He Was Too Good. They Called Him a Cheater. It Became a Badge of Honor.

At 4:50 in the morning on October 1, 1983, a 27-year-old stadium guard ran into Sparta and nobody was awake to see it.

The officials had estimated the winner would show up around 27 hours after the start in Athens. Breakfast time. Maybe later. So the mayor was in bed. The bishop was in bed. The girls who were supposed to hand out the awards were in bed.

Here's how he remembered it:

His official time was 21 hours, 53 minutes, 42 seconds. Running just about 153 miles.

It was his first ultramarathon. Ever.

And the first thing the running world did was accuse him of cheating.

His name is Yiannis Kouros. A lot of people who know the sport call him the greatest ultrarunner who ever lived. One of the men who raced him, Trishul Cherns, put it this way: "There's the elite. The world class. Then there's Yiannis."

I've wanted to write about him for a long time. Partly because I'm a runner. But mostly because when you dig into his life, the thing that made him great has very little to do with his legs.

He was a poor kid from a hard house. And for most of his early life, nobody believed in him. Not his father. Not his coaches. Not the officials. Not the other runners. 

It took years of winning before people finally did.

Even then, he made friends and he made enemies. He got some big things wrong. He was not a perfect person. But he found his way through. That's the story.

He was born February 13, 1956, in Tripoli, a small city in the mountains of the Peloponnese.

His father was a carpenter. The family was poor. By most accounts there wasn't always enough food, and Yiannis was doing manual labor by the age of five.

Home was worse than poor. Here's how he described it:

He spent a lot of his childhood with his grandparents. Strict people. He has said his grandfather's discipline left a mark on him.

He couldn't afford the movies, so he went to the stadium and ran around it for fun. In high school, when he couldn't be at home after school, he went to the track. He started formal training at 16, but his coach decided he was a mediocre athlete without the build to go fast.

He became one of the best junior distance runners in Greece anyway.

He wasn't only a runner. He was writing poems and songs by 12. He took music and singing lessons. He'd record albums later. Over his lifetime he wrote more than 1,000 poems.

He was an artist. With an ability to go deep into his dreams and fears. Remember that. We’ll come back it. 

He ran his first marathon in 1977 at 21, in 2:43. By 1981 he was down around 2:25, and that year he won the Athens Marathon.

Also in 1981, he started building himself a house in Tripoli. By hand. Mostly alone.

He was working days as a guard at the athletic stadium. Evenings he worked on the house. He trained twice a day. And he slept about two and a half hours a night.

That's not a legend somebody else made up. He said that himself in an interview with LetsRun Magazine

That same year he asked the national sports council to send judges to watch him try for a Greek 100-kilometer record on a road loop. He ran it in 7 hours and 35 minutes.

No judges came.

By 1983 he had run 25 marathons. Then he read about a new race. Athens to Sparta. The route Pheidippides was said to have run in 490 BC to ask the Spartans for help against the Persians.

He signed up hoping to be the first Greek to finish it.

There were 45 starters on September 30, 1983. The field had world-record holders in it, including England's Eleanor Adams, the only woman entered.

Kouros knew part of the course. He'd ridden the first half on a bus with the other runners a few days before. He had a plan to finish between 21 and 22 hours, and he figured the experienced guys would beat that.

But he was focused on running his own race. He didn't think it would be easy. He said he took it "seriously but also heroically."

He started out in the lead and kept it. 

On a mountaintop above Arcadia he shouted, "Where are you, compatriots?" and heard his own voice echo back. Near the end, running across the plains toward Sparta, he was cold and shivering.

He was also mad about something none of us would have noticed. After Ancient Corinth, the course turned north. He knew that wasn't the road Pheidippides took. To him, it was his country cutting corners. Falsifying its own history instead of being honest. It made him angry and he had to keep finding thoughts to keep his feet moving.

Then came 4:50 a.m., where this story started. The sleeping mayor. And the doubt.

They accused him of cheating. 

A French runner who wouldn't give his name said, "I do not make an accusation of unfair play, but still I say to myself, 'perhaps he made a favorable turn by accident.' Because this performance, it is not possible for any man."

So he came back the next year and ran it faster. 20 hours, 25 minutes. A course record that would stand unbroken for the next 39 years.

He won Spartathlon four times.

The American ultrarunning pioneer Dan Brannen later said it best: "He is the only runner for whom an accusation of cheating eventually became an honor."

In July 1984 he went to New York.

The race was a six-day event on a 400-meter track inside Downing Stadium, a battered old stadium on Randalls Island under the Triborough Bridge. July 3 to July 9. Thirty-one runners.

