iron
  
• Edwardian Marathon Mania
  
• The Running Boom and the Rise of Mass Participation Races
  
• Women Enter the Race: Breaking Barriers in Marathon Running
  
• The Democratization of Endurance
  
• Ultramarathons and the New Endurance Frontier
  
• Still the Gold Standard

A History of Marathon Running

Ancient Origins?

Despite the role of semi-legendary events from Ancient Greece in the history of marathon running as it is often told today, long-distance races were never an important part of Greek athletic culture.

The most prestigious event at the Olympic Games was the stadion, a short sprint of roughly 190 metres. The diaulos and hoplitodromos were sprints too, both around 380 metres. Only the dolichos, at around 5,000 metres, might qualify as long-distance by modern standards, and even then it’s not a distance that would raise many eyebrows today.

So when the classically educated founders of modern athletics began formalising the sport in Victorian Britain, they followed the Greek example by favouring short races, typically of under a mile in length. Sprints and middle-distance races not only aligned with ancient traditions, they also better reflected the qualities most prized by sport’s upper-class administrators at the time: dash, elegance, and effortless speed.

Longer races, by contrast, often descended into slow, grueling tests of endurance – less reminiscent of the noble athletic heroes of ancient Olympia than of the grim factory toil associated with the lives of the Victorian poor. Worse still, in longer events, hardened working-class runners who trained seriously had a disconcerting habit of beating their upper-class rivals. Better, then, to stick to the sprints, where such socially inconvenient gaps in ability were less likely to show.

The First Modern Olympic Marathon: 1896

So, when the Amateur Athletics enthusiast Baron Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympic Games in 1896, long-distance running could easily have played no part at all. Indeed, if it wasn’t for a French professor called Michel Bréal, there would have been no race over a distance of more than 1,500m. Bréal, though, had lobbied the Baron to include a long race in the Olympic schedule in honour of Pheidippides, the ancient Greek messenger who had run from Marathon to Athens to announce victory over the Persians at the start of the fifth century BCE.

Or had he? In fact, the Pheidippides story was a misunderstanding that had resulted from the garbling of two accounts from the ancient world by the English poet, Robert Browning. Pheidippides actually ran 150 miles from Athens to Sparta to request military help, not 25 miles from Marathon to Athens to announce victory. If there really was an original Marathon runner, he must have been someone else entirely! However, as a result of the professor’s intervention and the general ignorance of the people in charge of the Games regarding the ancient sources, a single endurance race did make the cut. And in managing to connect the high-flown and respectable ideals of the Olympic movement to this solitary long-distance race – the marathon – he changed the course of endurance running forever, setting in motion the modern history of marathon races.

Olympic officials chose a 40 km course between Marathon and Athens for the race, replicating the route mistakenly believed to have been taken by Pheidippides 2,400 years earlier. The event attracted huge interest because it appeared to be the best chance the host nation had of taking a gold medal in the athletics at their home Games. Tens of thousands of people were out on the streets of Athens to witness the final miles of the race, and excitement mounted as news filtered through that one of the Greek runners, Louis Spyridon, held an unassailable lead. Spyridon was an unknown peasant who earned his living selling water from a donkey cart, but as he closed in on victory through the dusty streets of Athens that day he became – for a few moments at least – the most important man in all of Greece.

As he entered the stadium for the final few hundred meters, two princes jumped onto the track to run with him, as perhaps 100,000 spectators roared him home. After the race, “the King rose from his seat and congratulated him most warmly on his success. Some of the King’s aides-de-camp, and several members of the [Olympic] Committee went so far as to kiss and embrace the victor.”

The marathon had turned Spyridon into an instant national hero, and a living symbol of the Olympic movement. He was feted by royalty and piled with gifts: a silver cup, an antique vase, a new cart, a new donkey, free dinners for a year, free shaves for life and – it is said – at least one offer of marriage. Louis Spyridon’s Cinderella story had made the marathon the defining event of the first modern Olympic Games, firmly embedding it in the history of marathon running.

