History of the marathon

490 BCE

A name borrowed from a battle

The marathon takes its name from the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE, when an Athenian force met a Persian landing party on a coastal plain northeast of the city. The courier in Herodotus is Pheidippides — sometimes written Philippides — and the run Herodotus describes is not the one on the souvenir mugs. He was sent to Sparta to ask for help, something like 240 kilometres over rough country, and the Spartans were held back by a religious festival.

The story that he then ran from the battlefield to Athens, announced the victory, and died is later literature. It turns up centuries afterwards, notably in Lucian. The modern race kept the place-name and the legend. It did not recover a verified 26-mile courier route.

1896

From the bridge to the stadium

Michel Bréal, a French linguist, proposed a long road race for the first modern Olympics in Athens, pointed at that legend. On 10 April 1896 — 29 March by the Greek calendar then in use — a small field left the Marathon bridge for the Panathenaic Stadium. The course was about 40 kilometres, not yet the distance we train for.

Spiridon Louis, a water carrier from Marousi, won in 2:58:50. He was not a professional athlete in any modern sense. The event was an idea that happened to fit a rebuilt stadium and a new Olympic movement. The distance would wander for another generation.

1908

385 yards in front of a box

Early Olympic marathons were not the same length. Paris 1900 was longer, St Louis 1904 was a shambles in the heat, and none of them matched Athens exactly. London 1908 started at Windsor Castle so the royal family could see the start, and finished on the track at the White City Stadium in front of the royal box. Measured that way, the course was 26 miles 385 yards.

Dorando Pietri of Italy entered the stadium first, collapsed, was helped to his feet, and was disqualified for the assistance. Johnny Hayes of the United States was awarded the race. The odd distance stuck. In 1921 the IAAF fixed the marathon at 42.195 kilometres. Paris 1924 was the first Olympic marathon run at that standard. Everything since — every plan on this site — is that length.

1897

The race that came back every spring

Boston did not wait for the distance to settle. On 19 April 1897, Patriots’ Day, the Boston Athletic Association sent runners from Ashland toward the city, inspired by the Olympic race a year earlier. It is the oldest annual marathon still held.

For decades it stayed a specialist affair. The mass marathon is much younger. New York’s modern race began in 1970 with one loop of Central Park and a field you could count; the five-borough course arrived in 1976. Frank Shorter’s Olympic gold in Munich in 1972 is the usual marker for the American road-running boom that followed. The city marathon, as a public festival rather than a club time trial, is a late-twentieth-century invention.

1966

Women on the start line

Organisers spent most of the century barring women, often with medical claims that have not survived contact with the results book. Bobbi Gibb finished Boston in 1966 without a number, having been refused an entry, and is recognised as the first woman to complete that race. In 1967 Kathrine Switzer entered as K.V. Switzer, was given a bib, and was grabbed on the course by a race official. Photographs of that shove did more for the argument than any petition.

Boston officially opened the race to women in 1972. The first Olympic women’s marathon was Los Angeles in 1984; Joan Benoit won it, and the event stopped being a novelty. Women’s records are now part of the same conversation as the men’s, including a separate women-only mark when races are decided without male pacemakers.

2006

Majors, money, and two hours

The World Marathon Majors began in 2006, tying Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago and New York into one series. Sydney joined later. Berlin’s flat course became the place records went to be broken. Prize money, pacemakers and carbon-plated shoes changed what a winning time looked like, and what an amateur’s goal time was measured against.

Eliud Kipchoge ran 1:59:40 in Vienna in 2019 on a paced, non-record course — a demonstration, not a world record. His 2:01:09 in Berlin in 2022 was eligible. Kelvin Kiptum took the record to 2:00:35 in Chicago in 2023. On 26 April 2026, at the London Marathon, Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30, the first sub-two-hour marathon in a record-eligible race. The same morning Tigst Assefa set a women-only world record of 2:15:41. The overall women’s record remains Ruth Chepngetich’s 2:09:56 from Chicago in 2024, set in a mixed race.

The distance has not changed since 1924. What changed is who is allowed to start, how many people do, and how close the fastest of them have come to a line that used to be a rumour.