Fred Lebow, the director of the New York Road Runners club, ran it. His biggest headache, he said, was the music. "The Greek runner wants bouzouki music. Siegfried Bauer from New Zealand wants Bach concertos."

Kouros went after a record set in 1888 at Madison Square Garden. George Littlewood's 623 miles in six days. It had stood for 96 years.

But it started out a bit messy. 

He told an interviewer years later that he went to New York planning to run 24 hours, break the world record for most miles run in day, and stop.

He failed at his attempt. His feet were blistered. And he was off the mark for the record attempt. 

But during his running he started to wonder… what if he kept going and tried to break the 48-hour record instead?

Here's how it started. He ran his first marathon in about 2:42 and kept going. After 24 hours he had roughly 164 miles, 46 ahead of the next competitor. The newspapers noted he finally sat down, ate a plate of boiled potatoes, and drank water with honey and lemon.

They also reported that some of the other runners wondered if his manic start would catch up with him. They were waiting for him to crash.

Then he told us what that felt like inside:

Carrying it without its consent.

Read that again. 

It was brutally hot. Eleanor Adams, who won the women's race and set her own world best, remembered that it was impossible to sleep in the tents during the day.

On the 4th of July, kids threw firecrackers at the runners trying to nap behind the stands. Then a lightning storm rolled in. "Yiannis Kouros and I continued through it with lightning arcing between us," she wrote.

His toes were bleeding so badly that people figured he'd drop out.

And then the part everybody quotes:

He also said he was scared of failing every single day. "Every day I was afraid that I would have to stop."

Then Sri Chinmoy, the spiritual teacher whose team was counting laps at the race, took his hand and told him, "You will win!"

He finished with 635 miles. Littlewood's record was gone, and he'd set new world records at 48 and 72 hours along the way.

His first words were pretty human. "I am very, very tired. I am really surprised that I broke the record. I didn't think it was humanly possible and I doubted that the man ran that many miles such a long time ago."

What came next is honestly hard to list without it sounding made up.

In November 1984 he ran a 24-hour race on a one-mile loop in Flushing Meadows and went through 100 miles in 11:46:37, a world road record, on the way to 177 miles.

A year later he ran the Westfield race from Sydney to Melbourne, about 544 miles on open roads, and won it in 5 days, 5 hours, 7 minutes.

That beat the course record held by the Australian farmer Cliff Young by roughly ten hours. The last stretch went through Coburg, a Melbourne suburb with a big Greek community. People lined the streets with flags and threw flowers at him.

He described the day after like this:

He won Sydney to Melbourne five times. One year he won by 28 hours. So one year the organizers made him start eight hours behind everyone else. He still won.

That September he ran another 24-hour race in New York while Hurricane Gloria was hitting the city. Parks closed, events canceled, and race volunteers tied tables down with construction blocks. He ran about 178 miles and raised his own world record.

In 1988 he ran 1,000 miles at Flushing Meadows in 10 days, 10 hours, 30 minutes. He didn't sleep for the first four days because jets kept taking off overhead.

A year earlier he'd tried the same race. He ran about 150 miles on the first day with a swollen knee, then had knee surgery the next day. This time he went back and finished.

He wrote about that race in Ultrarunning magazine in March 1990, in a piece titled "A War is Going on Between My Body and My Mind."

People still point to that essay when they talk about how his mind works.

In late November 1984, at a six-day race in Colac, Australia, with about 5,000 people watching, Kouros stopped running roughly 200 meters short of breaking his own world record.

He went on strike.

He'd been promised an appearance fee and prize money. The promoters didn’t keep their end of the deal. 

So he stood there. And waited 97 minutes, 200 meters from breaking another world record, until they delivered on their promise. 

Then he went back out and beat the record by 360 meters. His manager called it disgust at promises that had been broken. 

One newspaper called him graceless for it. I don't see it that way.

I see a man finding out something most of us learn the hard way. You can do everything right. You can be the best in the world at what you do. And people will still make you promises they don't keep. They'll back out. They'll try to take advantage of you.

Doing the right thing doesn't mean everyone else will.

He held his ground anyway.

And sometimes he was the one who got it wrong.

In 1988 he went to South Africa to run a 100-kilometer race while the international sports boycott over apartheid was in place. He said later he didn't fully understand what it meant until the press conference.

He was leading near the end and pulled out a few kilometers from the finish, giving up a $35,000 first prize so his name wouldn't appear in the results.

It didn't save him. He was disqualified from a 24-hour race in England afterward. Anti-apartheid groups pushed to keep him out of the upcoming Sydney to Melbourne race. In 1989, in front of cameras, he signed the UN pledge against South Africa's policies.

