One day in April 1973, Roberto De Munari happened to find himself at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. This chance encounter would lead him to running, and then to fifty years of loyalty to the magazine Spiridon - right up until his final tribute in 2019.
"April 1896. The first modern Olympic Games are about to end. 25 athletes gathered at Marathon..."
MARATHON is a small village with pretty white houses, tightly packed around the church. Erected in the public square, a monument speaks of those who fell during the war.
" They talk with their bare legs and arms...
Running, a direct extension of walking, is the most natural physical activity that can be found! No accessory, no artifice: the man, on the run, is alone with his body, his soul and his spirit. No other situation manages to free him more surely from daily trivialities, contingencies, burdens of all kinds. For a few hours, he is free and he remakes the world!
Will you survive, Spiridon?...
It's past two o'clock; it's raining in Biel!
For a long time now, those who have made these "100 km" something more than a simple endurance event, by adding the ambition of performance, have reached their goal.
The others are content to finish! In the best possible time, certainly, but without a minute more or less changing anything about their joy, complete, at least in appearance, by the fact that they were able to complete the loop in one go!
"Eat whatever you want!"
He has the coppery complexion, curly hair, bushy eyebrows, and dark eyes of some Southerners. And because he lived for some time among the British and the Germans, he easily assumes the polite, reserved, distant, or cold air that often suits our world of propriety. All exuberance and laughter with friends, when he smiles, all you see of his eyes is a deep crease, with the fine wrinkles of kindness around their edges. My colleague is Spanish. And punctual. One February morning, Mr. Alonso calls out to me: You, the runner, tell me, what do you think I should eat to lose weight...?
"I would love to run the marathon too."
"Impossible for a woman!" he replied. The challenge was set.
A woman who runs is also a runner!
I had been participating in men's organized long-distance races in the United States for about six years. And I often ran the risk of being expelled from them.
The joy of running
The champion of tomorrow will first and foremost be a man capable of maintaining within himself the joy of living and running, aware of his exceptional value, but refusing to live egocentrically, while always managing to maintain around him the climate conducive to both ideal training and recovery, as well as the emergence of great exploits.
Like a strange animal
I was the first woman to run the San Blas marathon, and for that too the small town was "waiting". Most people considered me a strange animal.
Kathy Switzer
In Flanders, everyone runs, everyone is happy
If I am happy to be Belgian, sometimes it is thanks to athletics, it is thanks to running, it is thanks to middle-distance and long-distance running.
The girls of Belgium
In Belgium, women's athletics took a very long time to get off the ground. It languished for months and years in an outdated organization, amidst indifference and even contempt.