More on the 1896 Olympic Marathon: The first marathon woman

Organisers included a marathon in the 1896 Games as a one-off, a special event that suited the moment because many believed it had taken place on the route of Pheidippides’s legendary run. But the race generated so much excitement that people quickly detached the idea of the marathon from its original geographical and historical context. It took on a life of its own and sparked the first phase of growth in the history of marathon races.

Later that same year, promoters arranged the first professional marathon in Paris, not Marathon. Britain’s great professional runner, Len Hurst, won it in 2:31:30—27 minutes faster than Spyridon’s time in Athens over the same distance. Hurst’s steely gaze in the picture here belies a showman’s heart – he was famous for somersaulting across the finishing line when he won a race! Many other professional and amateur races followed, and given the success of the event at the first Games, it was inevitable that it would become a fixture at future Olympics too.

The 1908 London Marathon: Men of Iron

Perhaps the most important event in the development of the marathon after 1896 was the race at the London Olympics of 1908. Not only was this the first marathon at the classic distance of 26 miles 385 yards (adopted as the standard length by the IOC in 1921), it also provided one of the most dramatic and famous finishes to a race ever seen. The diminutive Italian, Dorando Pietri, was first to enter White City stadium to complete the final 385 yards of the race in front of an enormous and noisy crowd. His lead of a few hundred metres over second placed Johnny Hayes should have been unassailable, but as soon as he stepped onto the track it was clear that something was wrong.

Looking dazed and unsteady, Pietri seemed barely aware of his surroundings, and policemen rushed to point him in the right direction for the finish line. Unbeknownst to those watching in the stands, he had just regained consciousness, having collapsed in the tunnel leading into the stadium, and remained in a desperately fragile physical and mental state. Unable to break into a run, he tottered forwards in an jelly-legged walk “like a man in a dream”, weaving from side to side for a few yards, before, shockingly, he collapsed again in full view of the crowd.

Assisted by race officials he managed to return to his feet, only to fall again a little further round the track. Once more he was pulled to his feet, but again he fell. In fact, Pietri collapsed at least six times over the course of the last few hundred yards of the race, but somehow, through a combination of the officials’ help and his stubborn refusal to give in, he finally got across the line, just 32 seconds ahead of the charging Hayes.

After the race, the Italian was rushed to hospital and many believed he had given his life achieving a remarkable victory. In fact, he lived on, but the victory proved ephemeral. Officials disqualified Pietri because of the help administered by the officials on the track, and declared Hayes the winner. What drama! What tragedy! And all played out in front of the largest gathering of international media the world had ever seen. The British press quickly adopted the valiant Pietri as their great hero and symbol of the Games, lionising him in the most purple of prose. Writing for the Daily Mail, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle described the closing moments of the race in epic terms, comparing Pietri to the giant figures of his homeland’s ancient past: “no Roman of the prime ever bought himself better than Dorando of the Olympic of 1908. The great breed is not yet extinct.”

The glorification of Pietri by important establishment figures brought huge prestige, not just for him, but by extension, for the marathon itself, as well as for the other tough working class men who competed in it. Conan Doyle described the Italian as “driven by a supreme will within” and the race as a “struggle between a set purpose and an utterly exhausted frame”, explicitly acknowledging that feats of endurance required much more than just a tough body. They were, he argued, also triumphs of the mind and of character. Endurance athletes were no longer to be seen as automata or workhorses but as “men of iron”, driven by willpower and fuelled by courage.

Edwardian Marathon Mania

The life-and-death struggle of the 1908 Olympic marathon left the world hungry for more, and in the years before the next Olympics, America was gripped by “marathon mania”, with top runners including Pietri and Hayes renouncing their amateur status for a shot at the big prize money on offer. In Britain too, there was a rash of new amateur and professional marathons. Some took place on the roads, but others were organised at indoor arenas like the Aggie, where crowds could be more easily monetized. These years were crucial in shaping the history of marathon running into the global story it is today.

The marathon had such huge appeal because it seemed to offer what the athlete-cum-academic, Roger Robinson, called “a new kind of gladiatorial spectacle” in which the excitement of competition was amplified by a belief in the very real possibility of a competitor’s imminent death. The marathon was seen as a fascinating balancing act on the knife-edge of survivability, and exercised a similar appeal to watching a modern free diver plunging to world record depths without oxygen tanks, trusting that their bodies and their calculations are robust enough to allow them to return to the surface alive.