He got South Africa wrong. He paid for it. Learned. And kept going.

That same year he lost the job he'd held for 9 years. His employer said he wasn't producing enough work. In truth, his boss got involved in politics after a change of government and decided not to pay him for 9 months. Another promise, by his telling, that somebody didn't keep.

In 1990 he moved his family to Melbourne. He'd met his wife, Teresa, at a marathon in Poland. Their daughter was born in 1987.

In 1991 the Sydney to Melbourne sponsor refused his terms, so he ran the course anyway as a solo runner, starting a day behind the official field. He still finished ahead of everyone. The sponsor pulled out after that year and the race was never run again.

He played Pheidippides in a TV film that year too. And then he mostly stopped racing.

In 1992 he enrolled at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He studied music and Modern Greek literature and went on to a master's degree.

He spent 8 to 10 hours a day in his studio with keyboards and guitars. He wrote his book, The Six-Day Run of the Century, published in 1997. He's said it's already been translated into English and just needs a publisher.

He told an interviewer how much he slept during those university years:

Thirty minutes.

I'm putting that on the record because it's his. I am not putting it in front of you as a plan.

In August 1994 he came back to race, now as an Australian citizen, in a seven-day stage race circling Tasmania. Snow on day two. Bad weather again on day five. He was coming off three years with very little running and a crew he didn't trust.

Here's what happened, in his words from 1996:

He said what he rarely says. "Forget it, it isn't worth it." He asked that his remains not be left in the mountains of Tasmania.

He lost that race to Anatoli Kruglikov by 37 kilometers.

And I think it might be the most important thing he ever did.

Two years later, in 1996, he went to a 48-hour race in Surgères, France. In his last training run before flying out of Athens, he fell and broke his ribs. Sources say three or four.

He raced anyway on a 300-meter gravel track in the sun and ran 473 kilometers, about 294 miles. A world record. It took him more than 40 days afterward to walk or sleep without pain.

In October 1997, at 41, he ran a 24-hour race on a track in Adelaide. That same week he'd raced the 10K at the Australian university championships against kids aged 19 to 23. He was stiff.

The track had no lights, so volunteers stood on the inside lane holding kerosene torches, and the fumes bothered his lungs all night.

Around hour 17 he hit a bad stretch, stopped talking, and his crew put small pieces of food in his mouth as he passed each lap.

When the sun came up, he came back to life. He started yelling at his crew for more food.

He ran 303.506 kilometers. 188.6 miles in a single day. 

When he finished he said, "I will run no more 24-hour races. This record will stand for centuries."

It stood for almost 24 years. Lithuania's Aleksandr Sorokin broke it in August 2021. Nobody else had come within 21 kilometers of it before then.

At the end of 1997 he moved back to Greece, where friends arranged a job for him as an officer in the Greek Air Force.

In 2005, at 49, back on the same rough track in Colac, he ran more than 1,036 kilometers in six days and beat records he'd set there 21 years earlier.

In the last hours he had a hamstring injury he says kept him from really running. "I managed to run metaphysically in the last couple of hours in order to better my record, a fact that cause me more damage to my leg."

His last big six-day race came at Across the Years in Arizona over New Year's 2013 into 2014. He ran 550 miles. Joe Fejes ran 555 and beat him. He had been running for almost 6 decades.

He stopped competing around 2014, at 58 and Australia's ultrarunning association put him in its Hall of Fame five years later.

When LetsRun Magazine asked what he was doing these days, he said he was renovating old buildings. Their interview had been delayed because his eyes were bothering him from welding iron on his house.

The man is still building houses. 

I tried to get him on my podcast once.

In 2015 I sent him a message asking him to be a guest. On the morning of December 21, he wrote back.

Honestly? I love that email.

The greatest ultrarunner who ever lived was behind on his work. He was too busy. He apologized for being slow to answer. He was just a guy with too much on his plate, like the rest of us.

You don't have to be perfect to be awesome. He wasn't.

People have spent 40 years trying to find the trick. Brannen finally gave up: "You won't find the secret to Kouros in either his ability or his training."

Kouros says the secret isn't something you can measure. He calls ultrarunning "a mental sport that touches metaphysical aspects of the human."

He has a word for what drives him. Eusiginisia. As he explains it, it's being moved very quickly and from many sources. "I believe that what revives me is exactly the same thing that also kills me at the same time."

And when he talked about the runners who don't belong in the sport, he put his finger on what they're missing: "there is lack of self-knowledge."

That's it. That's the secret, if there is one.

He knew himself.

