“Men, today we die a little.” Those aren’t words of combat, but of running – spoken by Emil Zatopek at the start of the 1956 Olympic marathon. And he knew what he was talking about. The great Czech runner had won the gold medal four years previously but this time, after hitting the marathon’s infamous “wall”, he collapsed across the finish line in sixth.
The marathon has come a long way since Zatopek’s time and now attracts runners of every shape and size. But that doesn’t mean covering the 26.2-mile distance has got any easier. It remains one of the ultimate tests of human endurance.
Today, 12,500 men and women will die a little when they line up for the 30th Dublin marathon. They can’t all be mad, although some probably are. Yet for those who do survive to the finish there is the guarantee of enormous personal satisfaction – along with severe muscle soreness, blisters, acute dehydration and so on. Many of them will be running for charity, often wearing some peculiar costume to highlight their cause. None of them, with the exception of the very few elite athletes, have the slightest ambition of winning.
Trying to explain the marathon running phenomenon is difficult, but it’s not entirely unrelated to Charles Darwin’s idea of survival of the fittest. Running does wonders for the heart and mind. You only have to look out your window any evening of the week to realise we’re in the midst of a running boom. And that’s not entirely unrelated to the fact that we’ve all been brought back to our senses in the last year or so, realising that our wealth after all is our health.
The Dublin marathon has come a long way since its humble beginnings in 1980. Back then, 2,100 signed up to run and only 1,420 finished. Over the years the numbers taking part have varied considerably before reaching today’s record entry of 12,500. At a time when practically every city in the world now stages a marathon, Dublin has held its own attractions, not least its superb organisation.
The only pity is that the city is slow to fully embrace it and instead seems to just about tolerate it. It is estimated that the marathon injects €10 million into the Dublin economy every year and no one has ever counted the health benefits for the thousands taking part.
Next Sunday 42,000 runners will run through New York and the city will welcome every one of them with open arms. It is about time Dublin city as a whole did the same.