still dark, and reaching Marathon before the sun was high. The later it got, the hotter it would be. It
was turning out to be exactly like the story “Run, Melos!,” about a competition to outrun the sun.
The photographer from the magazine, Masao Kageyama, would ride along in the van that
accompanied me. He’d take pictures as they drove along. It wasn’t a real race, and there weren’t any
water stations, so I’d occasionally stop to get water from the van. The Greek summer is truly brutal, and
I knew I’d have to be careful not to get dehydrated.
“Mr. Murakami,” Mr. Kageyama said, surprised as he saw me getting ready to run, “you’re not
really thinking of running the whole route, are you?”
“Of course I am. That’s why I came here.”“Really? But when we do these kinds of projects most people don’t go all the way. We just take
some photos, and most of them don’t finish the whole route. So you really are going to run the entire
thing?”
Sometimes the world baffles me. I can’t believe that people would really do things like that.At any rate, I started off my run at five thirty a.m. at the stadium later used in the 2004 Athens
Olympics, and set off down the road to Marathon. There’s just the one main highway. Once you run
roads in Greece you’ll understand, but they’re paved differently. Instead of gravel, they mix in
powdered marble, which makes the road shiny in the sunlight and quite slippery. When it rains you
have to be very careful. Even when it isn’t raining the soles of your shoes make a squeaky sound, and
your legs can feel how smooth the road surface is.
The following is a shortened form of the article I wrote for the magazine covering my Athens–
Marathon run.
The sun’s climbing higher and higher. The road within the Athens city limits is very hard to run on.
It’s about three miles from the stadium to the highway entrance, and there are way too many
stoplights along the way, which messes up my pace. There are also a lot of places where construction
and double-parked cars block the road, and I have to step out into the middle of the street. What with
the cars zooming around early in the morning, running here can be dangerous.
The sun starts to come up just as I enter Marathon Avenue, and the streetlights all go out at once.
The time when the summer sun rules over the earth is swiftly approaching. People have started to
appear at bus stops. Greeks take a siesta at noon, so they tend to commute to work pretty early. They
all look at me curiously. Can’t imagine many of them have ever seen an Oriental man running down
the pre-dawn streets of Athens before. Athens isn’t the kind of town with many joggers to begin with.
Four miles into the run I strip off my running shirt and am naked from the waist up. I always run
without a shirt, so it feels great to take it off (though later I’ll wind up with a terrible sunburn). Until
the eighth mile I’m running up a gradual slope. Hardly a breath of air. When I get to the top of the
slope it feels like I’ve finally left the city. I’m relieved, but at the same time this is where the