Men and gods are different things. It is worth mentioning because the man mentioned here is known as the “god of running.” Yiannis Kouros is not an ultrarunner. For him you have to use the definite article: he is “The Ultrarunner.” No one dared as he did, no one reached the limits of human endurance as he did.
For him:
Endurance refers not to something physical but to something spiritual.
In these words of his, one finds a way to understand his athletic feats out of the ordinary and even beyond the extraordinary: body and soul. Yiannis Kouros is a man who has always understood running as a solitary and heroic exploration of the boundaries of his soul.
He recounts that in one of his first ultramarathons at one point he distinctly sensed himself in a different place from his body. He was high above himself and you could see-or see his body, it would be better to say-running underneath him.
Often when people say “overcoming one’s limitations,” they mean physical ones. Instead, Kouros has always understood these boundaries differently. Where normally one understands overcoming them as an end, he sees a means: one that enables him to go beyond his body to another dimension, the spiritual. Where is this dimension found? He says so himself:
Your body cannot handle running you for 24, 48 hours. Even for six days in a row. No one completes races like this with their body-it just takes the mind.
Using the power of his mind, he dared the inosabile and the inosato: running for 24 hours in a row, running for several days, running for 1,000 km, running for 1,000 miles (that’s right: miles, that’s 1609 km) and in all these distances he still holds the world record (303 km and 506 m in 24 hours, 473 km and 495 m in 48, 1036 km and 800 m in 6 days, 1,000 kilometers on track in 5 days, 16 hours and 17 minutes, 1,000 miles on road in 10 days, 10 hours, 30 minutes and 36 seconds). New records that not only define new physical achievements of man but are forays into uncharted territory, so far beyond the physical limit as to trespass into the spiritual.
“When everyone else stops I keep running.”
His philosophy is all in this simple sentence, spoken by a man of great humility but who loves words and uses them with measure. Not only when he speaks but also when he composes the poems he has been writing since the age of 12. And when he plays and composes music.
A strange figure of a sportsman: so physical and yet so spiritual. Engaged in epic feats but also dedicated to mindfulness and love for his Greece.
A beloved country that he had to leave for 10 years from 1990 to 2000 to move to live in Australia in open controversy with the Greek Olympic committee that did not support him.
A geographic place in which he does not recognize himself because he has a mythical idea of Greece in his mind: the classical one, the one of heroes and poets, the one of Pheidippides, a man to whom he has devoted much thought and so much road.
The word “Excess” recurs frequently in his interviews. Not intended as a forcing of limits and healthy living but as a clear direction. To excel for Kouros is to honor these men of the past who lived for an ideal greater than themselves: to save the homeland from Persian attack or to sing its praises with poetry.
In its relationship with history, it is clear what its temporal dimension is. He does not measure himself by present time except in the chronometric limits he sets on the road. His thinking expands in a much more dilated historical time.
He is a man – extraordinary but human no doubt – who thinks in a much more dilated dimension in a historical sense. Not here and now but at a certain point in time and space that he reaches by running.
One anecdote most of all tells of Kouros and his relationship with time: the second time he won the Sydney to Melbourne Ultramarathon (which he won five times, in 1985, 87, 88, 89, and 90) by improving the historical record by 28 hours (twenty-eight hours) journalists told the organization that this was no longer fun and that he was too strong. So they did a little “intrigue”-as he calls it: they started him 12 hours after the other contestants.
I could have come 11 hours and 59 minutes later and still won, only I wouldn’t have won.
How did it turn out? He left 12 hours later, caught up with the leading group after 300 km, and of course, won.
Perhaps Kouros’ greatest ally is time: in its dimension straddling body and mind, reality and spirit he manages to distort it, bending and dominating it.
In this time dimension he ran, he won, and he brought back to us his poems and tales of his truly heroic deeds. Divine, indeed.