Originally Posted by
wolfchild
I think it was too much marathon running...Marathon running is not healthy. The very first marathon runner died soon after he finished his run.
That's a complete myth. As I wrote in
a blog post last year:
The myth of the deadly Marathon run is as old as the first Marathon run itself. The Marathon distance of 42 km / 26 miles commemorates a messenger called Pheidippides who supposedly delivered the news of the Greek victory over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon over that distance to Athens, only to die immediately afterwards. A closer reading of the historical sources however reveals it to be a myth, created from a mashup of several other events, neither of them involving the death of a runner. Herodotos, in his history of the Persian wars, only mentioned Pheidippides running from Athens to Sparta (a distance several times longer than from Marathon to Athens) to request help against the Persians. No mention was made of a run from Marathon to Athens after the battle or a death from running. After the victory at Marathon, the Greek army rapidly marched to Athens to ward off a sea invasion, but this was no run. Only some 500 years after the battle, the modern version of the story was cobbled together:The first known written account of a run from Marathon to Athens occurs in the works of the Greek writer Plutarch (46–120), in his essay On the Glory of Athens. Plutarch attributes the run to a herald called either Thersippus or Eukles. Lucian, a century later, credits one “Philippides.” It seems likely that in the 500 years between Herodotus’s time and Plutarch’s, the story of Pheidippides had become muddled with that of the Battle of Marathon (particularly the story of the Athenian forces making the march from Marathon to Athens in order to intercept the Persian ships headed there), and some fanciful writer had invented the story of the run from Marathon to Athens.
(Wikipedia article:
Pheidippides)