Here's how I read his life against the five things you control: Morning, Evening, Fuel, Exercise, and Conflict.

Morning is where you set your goals and intentions. Evening is where you get honest with yourself. Fuel is how you feed your body. Exercise is the stress you put your body under on purpose. And Conflict is everything else.

Kouros decided before he started.

Before his first Spartathlon he made a plan to finish between 21 and 22 hours. He spent three months looking for things that would keep him going in the race, and found them in music, rhythm, and thinking. In New York, with his body quitting on him, he said he "made a conscious decision to write history."

He decided first. Then he ran.

Most of us start the day reacting. The inbox. The news. Somebody else's emergency. Kouros never let anybody else decide what his race was for.

It would be a mistake to fixate on his sleep. Two and a half hours a night while he built his house. Thirty minutes while he studied. Ten minutes in the middle of a 1,000-mile race. That's the part that goes viral.

Sleep is a big part of your evening, and it's the part most of us get wrong. Most of us aren't building a house by hand and training for a world record. We're up late scrolling. Here's how he talked about it:

Make the decision. Just don't copy his numbers. His body paid for every one of them. For most of 30 years he took about three months off running every year, and sometimes he went three to nine months without running at all.

But the real work of the evening is introspection. Looking back at what you did and asking what worked, what didn't, and whether it lined up with what you say you value.

Kouros did that his whole career.

He changed his mind about his own training: "I was doing very rarely long runs at the beginning of my career, but I am sure this is the reason I became slower and weaker. Afterwards, when I change my opinion, even I was older, I was doing again well and even better without them!"

He changed his pacing: "Getting older you learn that more conservative pace supports the overall result in any distance beyond the marathon."

He picks his own records apart in public. The 10K race that left him stiff before Adelaide. The kerosene torches. The crew mistakes with his shoes at Colac in 2005.

Even the low feeling after a race, he used: "I feel disappointed, a bit depressed after races and feel I didn't accomplish much. But this inspires me to keep pushing."

And in Tasmania, when winning and his values pulled in different directions, he chose his values. Two kids at home mattered more than a race.

"When I am alone with my thinking, I have another world," he said.

That's the evening. Sitting alone with your thinking long enough to actually know yourself. Most of us never do it. He did. For 30 years.

People love to say his diet was the secret. He hates that.

Here's what he did do. During races he avoided animal products. He refused gels and ate real food. He'd had stomach problems early in his running career and decided never to race on an empty stomach again.

On the run from Athens to Sparta and back, Runner's World reports he got half his calories from Greek sweets, eating every 20 minutes. Baklava. Custard. Honey cookies.

And the best line on the subject: "The Australian runners documented what I ate one year in an ultra-distance race and copied it the next year and I still won by 28 hours."

Fuel is the floor. You can lose by getting it wrong. I know that from personal experience. But you can't win just by getting it right.

Exercise is stress you choose. Kouros chose very little of it, and he chose it carefully.

He did short, hard sessions on the track, never longer than 12 kilometers. Six times 2K. Three times 4K. And only two to four weeks before a race.

He also said this: "I am not the best runner. If I were to train with other runners, they would beat me. But in a race, I feel something different."

I'm not telling you to train like Kouros. What I take from it is this: he didn't use exercise to prove something every day. 

He used it to show up at the start line healthy and hungry, and he saved the real fight for the race.

Conflict is everything you didn't choose. Your response to it is the only part you control.

A father who lashed out at him. Coaches who said he didn't have the build. Judges who never showed up. Experts who called him a cheat. Promoters who broke their promises. A boss who stopped paying him. A hurricane in New York. Snow in Tasmania.

And his own mistakes, too.

Here's how he handled the hits:

And this:

That's the forge. The hammer comes down, and the steel gets turned and folded and hit again. Then comes the quench. Tranquility. Sobriety. Precision.

He got some of it right. He held his ground at Colac. He walked off the course in Tasmania. He got some of it wrong, and South Africa cost him.

You're going to get some of it wrong too. You're a flawed human. You're going to make mistakes.

That's okay. He did too.

He once said runners fail because they lack "enough tragedies in their life to build inner stamina."

I'd say it a little differently. You'll get plenty of hard days without going looking for them. 

What matters is what you do with them.

Pick one of the five this week. Just one.

Write down one intention before you open your phone.

Give yourself ten quiet minutes tonight. What worked today? What didn't? Did what I did line up with what I say I value?

Think of the worst thing that's happened to you in the last year. Write down one thing it equipped you for. Not what it took. What it left you with.

And if you want to tell me what you wrote, reply to this email. I'll answer faster than Yiannis did.

It goes straight to me. I dare you.