The marathon gets its name from the Battle of Marathon, fought in 490 BC on a plain in northeastern Greece about 25 miles from Athens. The race itself, though, is not an ancient tradition. It was invented in 1896 for the first modern Olympic Games, inspired by a legend about a Greek messenger who ran from the battlefield to Athens to announce victory over the Persians.
The Battle That Started It All
In September of 490 BC, a Persian invasion force landed on the Marathon plain of northeastern Attica. The Athenians, heavily outnumbered, assembled an army of about 10,000 soldiers along with 1,000 allies from the nearby city of Plataea. Under the command of the general Miltiades, the Greeks used a clever flanking strategy: they reinforced the wings of their battle line while letting the center appear weak. The Persians’ best troops pushed into the center and were surrounded as the Greek wings wheeled inward. In a single afternoon, the Athenians repulsed the invasion.
The victory was a defining moment for ancient Greece. It proved that the Persian military could be beaten and established Athens as a major power in the Greek world. The name “Marathon” would have faded into the long list of ancient battles if not for a story about what happened immediately after.
The Legend of the Messenger
The popular version goes like this: after the Greeks won, a messenger sprinted roughly 25 miles from Marathon to Athens, burst into the city, shouted “We have won!” and collapsed dead from exhaustion. It’s a dramatic story, and it directly inspired the modern race. But the historical record is messier than the legend suggests.
Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian who wrote the most detailed account of the Persian Wars, describes no such run from Marathon to Athens. Instead, he tells the story of a courier named Pheidippides (sometimes spelled Philippides) who ran from Athens to Sparta and back, a round trip of more than 300 miles, in roughly 36 hours. His mission wasn’t to announce a victory. It was to beg the Spartans for military help before the battle even started. The Spartans told him they were in the middle of a religious festival and couldn’t come yet.
The messenger-collapses-after-victory story comes from later writers. The ancient biographer Plutarch, writing more than 500 years after the battle, recorded that “most say it was Eukles” who ran in full armor from the battlefield to Athens, gasped out the news, and died. Other sources name the runner as Thersippos. Over the centuries, these different accounts blurred together, and the courier who ran to Sparta got merged with the messenger who supposedly ran from Marathon. The result is the single heroic figure most people picture today.
How the Race Was Invented in 1896
The marathon as a footrace didn’t exist until a French linguist and historian named Michel Bréal proposed the idea. At a conference at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1894, where organizers were planning the revival of the Olympic Games, Bréal suggested including a long-distance race from Marathon to the ancient Athenian assembly ground at Pnyx, a distance of about 40 kilometers (24.85 miles). The idea was to honor the legendary run and connect the new Games to their Greek roots.
The first Olympic marathon took place in Athens in 1896. A Greek water carrier named Spyridon Louis won the race in 2 hours, 58 minutes, and 50 seconds, finishing more than seven minutes ahead of the runner-up. With a crowd of roughly 100,000 watching, a mounted messenger had ridden ahead to the stadium with the news that a Greek was in the lead. Louis became an instant national hero.
Why the Distance Is 26.2 Miles
For the first several Olympics, the marathon distance varied. The original 1896 course was about 25 miles, and subsequent Games used slightly different routes. The now-standard 26.2 miles (42.195 kilometers) was set accidentally at the 1908 London Olympics. The British Olympic Committee wanted the race to start at Windsor Castle so the royal family could watch the runners depart, and to finish in front of the royal box inside the Olympic stadium. That specific route happened to measure 26 miles and 385 yards.
The distance stuck. After years of inconsistency, the international governing body for athletics formally adopted 42.195 kilometers as the official marathon distance, making the royal family’s viewing preference a permanent standard.
From Olympic Event to Global Tradition
The marathon spread quickly beyond the Olympics. The Boston Marathon, now the world’s oldest annual marathon, launched on April 19, 1897, directly inspired by the Athens race. Organized by the Boston Athletic Association, it was held on Patriots’ Day to draw a symbolic connection between the Athenian and American struggles for liberty.
For most of its history, the marathon was exclusively a men’s event. Women were not allowed to compete in Olympic distances longer than 1,500 meters until 1984, when the women’s marathon debuted at the Los Angeles Games. Joan Benoit of Maine won that first race decisively, a moment widely considered a turning point for women’s distance running.
The Real Ultramarathon Behind the Name
There’s an irony at the heart of the marathon’s origin story. If the historical sources had been read more carefully from the start, the race inspired by Pheidippides would have been far longer than 26.2 miles. The run Herodotus actually described, Athens to Sparta and back, covered more than 300 miles over brutal mountainous terrain. Modern ultramarathoners have recreated this route in an event called the Spartathlon, a 153-mile race from Athens to Sparta. The marathon as we know it exists because later storytellers simplified the history, swapping the epic multi-day run for the shorter, more dramatic sprint from the battlefield.