After years spent among books and grammars trying to 'think as the Greeks thought', Andrea Marcolongo began to train and to 'run as the Greeks ran'. And she did so using the first sports manual in history, the De arte gymnastica by the philosopher Philostratus, as an accompanying tool. Until she reached her final crazy goal: to run a marathon, or rather, to run “The Marathon”: the 41.8 km that separate Marathon from Athens, which the soldier Pheidippides ran two thousand five hundred years ago, before collapsing to the ground due to excessive fatigue. Why do we run? Why all this hustle and bustle? What does this constant search for muscle and sweat tell us about ourselves? Perhaps the Greeks, who were the first to question why we run, why we test ourselves and why we compete against others, can help us in finding the answer. The famous motto Mens sana in corpore sano is just the first open door through which we will discover a fascinating and complex universe of thought.