What Killed the OG Marathon Runner?

 When I was a kid, I was on the high school track and cross country teams. My hero back then was the original guy who sprinted the long way back from the Battle of Marathon to the city of Athens, where he delivered his message, and dropped dead from sheer exhaustion. He was so cool that a picture of him running in full on Greek armor, minus the helmet, was my profile picture for years.

Here is the picture for reference:

Anyway, as I was running home last night, as I was thinking about my recent Wilderness First Aid class where we had learned about hypokalemia, or the deadly lack of potassium during treks in the desert and ultramarathons. I thought about this and realized that there is a good chance that Pheidippides (the name of the runner), had died not so much from exhaustion as a lack of essential salts and water. If he sprinted like he did, eventually the sweat, which is salty due to the potassium and sodium pumps that keep our bodies in homeostasis would have sweated out the salts and left him vulnerable either to hypokalemia (the lack of potassium), the lack of sodium (hyponatremia), or the typical effects of dehydration and heatstroke. He possibly died from all three. I’ve only taken one physiology course, and have a minor in biology. I am not a doctor, but I have to wonder if anyone has really tried to take a stab at the physiological causes of Pheidippides’s death. The solution to hypokalemia, as Theodore Gray, the eminent chemist and science communicator is:

(Gray, Mann, 2012)

Unfortunately for Pheidippides, he didn’t live in a place with bananas. He did live as a runner off a diet of dried dates and figs, olives, cured meat, and a fruit called Sea Buckthorn. (Karnazes, 2016) The first two have plenty of potassium, but the rest of the foods do not. He may have run so fast that he didn’t have time to replenish his body’s source of potassium.

There is the point to be made that the whole run may not have happened at all. Herodotus didn’t mention it. But it has been handed down by oral tradition to the point that many people believe that this happened, and it is still a part of the heritage the classical world has handed down to us.

Works Cited

Gray, Theodore, and Nick Mann. The Elements : A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe. 2009. New York, Black Dog & Leventhal, 2012.

Karnazes, Dean. “The Real Pheidippides Story.” Runner’s World, Runner’s World, 6 Dec. 2016, www.runnersworld.com/runners-stories/a20836761/the-real-pheidippides-story/. Accessed 6 Apr. 2021.

twitter.com/ancientgrworld/status/998220263677448195/photo/1. Accessed 6 Apr. 2021.