History — The Marathon

Origins: the Battle of Marathon

In 490 BC, an outnumbered Athenian force defeated a Persian invasion at the plains of Marathon, about 40 km north-east of Athens. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing decades later, described a runner named Pheidippides being sent to Sparta — not Athens — to ask for help before the battle, a journey of roughly 240 km.

The story we now associate with the marathon — a soldier running from the battlefield to Athens to announce victory and then dying — appears centuries later in Plutarch and Lucian, with different runner names. Whether any single courier actually made the run is uncertain. What is certain is that by the late 19th century, the legend was popular enough to inspire a new athletic event.

1896: the first modern marathon

When the modern Olympic Games were revived in Athens in 1896, the organizers — at the suggestion of Michel Bréal — added a long-distance run from Marathon to the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens. The course was about 40 km. A Greek water-carrier named Spyridon Louis won in 2:58:50, becoming a national hero.

The Boston Athletic Association launched the Boston Marathon the following year, on Patriots' Day 1897. It is the oldest annually run marathon in the world.

Why 42.195 km?

The early marathons varied in length — 40 km in 1896, around 40 km again in Paris 1900 and St. Louis 1904. The peculiar modern distance was set at the 1908 London Olympics. The course ran from Windsor Castle to White City Stadium, with the finish reportedly extended so the race could end in front of the royal box.

That measured route came out at 26 miles 385 yards, or 42.195 km. The distance was used again at later Olympics, and in 1921 the IAAF (now World Athletics) formally adopted it as the standard.

The marathon distance is one of the few in athletics with no clean origin story. It exists because of one course, in one stadium, in one city, in one summer — and then never changed.

Growth: from elite to mass participation

For its first six decades the marathon was an elite event with very small fields. That changed in the 1970s. Frank Shorter's gold medal at Munich 1972 sparked the U.S. running boom. The New York City Marathon moved out of Central Park and through all five boroughs in 1976. London, Berlin, and Chicago grew into mass-participation races over the following decade.

By the 2010s, major marathons routinely fielded 40,000+ runners, and entries — particularly for Boston and the abbott majors — became coveted. Today over a million people finish a marathon each year worldwide.

Women's marathoning

Women were excluded from the marathon at the Olympics until 1984, when Joan Benoit won the inaugural Olympic women's race in Los Angeles. Boston had officially admitted women in 1972, after Kathrine Switzer ran in 1967 with a registered bib (under "K. V. Switzer") and was famously, if unsuccessfully, grabbed mid-race by an official. Bobbi Gibb had run unofficially in 1966.

Women's marathon times have dropped dramatically since: from Grete Waitz's 2:32 era into the low 2:10s today (see Records).

The modern era

Three threads define the current era:

Faster shoes. The 2017 introduction of carbon-plated, high-stack foam shoes (notably Nike's Vaporfly) coincided with a sharp drop in elite times.
Faster fueling. Athletes now consume 90–120 g of carbohydrate per hour during the race, well above what was thought tolerable a decade ago.
Bigger fields. Mass participation has grown faster than the elite end. The Berlin and London races each draw hundreds of thousands of applicants for a few tens of thousands of bibs.

In 2019, Eliud Kipchoge ran 1:59:40 in a non-record-eligible event in Vienna — proof of concept that a sub-two-hour marathon was within human reach. The ratified world record passed the two-hour mark in stages: see Records.

Next: Records — the times that have stood, the times that fell, and how they got there.