The marathon is a long-distance foot race with a distance of There are also wheelchair divisions. More than marathons are held worldwide each year, with the vast majority of competitors being recreational athletes, as larger marathons can have tens of thousands of participants. The distance did not become standardized until The distance is also included in the World Athletics Championships , which began in It is the only running road race included in both championship competitions walking races on the roads are also contested in both.
The name Marathon comes from the legend of Pheidippides , the Greek messenger. The legend states that while he was taking part in the Battle of Marathon , which took place in August or September BC, [ 3 ] he witnessed a Persian vessel changing its course towards Athens as the battle was near a victorious end for the Greek army. He interpreted this as an attempt by the defeated Persians to rush into the city to claim a false victory or simply raid, [ 4 ] hence claiming their authority over Greek land.
It was said that he ran the entire distance to Athens without stopping, discarding his weapons and even clothes to lose as much weight as possible, and burst into the assembly , exclaiming "we have won! The account of the run from Marathon to Athens first appeared in Plutarch 's On the Glory of Athens in the first century AD, which quoted from Heraclides Ponticus 's lost work, giving the runner's name as either Thersipus of Erchius or Eucles.
There is debate about the historical accuracy of this legend. Herodotus makes no mention of a messenger sent from Marathon to Athens and relates that the main part of the Athenian army, having fought and won the grueling battle and fearing a naval raid by the Persian fleet against an undefended Athens, marched quickly back from the battle to Athens, arriving the same day. In , Robert Browning wrote the poem Pheidippides.
Browning's poem, his composite story, became part of late 19th-century popular culture and was accepted as a historical legend. Mount Pentelicus stands between Marathon and Athens, which means that Philippides would have had to run around the mountain, either to the north or to the south.
