Next weekend the world will come to Ireland for the admirable torture that is the Dublin marathon.
There are few activities more gruelling for the everyday human. If runners do, however, want some chilling perspective they can, on Saturday morning, catch the Irish premiere of Barney Spender and Roddy Gibson's fascinating The Road to Sparta at the Light House cinema.
The film studies the annual Spartathlon, an “ultramarathon” that invites runners to traverse the 152 miles from Athens and Sparta. There are no breaks for sleep. For well over a day – unless you’re among the elite who can manage it in a mere 23 hours – runners pad their way painfully through the heat of the day and the chill of the night.
In The Road to Sparta, Dean Karnazes, among the world's most experienced ultramarathon runners, offers graphic explanation of the toll on the body. "Every moment you could lose your innards," he says. "Who knows from what end?" It's some story.
Spender, a versatile sports journalist from Somerset, got the idea while working in Greece between 2004 and 2009. “I’d run a few marathons, including the Athens marathon,” he says. “When I was living in Greece I was pointed towards the original Pheidippides story, which is based on Herodotus’s account of what happened before the battle of Marathon. I covered the race several times and just found it fascinating.”
The Spartathlon does, indeed, seek to move in the footsteps of the Athenian messenger Pheidippides. Herodotus tells us that he arrived in Sparta the day after he left Athens. This seemed scarcely possible. In 1982, a group of RAF officers set out to discover if a human could really achieve that feat. Three of them managed it in under 40 hours.
The Spartathlon began the next year and fast became a popular activity for runners who wanted to test limits beyond the mere marathon.
Spender and Gibson go among a small huddle of apparently ordinary men and women who yearn to finish the race and – as is the tradition – kiss the feet of Leonidas’s statue in Sparta. Most runners fail. But most fail after achieving more than the average human could dream.
Barney pondered the idea of a film. “I felt I couldn’t do justice to this race except by showing people,” he said. “Otherwise people just would not believe it.”
Compelled to get his act together following the sad death of two contemporaries, he phoned up Gibson, an experienced film-maker and educator who was at Trinity College, Dublin with Spender in the mid-1980s, and the two men launched themselves into this unlikely project. Spender’s wife gave him the final push. “It was at the back of my mind and I kept talking about it,” he says. “Eventually Jacqueline very kindly one day told me to shut the f**k up or go and make it. A lot of things happened at the same time.”
Sleekly edited to an economic 60 minutes, the film speaks to the film-makers’ experience in their respective fields. The heat boils off the screen. The discomfort twists the subjects’ ill-used features. It’s a classy piece. Yet Spender, who has lived in France for the last few years, reckons they spent no more than €12,000 on the project.
"I just put out feelers on Facebook. It was important to get female runners involved. I didn't want it to be just all blokes. It was all serendipitous. I have been cheeky and asked a lot of favours from old friends. The usual crowdfunding thing was helpful."
It hardly needs to be said that Greece has gone through traumas in the last few years. Featuring a neat complementary score and incisive verse from Alicia Stallings, The Road to Sparta is subtly bookended with references to the economic turmoil that has ravaged that country. We see shots of defiant graffiti. We note protest marches. The ancient myths and the modern sporting struggles play simultaneously.
“It is not meant to be in your face,” Spender says. “It’s not saying this is a film about austerity. But any film that has been made about Greece over the last eight or 10 years can’t avoid it. When Roddy and I went back for the pickups we got caught in a massive demo. The riot police were there.”
There is certainly some hint of old discontents there. No other country has its public image so entwined with ancient history.
“I just thought that worked well with the Battle of Marathon. In those days the threat was to Athens. It was, as Dean Karnazes says, a threat to the great western civilisation. The Greeks have had that threat on their doorsteps. The Roman smashed them up. Then the Ottomans. Now they have austerity. People are really suffering. Ordinary people can’t feed their children. That’s the current menace.”
So extraordinary is the story of the Spartathlon that it seems baffling more is not known about it. Why isn’t it on the telly ever year? Why are we only hearing about it now?
“I don’t know,” Spender laughs. “Well, I suppose it were better known we wouldn’t have made the film.”
The Road to Sparta premieres at The Light House Cinema in Smithfield on October 28th at 11.00am. eventbrite.ie
