2nd October 2013 02:42
The Spartathlon is a draining 245.3km and takes around 24 hours for the best to complete. Stolzekleiven Opp is a thigh numbing 900m climb up the side of a mountain with an average 36 percent gradient.
For the record the winner of the Athens to Sparta race was Portugal’s Joao Oliveira in 23hr23min08sec with the women’s title going to Hungary’s Szilvia Lubic in 28:03:04.
Over on a mountainside outside Bergen on the west coast of Norway, Thorbjørn Ludvigsen took the title for the fourth year running clocking 8min06sec, a course record. The women’s event was won – also in record time 9:35 - by Nordic skiing cross country specialist, Kristin Størmer Steira.
One clear indication of the difficulty of the terrain is that European 1500m champion, Henrik Ingebrigtsen, could finish no higher than seventh, 44sec behind the winner.
But the mere figures hardly do either race justice. The Spartathlon follows the route taken by the Greek messenger, Pheidippides, from Athens to Sparta in 490BC to enlist the help of the Spartans in the war against the Persians at the battle of Marathon.
It starts in the shadow of the Acropolis at 7am on a Friday, passes the ruins of ancient Corinth, crosses five mountain ranges where at night the path is lit by fires that guide the runners over the summits. Finally, it ends the following morning at the statue of the Spartan king, Leonidas, where to complete the race each finisher has to kiss his huge bronze toe and drink water from the Evrotas river.
Stolzekleiven Opp, meanwhile, was an old delivery route over the mountains that on the 100th anniversary of the Norwegian Mountain Path organisation in 1979 became a race. 50 took part in the first edition, but that increased dramatically so that in 2013 over 6000 put their name down from age groups ranging from 10 year olds to the over 80s.
Spartathlon requires its numbers to take part in Ultra qualifying events and not surprisingly the numbers are much smaller that embark on one of the world’s longest races. This year 350 took part, of which there were 39 women.
The highest point comes at the dead of night as the runners cross the 1200m high Mount Partheniou where Pheidippides is alleged to have met the God Pan. Hallucination is not uncommon in modern competitors as the combination of exhaustion and altitude starts to take its toll.
The most famous winner of the Spartathlon is Yiannis Kouros, now Australian, who has won four Spartathlons in all and is still the record holder with a phenomenal time of 20hr25min, almost three hours faster than this year’s winner. He said he would only return to the Spartathlon if runners then turned round and did the return journey which is what Pheidippides was obliged to do.