Running a Marathon October 30th-October 31st

what is left of the temple

So even though it is saturday, we still have classes. But today instead of class we are traveling and touring some more in Greece. I was really tired today, but it was nice to get out of the usual routine. It's also freezing today, which I wish I would have known before I left the Artemis in only a T-shirt and rain jacket. Although, it does make me very excited for fall weather!! (Although we are leaving for Egypt in two days...as you can see my life has been crazy full of traveling). But today! We went to Brauron and saw the ruins that were there. There were not a lot of ruins there, only a temple like structure. One thing that I thought was interesting was the emphasis on the fact that here, the goddess that was worshiped was not Athena, but rather Artemis because she was less prestigious and glamorous but rather more practical. Apparently young women would come here to serve Artemis and ask for help in their future married life. This is something that I found to be quite interesting. It's crazy how much the Greeks relied on their gods and goddesses throughout their life. I honestly wonder if they felt like the gods&goddesses really did do stuff in their life like we feel that God does...

We also went to the Museum of Brauron which was really nice at the time because it was so cold, walking into a warm building was wonderful. My favorite thing in this museum was the earrings that they had. There were actually some that would have been gauges back then! I appreciated this, because I like gauges (even though I took mine out). I took a picture of them and thought that some of my friends would appreciate the fact that they even had them back then too :p Nothing is new under the sun, right?

Then after the museum we headed on to the location of Marathon. Marathon was a 5th century Greek city with Ionian states. As we all know, the battle of Marathon was here. To give a few details...The Athenians marched out to area 13 (Marathon). They had 10 generals, and one chief who was Mitelidis. They were going to wait there to attack the Persians first. At one mile, they began to run towards the Persians without breaking their defense line setup. They designed this very cleverly, too. Herodotus claims that the Persians lost 6400, but that was probably an exaggeration. Never the less, the site at marathon is where families came to bury their dead from this battle. The tombolas is a big mound of earth that was excavated in the 19th century. Pottery found was from 490 BC.

as you can see we were all miserably cold, but here is the mound!

After we were done with that, we went and looked at the place where we would actually be participating in the 2500th anniversary of the Marathon itself the next day! Which I will write about right now.

So the next day (Sunday), we had to wake up super early in order to get to the our marathon. Like I mentioned before,  I was going to run the 10K. I wasn't really prepared, but it didn't end up being bad at all! Once we got there we had to wait a while because we were early. Being so early in the morning, it was FREEZING cold. So we all huddled together to try to keep warm.

A while later, it was about time to start the races. There were only three of us from my group that were going to run the 10K, and the rest of them were going to run the 5K. Mandy, Conor and I were the 10Kers. Mandy and I decided to run together (we had no idea where Conor was). Anyways, we ran the whole thing without stopping but only once so that she could tie her shoe after halfway through. She was so helpful to me, because even though we were not necessarily completely in shape, she kept encouraging me and everyone else around us. My favorite parts was when we ran by the actual marathon runners who had been running for hours and they were almost at the end of theirs. That was really cool to me...we cheered them on and everything :) Also, towards the end, we ran into this man who was running and looked like he was having a hard time. Mandy patted him on the back as we ran past him and we both smiled back at him. A few minutes later, I feel this hand on my back and it's him running past us and smiling at us...it was so touching because even though we didn't speak the same language (and he seemed to be slightly challenged) we were able to share that moment together...it was really awesome :)

me and skylar with our medals after the race!

Anyways, Mandy and I finished the race in nearly an hour flat, which I was really really happy about. After that, we received our medals which was awesome! Then took a whole bunch of pictures, and later on spent the rest of the day in Athens. It was a really good day and I felt really accomplished.

Then, that night I had to pack, and get ready for my next adventure! Egypt in the early early morning!!