CHICAGO — A long time ago in an HBO Original Series far away, an army of ancient Greeks won a battle.

Phidipiddes, one of the soldiers, said, "I'm so happy, I'm going to invent an insanely long footrace designed to test endurance, strength and speed, which shall give millions of people the chance to one day wear paper numbers on their shirts and wrap themselves in shiny foil thermal blankets upon finishing."

Excited to get to work on his idea, Phidipiddes sprinted all the way back from the battlefield to the city of Marathon to tell someone. But since he hadn't adhered to a comprehensive 16-week training program, poor Phidipiddes' body gave out when he arrived. All he could do was gasp "Victory," before he collapsed to the ground, dead.

This Sunday, 40,000 people gathered in downtown Chicago to continue the tradition Phidipiddes started so many years ago, only without killing themselves, by running the 28th Chicago Marathon.

I felt like Hemingway watching the running of the bulls in Pamplona, only the people were running for fun and competition, not to escape a bloody goring by a herd of stampeding bulls (and Hemingway was slightly better at turning a phrase).

There were runners of all ability, age and size, which is what made the whole thing such a great event. Sure, there were the select couple thousand who were at an elite level, those who do this sort of thing for a living.

But there were also 30,000 other people in the race, ordinary people competing because they wanted to.

The only thing separating the spectators from the participants was four months of training and a willingness to wear running shorts. A few spectators even jumped in during the race to run alongside their friends for a few feet or so.

You can't do that with any other sport. Imagine regular fans climbing out of their seats at a football game and trying to play along. You'd have a talent level amounting to that in the NFC North, and who wants to watch that?

"It was as much about having fun as it was about pushing yourself and doing something you've never done before," said senior physical therapy major Lizzie Norris, who finished the course in four hours and 44 minutes, good for 21,000th place. "And it was such a good time. It's a really fun marathon."

"It's nice because it doesn't depend on a team, you don't have to have eight guys like you do to go play baseball," said Ed Eucker, who finished in four hours, 38 minutes and 18 seconds. "It's all about you and dedication and will power."

If you were the person in the cow suit, it was also about what kind of costume to wear. If you were the girl with "My boyfriend dumped me on Thursday" written on your t-shirt, it was about what kind of vengeful motivation to use.

Though who can blame some for taking an absurdist approach for an inherently absurd task? Twenty-six miles is a long way to run — longer than most SUVs will travel on a gallon of gas — and there's a lot of time to think about a lot of things.

"I started thinking about how one of my professors has done ultra-marathons before, and she started seeing huge wild turkeys, and I was thinking about how far you'd have to run before you start hallucinating," Norris said.

Somewhere, Phidipiddes is smiling.

This article was published in The Marquette Tribune on October 13, 2005.