By Brad Whitehouse

There's an ancient Greek legend about the first marathon. It has a sad ending. The Persians attack Greece at a town not-so-coincidentally named Marathon. The Athenians make a surprising showing and completely rout their enemies, and they're so happy that they order one of their soldiers to run the 26 miles to Athens to report the victory. He does, but he dies from exhaustion.

Granted, hand-to-hand combat with Persian soldiers isn't the recommended form of crosstraining for a marathon. Yet try to ignore the irony: a guy runs so far that it kills him, and they turn it into a sport.

However much sense that makes, there's no doubt the marathon is here to stay. It's part of our language, even when we're not talking about running: when U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the war on terrorism is not a sprint but a marathon, the message was clear. It's worth big money: the male and female winners of the 2001 Boston Marathon each won $80,000. And perhaps most convincing of all, it's even worth doing for free. Thousands flock to marathon courses every year, to face what will probably be the most incredible athletic feat they ever attempt.

That's why it's a little hard to comprehend that Adrian history professor Michael McGrath has run somewhere around 50 of them. And compared to his long events, a marathon just ain't no big thing.

At first look, McGrath, 58, doesn't look that athletic. It's not that he isn't in shape, but maybe it's the professor digs that are so misleading: the rumpled khaki pants, the blue Oxford unbuttoned, the Birkenstock sandals, the longish grey hair. He's a scholar of East Asia, he does yoga, and he spends part of each summer in France where he is acquaintances with R. Crumb, an underground comic from the 1960s. All said, he seems closer to a "Teach Tolerance" state of mind than to "Just Do It."

However, the absence of athletic clothing can be deceiving, and it turns out McGrath belongs to an elite class called ultrarunners. When a marathoner stops at an impressive 26.2 miles, ultrarunners keep going: 50 kilometers, 50 miles, sometimes even a whopping 100 miles.

While McGrath is the first to say that distance isn't everything, there's something about running 100 miles all at once that speaks for itself. In the 103 marathons and ultras that he's completed over 26 years of distance running, three of them have been 100 milers. It's an altogether different kind of race. The first time he ran the Western States 100 Mile, the biggest and best-known ultra in the U.S., it took him 27 hours and 47 minutes to finish. In the process, he lost 14 pounds. Most of it was water that he gained back the next day, but he also worked up a killer appetite.

"It's a 10,000 calorie run, so you get to eat a lot of food afterwards," McGrath says. "The next day I went to Denny's and ordered a super cheeseburger, an order of fries, waffles and a piece of pie. The waitress asked if I was ordering for someone else."

So is this kind of running good for you? After all, it only took 26 miles to kill the Athenian soldier. McGrath maintains that it is. In fact, when asked this question, his mind goes in a completely different direction than physical health.

"Basically, yes, [it's good for you]," he says. "It could easily be bad if you use it to escape your responsibilities, which has never been a problem with me, because I've done it along with everything else."

What McGrath is referring to is another serious problem for his type of runners: training for ultras takes an incredible amount of time. "You have to get your body used to moving for four, five, six, seven, eight hours," he says. However, it's this sort of time that McGrath says makes an ultra safe. "I think marathons are where more people get injured. Speed-that's what I think it is."

Of course, McGrath runs his share of marathons, and there was a time in his life when speed was definitely an issue. He says he stopped running competitively in 1980, after he decided he "really didn't need an extra job." In 1979, McGrath ran the best race of his life, finishing the Baltimore Marathon in 2 hours and 40 minutes. "I felt like a god. I mean, everything just clicked." In 1977, he ran his fastest ultra, running approximately 7:40 minute miles to finish 17th in the U.S. 50 Mile Championships.

But these days he aims to be more of a tortoise than a hare. That's how it was possible to run for one complete day in some of these races. His goal is 12 to 14 minute miles, and he conserves energy by walking up hills. Once when he got overheated during a race, checkpoint officials made him take a break to shiver it out in a sleeping bag. "In a long event, resting an hour didn't make a difference," he says. This sort of pace cuts down on a lot of the wear and tear on his body.

