Olympic Message
When the unnamed hoplite ran for his city's glory a new moon rose through silvery olive trees. Athens memorialised the battle story, minted the moon on her silver currency.
Beside the Marines' Iwo Jima monument, where we once ran in Washington DC, fall's golden coinage showered our progress, spent like ticker-tape for a civic jubilee.
Some did it to express the common weal, some to raise funds for a deserving cause; others fulfilled a personal ideal, or chased the dragon of their peers' applause.
True marathoners only run for love, to feel their freedom in each fleeting mile, for whom the time clocked, if it can improve on last time, is the only prize worthwhile.
For 'love', for 'freedom' — yes, and such words bleed to remember those who ran from start to finish up Normandy's beaches in our hour of need, whom today's lies and shame cannot diminish.
And from the Greeks two thousand years ago the flame now signals, and the race relays a sterner lesson we still have to know, if we would hold the pass for peaceful days: that cost at which our leisure hours were won, the will to face life's older Marathon.
John Weston
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