Marathon isn't dead after all

Battered, bruised and left for road kill, it appears the rugged, mountainous Deseret News Marathon isn't about to follow the evening-delivery Deseret News and gulp its last gasp after all.

Rumor had it this spring that the 34th annual running of the 26.2-mile Pioneer Day foot race this coming July 24th would be its last.

Well, OK, it was more than rumor that had it. Reports of the marathon's end were printed several times in the pages of the Deseret News shortly before the newspaper made the switch to the Deseret Morning News at the start of the summer. The paper that started the race in 1970 and has sponsored or co-sponsored it ever since (current co-sponsor is KJZZ) said the race was about to do a Custer.

A reliable source, you'd have to think.

But in the weeks and months since, there have been sufficient howls of protests from runners and traditionalists that abandoning the long run didn't seem like such a good idea.

"A lot of people really love the race," said Deseret Morning News publisher Jim Wall.

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People who know running history can breathe a deep diaphragm sigh of relief.

A pioneer isn't about to bite the dust.

The Deseret News Marathon will turn 34 years old in less than two weeks, and while that may not seem exactly ancient — Julia Roberts is older than that — in the world of modern marathoning it is getting up there.

When the first D.N. Marathon was run on July 24, 1970, with 73 entrants and 43 finishers, it was one of only a handful of 26.2-mile races in the entire country.

There was the Boston Marathon, of course — its roots date back to 1897, just one year after the first official marathon race in history was contested at the inaugural modern Olympic Games in Athens, Greece.

The inspiration for the distance run came from a Greek soldier named Pheidippides who, as legend as it, ran all the way from the Greek town of Marathon to Athens in 449 B.C. to bring news of an important victory, after which he collapsed dead.

The organizers of the 1896 Athens Olympics marked a starting line in Marathon and a finishing line in Athens and invented a new running event.

Marathon races have been in every Olympics since, as well as at Boston, but it wasn't until the running boom of the 1970s that the races began spreading to the masses.