For some, it all seemed ludicrously dangerous. Rumours swirled of inexperienced athletes collapsing and dying during races, and notices of marathons in the press were accompanied by stark health warnings. One, published in 1909, stated that distances “above 15 miles are too much for the average athlete to endure and even though there are exceptions where men can go through this 26 miles and appear all right the next day, it is certain that such a terrible grind on the inner machinery has worked a screw loose somewhere that will tell its tale in time to come.”

Nevertheless, the races proved popular with spectators and with athletes, and even after experience had – mostly – dispelled the marathon’s deadly reputation, it retained a frisson of danger and an unequalled prestige amongst runners. Less than two decades after its inception, the marathon’s mystique was firmly established. It had become the gold standard long-distance test, and a byword for feats of endurance more generally. The history of marathon races was now inseparable from the culture of global sport.

The Running Boom and the History of Marathon Races

Over the first three-quarters of the 20th century, the marathon legend was burnished by greats like Kee-Chung Sohn, Emil Zatopek and Abede Bikila, and the race became a fixture of club-level athletics. However, there were none of the mass participation events that have come to define the sport today. This development would await the running boom, which began in 1970s America—a key turning point in the history of marathon running.

As joggers began to fill American sidewalks and to seek the test of competition, race organisers saw an opportunity to cash in on the marathon’s glamour and expand participation. As a result, existing races expanded—the venerable Boston Marathon went from 1,011 finishers to 5,958 over the course of the 1970s—and new marathons were inaugurated, including the now famous New York City Marathon, which began with just 55 runners in 1970, but boasted 10,447 by 1979. Indeed, several hundred new marathons were founded nationwide over the course of the decade, many following New York’s example by encouraging runners of all abilities and backgrounds, not just the elite males who traditionally dominated the sport. This period marked a major shift in the history of marathon races, as the sport began to open up to the masses.

A few years later, the concept of the big city marathon followed the running boom to Europe, and the first London Marathon took place in 1981. Over 7,000 people were at the start line for the inaugural race, and the following year the number had more than doubled. With 90,000 applying to take part, it was clear that demand for marathon running was far outstripping supply, and that the aspiration to run a marathon had spread far beyond the club running elite. This was another pivotal moment in the history of marathon running, as participation broadened rapidly.

For the first time, marathon running had mass appeal, and people without previous athletic distinction began aspiring to conquer “the Everest of all running”. Why would this be? The anthropologist David Le Bretton suggests that in modern Western societies where values are subjective, shifting and contradictory, voluntary physical tests like the marathon provide a rare opportunity for average people to experience clarity of purpose. “Playing symbolically with death” by pushing oneself to one’s limits “gives legitimacy to life… providing a renewed significance and value”.

Others though, saw it differently. Fellow Frenchman and philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, described marathon running as a “vision of Doomsday”, a bewilderingly pointless advertisement of one’s ability to get “every last drop of energy out of yourself” for no particular reason. But for many of the new marathon runners, the idea of setting and overcoming a self-imposed challenge had a profound appeal, holding out the possibility of life-affirming physical achievement and countering the anomie that might otherwise overwhelm their safe, predictable—and numbingly comfortable—modern lives.

As well as a source of inner meaning, marathon running was fast becoming a powerful outward symbol of identity too. People widely understood the race as “the supreme test of physical endurance,” and many came to see completing the distance as a reflection of a person’s toughness, stoicism, and ability to endure pain. In 1980s Britain—perhaps even more than today—society strongly linked these traits to men and masculinity. Not surprisingly, male runners dominated the early marathon boom: of the 6,300 finishers in the first London Marathon in 1981, only about 300 were women.

Women Enter the Race: Breaking Barriers in Marathon Running

This came as no surprise. Just five years earlier, Germany had hosted the first ever women’s marathon. Before that, only a few women had occasionally run in men’s races. Many people still found the idea of women taking part in such a grueling event difficult to accept.

