Ultra Running from the Beginning of Time

The first runners in history were ultra runners. Early humans could not run faster than a deer but they could out-endure it. Carved hieroglyphs reveal that Pharaoh’s army in ancient Egypt ran races of seventy miles or more. A Greek long-distance military messenger like Pheidippides would have regarded a mere marathon as a warm-up. The run that put him in history was in fact all the way from Athens to Sparta and back, 150 miles each way on mountainous goat tracks, sent to ask the Spartans for help against the invading Persian army. It took him three days there and back, a normal workload in his job.

“I do not think it is possible to die after running as little as twenty-five miles,” said the great Greek ultra-runner Yiannis Kouros quietly to me, when we worked sceptically on a film about the supposed death of Pheidippides and the origins of the marathon.

The Old Testament records how a messenger from the Tribe of Benjamin ran twenty-five miles of sandy camel trails with the news that the Israelis had been defeated in battle. That was in 1080BCE, three hundred years before the first track races at the ancient Olympic Games (776BCE). The ultra runners came first. 

Essential to early human survival, long-distance running was also essential to the development of human society. There’s no society without communication, and, in every era before the railways, communication meant running. Faster and cheaper than horses over long distances, far more flexible than waterways, runners carried every kind of message, from royal commands and military orders to love letters, business news, and birth, death and marriage announcements. Runners did everything that we do by phone, text, email, TV, or tweet, and they ran from place to place on rough foot-tracks, or on roads so muddy or dusty that we would call them tracks, or trails.

Runners were also often the fastest parcel courier service. Heavy goods went by packhorse, but relays of ultra runners portered fish and fruit to market (in ancient Peru), bags of money (Ethiopia), and condemned criminals, lashed to stretchers on the runners’ heads (India), an idea that no-one has tried today even in the London Marathon.     

They were so important that the ancient Greeks worshipped a messenger god, wing-footed Hermes (renamed Mercury by the Romans). Runners feature in many creation mythologies. In the belief of the Native Americans of the southwest, the Sacramento River was carved by a messenger running inland, and the Milky Way itself is dust raised by a race between the coyote and the wildcat as the earth was being formed. 

Track races came later, beginning as religious rituals. Cross-country came much later, beginning in the early 1800s as a variant on hunting foxes or hares. Last of all came what we call road running, which could not exist until gasworks tar was sprayed on crushed stone roads in the early 1900s. As late as 1908, the London Olympic Marathon ran on dirt roads and ended on cow-tracks across the open common land of Wormwood Scrubs to reach White City stadium.

So the world’s first great long-distance runners were not the graceful nude track racers idealised on ancient Greek vases, who anyway never raced further than about two miles, but generations of down and no doubt often dirty postmen, couriers, messengers, whose modestly paid role was to run many many miles, on rough and risky terrain, in all weathers, running all day and more if necessary. Pheidippides’s job description was “day runner.” Ultra-running messengers made up one of the world’s oldest, most global, and most important professions.

We know few of their names. The only sure way for a runner to be turned into legend is to drop dead at the finish. One who did got mixed up later with Pheidippides, whose fictitious fame is thus assured. Another was the Welsh shepherd Griffith Morgan, or Guto (pronounced Gitto) Nyth Brȃn, swiftest of the fleet-footed shepherds on that hilly terrain. He could herd sheep without a dog. Undefeated as a professional pedestrian over the hillside trails, Guto is remembered now for his last race, when he outran a young upstart calling himself “Prince,” for the huge sum of a thousand guineas, over a hilly trail from Newport to Bedwas. Many fans reputedly wagered their life savings. When Guto raced home uphill between fervently cheering crowds, his fiancée and manager Jane rushed over, cried “Bravo, Guto bach, bravo!” and passionately slapped him on the back. Guto fell dead on the spot, and has therefore been remembered ever since.

He is celebrated every New Year’s Eve in the “Nos Galan” race created in the 1950s by an astute Welsh schoolteacher, Bernard Baldwin, and now a major running festival. Baldwin’s most inspired idea was to invite an annual “mystery runner,” whose identity is kept secret, to embody the spirit of Guto. Many luminaries of British running and other sports have emerged out of the shadows with a lighted flare to represent the humble ultra-running shepherd. The latest was Welsh rugby legend George North.  

Most messengers remain in the shadows, yet they played their part in history. The Inca chasqui and Aztec titlantil runner-relay systems were so efficient that when the Spanish landed at Chianiztlan in May 1519, they were surprised to find that detailed reports of their ships and forces had reached Montezuma, 260 miles away, within twenty-four hours. A similar communication network enabled the Native Americans of the widespread southwest pueblos to rise successfully against the Spanish and take Santa Fe in August 1660. Indigenous runners in Bengal in 1857 used a “chain-letter” system of divided chapatti to summon the scattered villages to join the uprising against British rule known as the Indian Mutiny. 

It could be a dangerous profession. A history of the Indian postal services records one ultra-runner postman being eaten by a tiger. His family was refused compensation on the grounds that “the man was only carrying out his ordinary duty.” Readers who are worried about tigers will be relieved to know this unkind decision was overruled on appeal, and the audit officer reprimanded.

Running messengers were known for their stamina, resourcefulness, and skimpy clothing. The first Western observers in Japan recorded that the hikyaku messengers could cover 850 miles in nine days, but were perturbed by their traditional near-nudity, wearing summer and winter only a thin white loincloth, with straw sandals, and carrying a bamboo pole, with a box of letters at one end and the name of their employing provincial lord at the other. Japanese woodcut prints confirm this dress code. 

In Tudor England, the couriers’ traditional dress was a sort of kilt or long linen shirt coming to the knees but, like the Japanese loincloths, leaving ample freedom for running. “Our village maids delight,” wrote a mid-1500s chronicler, “to see the Running Footman fly bare-arsed over the dusty road.” 

Developing communities employed “footposts” as they were called in England, like Bartholomew Moore, who ran from Leicester to London and back once a week in the 1600s. In New Zealand in the 1850s, “Black Andy,” an Australian aboriginal, worked as mail carrier between the sheep stations of South Canterbury and the city of Christchurch, 100 miles each way, with dangerous river crossings, “at a quick trot all the way.” Knowing his own weakness for brandy, Andy used to check into the Christchurch police cells for the night.

For centuries, all around the world, these usually nameless ultra running messengers were the true precursors of our vibrant global modern sport of running. Their often heroic stories add up to one big and overlooked story. It’s one that should be part of every history of sport, and it had profound effect on the whole progress of civilisation. They included, no doubt, some very great runners, who in a different context would have been elite ultra runners, trail racers, or marathoners. 

Only now do we understand how they could sustain such distances day after day. It took us (the competitive sport) until the late twentieth century to learn the human body’s adaptive ability to develop increased endurance. Those who risked training mileages ahead of their time, like Tom Longboat, Jim Peters, Ted Corbitt (main image), Yiannis Kouros, or Marcy Schwam, reaped the benefits in their races. Their names live on. But they were running in the tireless footsteps of countless ultra-running messengers whose names are long forgotten.

*****

Abbreviated excerpt from Roger Robinson’s ground-breaking new book, Running Throughout Time: the Greatest Running Stories Ever Told (Meyer & Meyer, 2022), available from Meyer & Meyer and all good bookstores and online retailers.

Roger Robinson ran cross-country for England and New Zealand, set masters records at the Boston and New York Marathons, and in February won the world cross-country championship, over-80 grade. He is regarded as running’s best writer and historian.