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Saturday, October 30, 2010

2500th Anniversary of the Legend of Marathon

The 28th Athens Classic Marathon of this Sunday celebrates the 2500th anniversary of the legend of Marathon.

Don’t forget to read from a defense expert’s point of view, the legendary messenger, Pheidippides, who ran from Marathon to Athens to announce the victory and then collapsed and died, is not the whole story, he must have actually covered more than 280 miles in less than 10 days before dying of exhaustion.

Modern men try to follow Pheidippides’ footsteps by creating the 246 kilometre (152.85 miles)  ultamarathon race called Spartathlon, and the record holder is a Greek Australian called Yiannis Kouros.

Back to our main topic of the Athens Classic Marathon, I think the climb between the 20 km to 32 km will be the hardest part of the race but the Kenyans may find this section just a daily routine.

Aside from the 42 km race, there is also the 10 km and 5 km race.  Our representative office’s Economic Director, Mr. Lo is running for the second year in the 10 km race.  My husband is running the 5 km race in a team to raise charity for an orphanage, SOS Children’s Village in Vari.  Good luck to both of them, but with so many runners participating in this year’s event, it will be hard to spot them at the finish line.

Back in Taiwan, the recent damage to the Suhua Highway from typhoon could discourage some marathon runners from participating in this year's Taroko Gorge Marathon, nevertheless a previous participant was fascinated by the scenic route.

Other links:

The 1st image of our beautiful earth as seen from the lunar orbit in 1968.

If you are not a lucky tourist, you may run into a situation like striking public sector workers from the Ministry of Culture protesting at the Acropolis.

Thanks to Christine from Canada, her hike this past summer provided all the pictures of the Samaria Gorge in the island of Crete.  If you are going to hike this gorge, be prepared for a few days rest afterwards as the road is quite rough and hikers may experience sore legs for 3 days after the hike.

a map of the Samaria Gorge









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