Original Marathon

Ha! It's a thing now: I happened to be in London last week and remembered that the Other Original Marathon is from London, and so I ran that one too. This is the route I followed. While the one in Marathon may have been the exact historic route (I don't think much about the road has changed in 130 years, and there is even one odd excursion where you jump over a concrete barrier that suggests it has not been retuned for contemporary streets), I'm pretty sure that this one is more like "what you would run today to pay homage to the classic course." What makes the course classic? In the 1908 Olympics the marathon was going to originally be the 40km length that was used from Marathon to Athens (and Paris 1900, St. Louis 1904). But some people in the UK are weirdly obsessed with royalty, and the royals wanted to watch the race without encountering regular people. So they moved the beginning of the race so they could watch the beginning out the windows of Windsor Castle, and the end…