In Britain, the big breakthrough had occurred only a year before the first London Marathon, when the International Marathon Championships for Women, led by 1960s distance-running pioneer, Katherine Schwitzer, and sponsored by Avon Cosmetics, arrived in the capital for a showcase race. With runners from 27 countries, the event attracted media coverage from around the world, and the quality of the athletic performances on display that day helped convince both the public and the sport’s administrators of the legitimacy of women’s marathon running. Indeed, the race has been credited with helping to ensure that a women’s marathon would be introduced at the Olympic Games of 1984. These were giant strides, and a crucial chapter in the history of marathon races, but as yet, race participation remained heavily skewed towards male runners.

The profile of early marathon runners also differed from the general population in terms of their socioeconomic status: marathoners were better off, better educated and more likely to work in white-collar jobs, not only than the general population, but also than other kinds of recreational runner. They were disproportionately business executives and bankers, not shop-keepers and brickies. Perhaps marathon running attracted status-seekers, or perhaps it was just that middle-class people in desk-based jobs had more time, money and spare energy to dedicate to the sport. Whatever the reasons behind the skewed demographics, the result was the same: early mass participation marathon running was the domain and symbol of a kind of competitive, middle-class masculinity.

The Democratization of Endurance

After the explosive growth of the 1980s, the next decade saw a slackening of the growth in interest in marathons and in endurance running as a whole. But the loss of momentum proved temporary. From around the turn of the millennium the running boom’s “second wave” began in earnest. The increase in running participation between 2000 and 2019 was largely a result of huge numbers of women taking up the sport, and by 2020 almost 40% of London Marathon applicants were female, an enormous improvement on the 5% participation rate in 1981. These years added an important new chapter to the history of marathon running, defined by inclusion and growth.

A broadening of ideals around femininity over the last few decades helps explain the big boost in women’s marathon participation. Although progress is ongoing, society no longer treats sporty, tough, and competitive women as transgressive. In fact, many now celebrate them as role models in modern culture. But marathons themselves have changed too. The iconic London race has become at least as famous for its fancy dress, charity fundraising and party atmosphere as for its credentials as an extreme endurance feat. In other words, marathoning has become a much more diverse, inclusive and welcoming sport.

The democratization of endurance was, of course, great for the health of running. But what did it mean for marathoning as a symbol of tough guy status? In other words, how could runners continue to claim membership in a rugged and glamorous endurance elite when completing a marathon now carried the risk of being overtaken by someone dressed as a chicken?

The problem is analogous to what economists would describe a loss of scarcity value. In the wider economy, people place a higher price on goods that are rare and difficult to obtain than on those that are common and easy to access. Within the world of running, as more and more people joined the once exclusive club of marathon runners, the less valuable the achievement seemed.

Ultramarathons and the New Frontiers

With the race’s position as the ultimate endurance test undermined, those seeking the status in the sport bestowed by completing a truly impressive challenge had no choice but to look elsewhere. And the obvious choice was simply to run further.

Ultramarathons already had a cult following by the 1990s, but at almost exactly the same time as women were pouring into the wider sport of running, the number of participants in these extra-long races started to increase dramatically. Globally, participation doubled between 2000 and 2008, and then increased by a further five-fold in the seven years to 2015. Tellingly, the vast majority of the new recruits to the ultra-running movement were from the upper reaches of the socioeconomic scale—and they were men (more on socioeconomic variation of running here).

Still the Gold Standard

Today though, despite the rise of ultramarathons and ever more extreme endurance events, the marathon continues to hold pride of place in the world of running. It remains the defining race—not because it is the toughest, but because it perfectly balances difficulty and accessibility. Its enduring appeal lies in being a meaningful challenge that’s within reach: a true adventure that demands grit, training and resolve, but welcomes anyone willing to try.

You can’t fake 26.2 miles—and that’s kind of the point. In a world that increasingly values perseverance, self-discipline, and personal growth, the marathon is more relevant than ever. The race that began as a one-off myth-inspired experiment in 1896 has, over time, become the centrepiece of global endurance sport. And as the history of marathon running continues to unfold, it’s clear that this legendary event still has many miles to go.

 

© 2025 Neil Baxter