After several failed attempts to resurrect the Olympic Games, a French Baron named Pierre de Coubertin was able to overcome many obstacles and formed the International Olympic committee in 1894. Little did he know a simple decision to honour Pheidippides famous run from Marathon to Athens would strike a chord that would resonate even louder as the next century progressed.

Thus, out of an accomplishment by an ancient Greek, a legend corrupted by historians and poets from Greece to England, and the dreams of two Frenchmen, was born the most audacious of races, the marathon.

Eager to excel in the marathon competition, the Greek held a race over the proposed Olympic course to select their team. According to some sources as many as three Greek men died while training for the marathon, so choosing a well-conditioned team was important. The Olympic trial, held on March 10, 1896, was the first organized marathon race ever to run.

On the afternoon of Friday, April 10, seventeen runners gathered on the Marathon bridge to await the start of the first Olympic Marathon. Among the competitors were the Australian Edwin Flack, who had already won gold medals in the 800 and 1,500 meter races. Flack lived in London, where he worked as an accountant, but he held the Australian national record for the mile. Arthur Blake of the United States, the second place finisher in the 1,500 meters was another threat along with Albin Lermusiaux of France, third in the 1,500 meters, and Gyula Kellner of Hungary. The rest of the field was made up entirely of Greeks who had some experience on the course from running the trial races. The race would cover a distance of forty kilometers (24.8 miles). Of the non-Greek competitors, only Kellner had ever run such a distance.

The runners were escorted not by motorcycles and television trucks as in today's marathons, but by officials and doctors on bicycles and in horse-drawn wagons. The Frenchman Lermusiaux took the early lead, setting a fast pace even by modern standards. He reached the village of Pikermi, more than halfway into the race, in a mere fifty-five minutes, leading by nearly two miles over the Australian Flack, the American Blake, and the Hungarian Kellner. No Greeks were running in the top four spots, and Spiridon Louis was well back in the pack. Sometime later, when Louis reached Pikermi, he enjoyed a lavish dinner and expressed his certainty that he would win the race.

Over the course of the race, after several of the early leaders had to drop out due to exhaustion, Louis gradually started working his way to the front pack and finally entered the stadium as the winner. He had completed the race in a time of 2:58:50, a remarkable improvement over the times posted by the winners of the trial races.

It is said that one runs a marathon because there is something in man that seeks out challenge, especially the challenge of a single man taking on a task in which all the forces of nature, and often the opinions of men, are arrayed against him; a task in which his own solitude may become his greatest enemy; a task that his own drive, his own desire, and his own ego cannot fail to make him accomplish. There is something in man that seeks out the challenge of the unknown.

Spiridon Louis, and all who had taken part in the first Olympic Marathon, had foreshadowed the creed that Pierre de Coubertin, inspired by a sermon at St. Paul's Cathedral on the eve of the 1908 Games, would write for the Olympics: "The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well." In no Olympic event is the importance of those words more evident than in the marathon, and in the next century of Olympic marathons, competitors would consider taking part and fighting well the greatest victories of all.

After the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, a group from Boston that had competed for the United States returned home full of excitement about the marathon race they had witnessed. The result of that excitement was the establishment of the Boston Marathon the following year. Run every April since 1897, the Boston race is considered by some the most prestigious of all marathons. After all, the Olympic race is run only every four years, while Boston is an annual race.

By the 1970s, the Olympic Marathon had come a long way from the dusty roads of Athens. Yet women were still not allowed to compete and the struggle to establish a women's Olympic Marathon was itself something of a long-distance race.

Before the 1980s, there were no women's distance races in the Olympics. In the Moscow Games, the longest race for women was the 1,500 meters, which had been instituted in 1972. Women had been excluded from track and field competition altogether until 1928, when the longest race was the 800 meters.

This is not to say there was no tradition of women's long-distance running. Women had been forbidden from participating in the ancient Olympics. A woman who was caught even as a spectator at the Games could face execution. But women in ancient Greece held their own festival to honour the goddess Hera every five years. Only one athletic event was held-a short footrace.

When the Olympics were revived in 1896, women were again excluded. But, in March of 1896, Stamatis Rovithi became the first woman to run a marathon when she covered the proposed Olympic course from Marathon to Athens. The following month, a woman named Melpomene presented herself as an entrant in the Olympic Marathon. Race organizers denied her the opportunity to compete. Undiscouraged, Melpomene warmed up for the race out of sight. When the starter's gun sounded, she began to run along the side of the course. Eventually she fell behind the men, but as she continued on, stopping at Pikermi for a glass of water, she passed runners who dropped out of the race in exhaustion. She arrived at the stadium about an hour and a half after Spiridon Louis won the race. Barred from entry into the now empty stadium, she ran her final lap around the outside of the building, finishing in approximately four and a half hours. It would be nearly a century before another woman would run the Olympic Marathon.

Violet Piercy of Great Britain was the first woman to be officially timed in the marathon, when she clocked a time of 3:40:22 in a British race on October 3, 1926. Due largely to the lack of women's marathon competition, that time stood as an unofficial world record for thirty-seven years.

As with her historical counterpart, Stamatis rouithi, women had been barred from the most famous marathon outside the Olympics-Boston. That rule did not keep women from running, though. In 1966, Roberta Gibb hid behind a bush at the start of the Boston Marathon, sneaking into the field and finishing the race in an unofficial time of 3:21:25. She was the first woman known to complete the arduous Boston course. Gibb had been inspired to run by the return of her race entry with a note saying that women were not physically capable of running a marathon.

Slowly, the rules did begin to change. On August 31,1971 Adrienne Beames of Australia became the first women to run a sub-three-hour marathon, smashing that barrier with a time of 2:46:30. In 1972, women were allowed to compete officially in the Boston Marathon for the first time. As running became a more popular sport during the 1970s, more women began competing in marathons. In spite of all the progress being made in women's distance running, a woman's marathon at the Olympics was still a pipe dream. It took perseverance, dedication and sheer will to finally succeed. Women had finally won the right to compete in an Olympic Marathon in the 1984 Games. Over the years, Marathons have been witness to many heroes, from the historical Phaedippides to Sebastian Coe and Frank Shorter to the all time greats, Grete Waitz and Joan Benoit.