So does good technique. "I'm a smooth runner, and light-footed," he says. This takes conscious effort, and he sets aside one day a week just to focus on it. Another big help is yoga.

"Every time I go to my yoga class in Ann Arbor, the next day my run goes better. My teacher can be a killer. She's a lovely woman, but she can be fiery," he says. "Sometimes she makes us do a handstand for 10 minutes, and that takes upper body strength. Also, her style focuses on precision and alignment." McGrath says the absence of bouncing and sudden movements have been a big help. "Since I started yoga, I've been pretty much uninjured. I think I've had two injuries in the last 18 years."

McGrath had a childhood dream that he was running the Boston Marathon. He forgot about it for years, and in the meantime he attended high school in Taiwan where his father was stationed with the CIA. McGrath was in the military from 1962 to 1969, where he served as an Intelligence Officer. "When I was in the Army, I ran a lot, but it was never more than five or 10 miles." (He and the rest of his team did, however, set the U.S. Ranger School record for the obstacle course run.) Then when he was an undergraduate at Princeton, he remembered the dream again, and he says that's why he ran his first marathon. Later in graduate school (also at Princeton), he ran Boston, followed by his first ultra, a 50K he ran in 1978.

He's kept on running up to the present, completing an average of two or three big events a year. "One year I ran 13, but that was a burnout year," he says. "I didn't do any long runs for two years after that, I felt so fried."

Of course, all this running makes it hard not to ask the burning question: Why? What motivates a person to do this to himself?

One reason is probably because now he knows he can. "Experience helps a lot," he says. "It might hurt today, but it won't hurt tomorrow." He recalls a knee problem he once had. "An ordinary, sensible person would have gone to the hospital with what they thought was really bad tendonitis." Instead, McGrath just kept running. "You discover what your body can take."

On a really long race, McGrath says this discovery happens over and over. "You hit the usual wall at 20 miles, and then another valley of despair at 35. And then another at 55 or 60. Then you get to the mid 80s, and you know you're OK for a while," he says. "The first time when I hit 35, I thought I'd never finish. But then it went away."

It's this sort of sharpening of will power that makes a great ultrarunner. McGrath mentions Ann Trason, who has beaten all the women and the men in the Western States, and has set several world records. "Ultramarathons probably have proportionately more women winners, because in longer distances, it's about will power and not just sheer strength."

Apparently McGrath also has a dose of this mental toughness. His strategy is actually to view pain as something that happens not to him, but just to his body: "I say, 'I'm reporting a muscle that says it's in pain.' I know it's me, but I stay detached."

But there's still the question why. Just because a person can do something doesn't mean he does. His best explanation is quite simple: "Probably the reason I do it is because it makes me happy. It's mostly what I call cleaning out the garbage. Emotional garbage. And my wife concurs-I'm a much nicer person when I run than when I don't run."

And don't forget the milkshakes. McGrath has run up to 140 miles in one week during training, and it takes a lot of calories to compensate. "I used to drink a milkshake a day to keep up my weight. That was one of the pleasures, to eat without restraint," he says. "It's one of the reasons I still run. At 58, I couldn't stay trim if I ate what I eat."

Ultras have yet to enter the mainstream. There are no Olympic medals, no big cash prizes, no trips to Disneyworld. "If you win an ultramarathon, the most you'll get is a belt buckle and a ribbon," McGrath says wryly. He thinks it will become more popular when producers figure out how to televise it. "All the passes at the end are pretty damned exciting," he says.

For now, though, the group consists of a dedicated few who continually push running to an extreme. (There are even races for 1,000 hours, or 1,000 miles.) Not surprisingly, ultrarunners develop a sense of camaraderie.

"Most of us are just runners who happen to run very long distances," McGrath says. "We still are weirdos, but we find each other congenial."