THE Parthenon is lit, but Athens is still dark. In the gloom, a cleaner is sweeping the pedestrianised road that runs beneath the southern slope of the Acropolis. And in the trees beside the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, an ancient stone theatre, Lycra-clad figures are urinating everywhere. These are the last few minutes before the start of the Spartathlon, one of the world’s toughest ultra-marathons. The 310 runners in this year’s race are doing their final stretches. Energy supplements are being taken; running belts are being checked; caps with neck flaps to protect against the sun are being adjusted. Many athletes have a crew to support them during the race; there is time for some final words of encouragement before the runners edge towards the starting line. At 7am precisely, as dawn approaches, the race begins. The field strings round the Acropolis and past the agora, the heart of ancient Athenian life, before heading into the early-morning traffic. The pace is gentle: an average runner can keep up for the first kilometre easily. But this race is about distance, not speed. After that first kilometre, another and another and another lie ahead. Everyone in the field has completed at least a 100km (62-mile) race. For this event, they will have to run 245km (or almost six consecutive marathons) within 36 hours. Only 72 of them will end up making it all the way to historical Sparta. This year’s Spartathlon, which took place in late September, was the 30th. Its heritage goes back much further. The most famous ultra-marathon in history was that run by Pheidippides, an Athenian who made the journey to Sparta in 490BC. His mission was to ask the Spartans for their help in fighting the invading Persians; Herodotus, a historian, records that he reached Sparta on the day after he left Athens. (The Spartans were celebrating a religious festival, so could not offer help until after the Athenians had dispatched the Persians at the battle of Marathon.)

Herodotus did not appear particularly taken by Pheidippides’s feat of endurance. Since his “Histories” also includes tales of ants bigger than foxes, it probably seemed rather unimpressive. But in 1982 his terse description sparked the interest of a British air-force officer and long-distance runner called John Foden, who wondered if it really was possible to run from Athens to Sparta and arrive the next day. With four other officers, Mr Foden decided to see for himself; after 36 hours’ slog they arrived in Sparti, as the town is now called.

Racing through history

That achievement inspired the organisation of the first Spartathlon a year later; the race now ranks as one of the world’s classic ultra-marathons. The Spartathlon’s allure has two sources. The first is the difficulty of finishing it. Any race that is longer than a marathon can call itself an ultra-marathon, but no self-respecting ultrarunner gets excited about finishing, say, a 48km course. The most talked-about events in the calendar are the ones that look most incomprehensible to the average person.

Take the Barkley. This 161km trail race in Tennessee forces runners to makes climbs and descents of 18,000 metres each inside 60 hours. The Barkley has been going since 1986, and in that period only 13 people have managed to finish the course within the cut-off time. Badwater is another race that derives kudos from insanity. The 217km course in California runs from Death Valley to Mount Whitney in temperatures of 50°C and above. (“Nudity is specifically not allowed,” say the rules.)

The Spartathlon cannot claim such extremes. It is not the hilliest race, nor the hottest. But it combines lots of different tests. There is the heat of the Greek day, then the plunge in temperatures when darkness falls. There are climbs, too: the route includes a series of ascents, among them a 1,200-metre mountain pass negotiated in the dead of night. Above all, there is the relentless pressure of the clock.

Badwater gives competitors 48 hours to finish; the Spartathlon gives them 12 hours fewer to run 27km more. A series of 75 checkpoints ram home the pressure: if a runner is not at a checkpoint by a specified time, he is pulled out of the race. That explains why many Spartathletes mock the Marathon des Sables (MdS), a six-day, 250km run through the Sahara that has a much higher profile and also vies for the title of the world’s toughest foot race. The MdS allows for fripperies such as sleep. “A trekking holiday” is how one veteran of both dismisses it.

If the athletic demands of the race explain some of its prestige, a second reason is its heritage. Never mind that the first stages take the runners through a grim industrial estate outside Athens: the idea of retracing Pheidippides’s footsteps still grips many participants. “It feels like racing in history, passing through places where history began,” says Ivan Cudin, an Italian who won in 2010 and 2011.

The Spartathlon is thus a low-key example of a grand tradition, that of foreign visitors entranced by the idea of classical Greece. Western support for Greece in its war of independence in the 1820s was predicated on the philhellenistic idea that modern Greece had the same DNA as ancient Greece. Greece’s entry into both the European Union and the euro also owed much to the idea that Europe without the cradle of democracy was somehow incomplete. “Europe without Greece is simply not Europe,” said President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of France in 1979, when the country signed its accession treaty with what was then the European Community. “It was here in Greece that the culture of Europe achieved its most vigorous expression, its admirable feeling for proportion and beauty.”

A glorious past, especially one heroised so relentlessly by the rest of the world, can be a burden, says Nikos Dimou, the author of a book of aphorisms called “The Unhappiness of Being Greek”, which was published in Greece itself in 1975, has subsequently become a big seller in Germany, and will appear in English in 2013. One of his pertinent reflections runs:

Any race believing itself to be descended from the ancient Greeks would be automatically unhappy. Unless it could either forget them or surpass them.

The Spartathlon feels like a largely uncomplicated homage. But the gap between troubled modernity and shining antiquity still gapes uncomfortably at times. The stinging of tear gas in Syntagma Square two nights before this year’s race began was one reminder of Greece’s current problems. And when the citizens of Sparti stood to hear the national anthem of the winner, there was an awful inevitability to the sound of the Deutschlandlied.

From the start, the pressure of the clock leads to some bad decisions. The goal of many in the Spartathlon is to build up a comfortable time buffer in the first part of the race, which they can gradually run down when the going gets tough in the later stages. A reasonable plan, as long as you don’t go too fast too early.

