A 75-Year-Old Finished the Athens Marathon Barefoot and Dressed as an Ancient Warrior

Idomeneas Avramakis ran into the Panathenaic Stadium at 6:15 p.m. on Sunday dressed as an ancient Greek warrior, shield and sword in hand and nothing at all on his feet. The 75-year-old from Heraklion, Crete, was the last finisher of the 43rd Athens Authentic Marathon, arriving with close to 10 hours on the race clock, long after the winners had been presented and most of the crowd had headed home.

Sofia Sakorafa, president of the Hellenic Athletics Federation (SEGAS), was still at the line to hand him his medal. Speaking after the race, as first reported by LiFO, Avramakis offered the motto he likes to give out: “Τρέξε για να μη σε τρέχουν,” “Run, so that others don’t make you run,” in English. It is a play on a Greek idiom, and the sense of it is that you should run now, by choice, so that nobody has to run you around later.

He made it on the very minute the course was due to close: the marathon has an eight-hour limit, and because runners leave Marathon in waves from 8:30 a.m., the final finishing deadline in the stadium was 6:15 p.m., according to Travel.gr’s race-week guide, so Avramakis, with more than 54 marathons to his name, came in with no time to spare.

Avramakis runs barefoot all the time, not only on race day. In 2024, when a journalist from Reader.gr ran the closing stretch of the same race beside him, he explained that he trains without shoes too, every other day, for two and a half to three and a half hours at a time. In his experience the feet need about three months, at most, to get used to it. Runners who would rather ease in than go all the way have barefoot shoes as a middle ground, and at the far end of the scale, a Polish runner has set a Guinness record for a barefoot half-marathon on ice.

About 18 years ago, Avramakis spent a month in a coma after what he described to Reader.gr as a medical accident, and he started wearing the warrior’s dress once he came back to life. A road accident since then badly injured one of his legs, which he says still makes running harder. Away from racing he swims in the sea all year round, hikes in the mountains and sings. The costume suits no race better than this one, which runs from the town of Marathon into Athens along the route behind the legend of Pheidippides that gave the distance its name.

Ethiopian runners won both marathons in course-record times, 2:10:03 for the men and 2:30:04 for the women, and SEGAS counted seven records over the two days, the pair of marathon course records plus five event records. The federation took the weekend as a promising sign for Athens, which World Athletics has named its preferred host for the first standalone World Marathon Championships in 2030, Neos Kosmos reported.

Back in 2024, when the Reader.gr reporter asked whether anyone was still behind him on the road, Avramakis told her he never looks back. The next Athens Authentic Marathon is set for the second weekend of November 2027.