The Greek athlete who cut the thread in the 500 km super marathon in the Arctic Circle

“Sometimes I said it would not work. For the first time I felt my soul coming out of my body. The Greek flag that I had with me and the love of the people was the one that brought me to the finish “. With a voice that betrays the terrible physical exertion he experienced in the last eight days but also at the same time the mental uplift and satisfaction for achieving a great goal, the Drama athlete Marios Giannakou explains how he managed to cut the finish line in the hardest race of his life, the 500km “Lapland Arctic Ultra” super marathonin the Arctic Circle.

“This fight was by far the hardest effort I have made to date,” he says a few hours after finishing a fight, where in addition to the physical crash, as he describes it, he had to fight with his “means” to convince himself that he should not think and react to hardships as a person who is in pain, crying, frustrated and suffering. This is because, as he explains, “we had to deal with the fact that we had to drag our things on a sleigh that was often very heavy, especially on the slopes, in addition to the long distance and the extreme temperatures.”

One disappointment followed another, but the messages of love and support that flooded his social media profiles gave “wings” to his feet crippled by the frost and distance and made him continue.

“On the second day we were unlucky and we succeeded in a snowstorm, so the second disappointment came, that we would not make it as we slept very little. For the first four days, the total sleep did not exceed four hours. “There were many wounds in the legs and pain all over the body, until after eight days we reached the finish line”, says Marios Giannakou who on the way saw his teammates collapse under the weight of the extremely unfavorable conditions of a very difficult match.

He, however, managed to do that, as he says, he owes it to the thousands of messages of support from every corner of Greece but also to the Greek flag, the one that he always carries in each of his new “adventures”. After all, as he explains, these two elements (the flag and the love of the world) “were the biggest source of inspiration for me to finish”.

A preparation that lasts for years and a journey that changes you

It was not the first time that Marios Giannakou he was running a marathon under extremely difficult conditions. He had tested his endurance in the past – again successfully – in another race in the Arctic, in the desert and in the jungle. This particular fight, however, was very demanding for it and the preparation was long.

“It’s a ‘journey’ that starts many years earlier. I have been preparing for this race for many years, a race that I thought about every day: when it will come, when I will be at the start … so every day for years I lived it every day. “Now was just the moment I had to go in and prove that I can do it.”

“I leave a part of myself in the Arctic”

The feelings of the Drama athlete, now that the race is over, are very intense, mixed, as he says. “Suffering and fatigue begin and go away, negative thoughts go away, and I have a feeling of happiness because I feel that I am leaving a very large part of my life. I go back to everyday life after this effort, very changed as a person, very different. “I believe that a large part of me has been left in the Arctic”, he emphasizes, in a voice “broken” by the over-effort.

He does not forget, however, to thank one by one all those who, in various ways, supported his effort and to dedicate his success to all of Greece and to the Greeks.

The match ends tomorrow, Wednesday. As of late last night, when the telephone communication between APE-MPE and Mario Giannakou was in progress, a total of 11 athletes had finished.

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