In this year’s race, the weather meant anything other than sitting in the shade was going too fast. Late September in Greece is always warm, but this year the temperature was higher than usual. The heat thrown off by the tarmac and the roadside rock-faces made the air hotter still. Overheating and dehydration are the obvious dangers in these conditions, but drinking lots of water isn’t necessarily the right answer. Many runners found it impossible to keep food and drink down: the road to Sparti is paved with vomit. Drinking too much risks a condition called hyponatraemia, in which excess body water dilutes the amount of sodium in the blood. You can, in effect, drown from the inside.

“Those whose race ends prematurely are collected by “the death bus”, which slowly makes its way to Sparti, stopping to let off its passengers to throw up”

The heat caused a very high early drop-out rate. Many people were timed out before the first major checkpoint, after 80km. Those whose race ends prematurely are collected by a bus (nicknamed “the death bus”) which slowly makes its way to Sparti, stopping to pick up more non-finishers and occasionally to let off its passengers to throw up.

The survivors run on, across the Isthmus of Corinth and into the Peloponnese. At ancient Corinth, 93km from Athens and barely more than a third of the way into the race, athletes sporadically arrive at another checkpoint.

All pain and no gain

The drama lies not in the competition between them but in their personal struggles. Many douse themselves repeatedly in cold water. Some briefly rest, grimacing as they rise to their feet again. One disoriented Japanese runner heads off in the wrong direction, and needs to be overhauled and turned around. James Adams, a British runner, arrives after about ten hours on the road, a great muddy stain of blood on his shirt, courtesy of unlubricated nipples. A couple of tourists sit in a nearby taverna watching the runners head off again. “Isn’t it amazing?” says one. “Or stupid,” responds the other. Her scepticism is understandable.

The race attracts some of the biggest names in the sport. The winner of the first two Spartathlons (and two others) is the best athlete you have never heard of: Yiannis Kouros, a Greek-turned-Australian whose records in this race and over many other distances are seen as untouchable. Scott Jurek, an American legend, has won three times. The biggest name competing in this year’s event was Lizzie Hawker, a British runner who holds the women’s world record for the longest distance completed in 24 hours on the road. Although no money is on offer for winning, athletes of this calibre have sponsors for which a Spartathlon victory counts as great publicity.

But almost everyone else in the race is an amateur. These people are spending their own time and money to come to Greece in order to run for hours on end in sapping heat. Their reward, if things go well, is to keep going all night and the next day, too.

Their training regimes leave no time for the weekend lie-in. Rajeev Patel, an American, says that in the build-up to the race he ran for 10-12 hours on a Saturday, and then another 4-5 hours on Sunday to get used to jogging on tired legs. An Irish athlete tells how after clocking off from a late shift at work, she sometimes runs all the way through the night, only getting home in time for a quick shower before heading off for the next day. Neither even made it to ancient Corinth.

Such obsessiveness would be easier to dismiss as nutty were it not for the rising popularity of ultrarunning. Keith Godden, editor of ultramarathonrunning.com, an events-listings website, started the site as a hobby in 2008; it is now a full-time job. He says the number of races in Britain, for example, has tripled in three years. If this is madness, it is catching.

Some attribute the discipline’s growth to the fact that running a marathon has become so commonplace. Going farther is the logical next step for people seeking a challenge. The athletes themselves rhapsodise about the simplicity and self-sufficiency of running very long distances. Robin Harvie, who attempted the Spartathlon in 2010 and subsequently wrote a meditative book called “Why We Run”, says he was able to ignore the irritations of normal life when training. After a pause, he adds: “I may just have been exhausted.”

As night falls, so does the temperature. Many of the athletes have prepared bags for the organisers to place at specific checkpoints: this is when they pick up things such as head torches and warmer clothing. The landscape changes, too. The middle of the night sees the remaining runners scrambling up a mountain trail to crest the Sangas Pass, then down and across the plains to Tegea.

It was above Tegea, according to Herodotus, that Pheidippides had an encounter with Pan, the god of the wild. At around this mark, almost 200km from his starting point, it would have been no surprise if Pheidippides experienced the first recorded case of exercise-induced hallucination. Many ultrarunners report seeing things as a result of exhaustion and sleep deprivation. Mr Adams recalls following a white line painted on the road at the Badwater ultra-marathon, and clearly seeing a man ahead of him picking up the line and shaking it around like a roll of toilet paper.

Come and get them

There are now 50km to go to Sparti. Anyone who has got this far can be fairly confident of finishing, but it will not be easy. The checkpoint closing-times must still be beaten. The sun rises again, and the heat on day two of this year’s race is just as searing as on the first. Running this far wears the body down: tests of ultrarunners before and after races show huge jumps in creatine-kinase and C-reactive protein, both markers of muscle damage and inflammation. The last bit of the race is almost all downhill, an extra burden on the joints.

The body’s stores of glycogen, an energy source, are depleted, too, whatever regime the athletes have been following to build them up. Loading up on pasta is by no means the only option for packing more glycogen into the muscles and liver. Some believe in the paleolithic diet, which is supposed to mimic the carnivorous diets of that era. One of this year’s Spartathlon finishers, Michael Arnstein, eats almost nothing but raw fruit.

But for those who do finish, mental fortitude explains more than physical preparation. These are people who simply will not stop until they reach their goal, whether they run, walk or hobble. The importance of mental grit may explain why older runners do noticeably well: the winner this year was 46, and the oldest finisher was 60.

Their destination is a statue of King Leonidas, leader of the 300 Spartans who died defending the pass of Thermopylae against another invading Persian army ten years after Pheidippides’s mission to Sparta. The statue’s inscription reads “Come and get them”, the Spartan response when the Persians asked them to put down their weapons. If being a modern Greek is tough because of the burden of the past, imagine being a man in Sparti.