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HISTORIC PATH: Spiridon Louis (left) was the first to bring home the Olympic marathon title in 1 896 and is still revered by Greeks. I he 26.2-mile trek, similar to the one run oy louis, win pegin ai ine newiy constructed start area in Marathon (center) and end at the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens. AP, Getty Images file photos HYDE CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1C i a i "i i ieei as ine vjames move mio view wnat better way than through the orism of their signa History of the Marathon The history of the event goes back to 490 B.C., when the Athenians defeated the Persians at the battle of Marathon. An Athenian courier called Philippides was sent to Sparta to request help when the Persians landed at Marathon. He ran 1 50 miles to Sparta in two days and then returned with a negative reply.

The Athenians won anyway and at the end of the battle, he ran 26 miles to the Acropolis in Athens, where he shouted, rf ture event? And so sampling a view of 5 two wonas, wnn one eye on to day ana the other on the titth century B.C.. I take a deeD breath, admire the panoramic 4i i sweep to ine distant Aegean sea 'Rejoice! We win!" and then died of exhaustion. SOURCE: Sun-Sentinel research ana summon ine woras or tne ancient Greek messenger Phi Staff graphicHiram Henriquez lippides tor my lirst triumphant Marathon route AcnucKiing voice interrupts. "You know Philippides died doing this." Ekieni savs. it rr: "I The marathon course follows a similar route as the one from the 1896 Olympics.

vac GREECE area Mediterranean Sea Marathon Stadium Tomb of. Start Marathon -Warriors -Yannise I Pandeieimonas), Wllea Makri leZoumberi Ag. Andreas Mati Kok. limanajkie Stavros as Main Olympic Complej Halandri, Paraskevj Rafirta Holaufos Pikermi Pall in i SaronicGuff SlntanmaV Halfway Athens point Spata Panathenaic Stadium Finish MILES Changes in elevation along the route l-: onn Paraskevi MILE 2 It is 3:26 p.m. The sky leaks an occasional raindrop.

And stretching ahead are all the elements suggesting the freedom of the open road. Green fields. Farmhouses. A gentle bend of the two lanes. More fields.

More farmhouses. Another gentle bend. More fields. More farmhouses. Lots of people do marathons.

My out-of-shape neighbor somehow has run five. But on my fantasy checklist of sporting adventures golfing Troon, eating a Dodger Dog, watching Real Madrid play Barcelona the monotony meter never tempted me into laboring through a marathon. But this is an opportunity. How many sporting events are held where they were once created? And off er a potential travelogue of sights? Two older women wearing traditional Greek black dresses are in a field, bending down, tending plants. It's a picture-postcard view.

I wave. They look. I wave again. They just look. There is no sidewalk.

No marked room for pedestrians. ai 1 1 Panathenaic i -600 Stadium i 1 1 I 1 Pikermi Tomb of-- 400 fijiisH: 26.2 miles Ml' 10 miles 25 miles 20 miles 15 miles SOURCES: Associated Press; ESRI; SEGAS 5 miles Start Staff graphicHiram Henriquez MILES 18-21 Andreas Michos has followed his father's footsteps as a taxi driver. At 25, he has his own cab as well as a valuable commodity for the Olympics that his father doesn't. 1 "I speak English," he said. "The drivers that speak English make contracts with the hotels for the Olympics.

We will wgrk for them. That will be more money for us." A mile up the road, he pulls over for another would-be fare. He asks where she is going. "Polygano," she answers, naming a nearby town. It's out of the way to Athens, though.

He pulls put without her but mentions ride-sharing is a custom in Greece. The Olympics? "I hope Greece doesn't ldse too much money," he says. "What do we need with a baseball or badminton stadium? No one plays those here." MILE 22 Closing in on downtown Athens, night has fallen as I walk on tightened calves. Soon the rain starts. Pedestrians pick up their pace.

Some duck under stbre awnings. Up ahead a few hundred yards is a sign of refuge: The blue-line subway stop at EthnikiAmyna. MILES 23-25 The Athenian subways are safe, clean, on time and even cultural. You want graffiti? Travel New York. You want to sttidy pottery of an aristocratic family in the third century B.C.? Here's your city.

The building of the Athens subway turned into Greece's biggest archaeological excavation. The project was delayed at every turn by new finds and the demand for archaeologists to'in-spect uncovered ruins. Today, as you walk through the central station at Syntagma Square, where I step out, there are glass display cases full of vases and cups and artwork of ancient Greece. MILE 26 It's dark and rainy, and the streets are mostly empty in" the center of Athens. A vendor stands at the subway exit selling umbrellas for five euros.

I buy one, cross the street, walk by the Parliament building and cut through the pedestrian walkway of the National Garden. There, against the horizon, looms the Panathenaic Stadium. Philippides ended at the Acropolis, the famed ancient structure that was the center of Athens. But the marathon course ends here, a half-mile away, at the stadium of the first modern Olympics. Finally standing here after my modern pentathlon of a marathon walking, running, busing, taxiing and subway riding I muster up the to Athens.

"Rejoice, we win," I say. I don't collapse. I don't die. But at 9:33 p.m., after more than six hours of following Philippides' trail, I do hail a taxi, down some extra-strength Tylenol, sit in a hot bath and conclude the joy in any marathon is all Chinese to me. MILE 10 A half-dozen people stand at a spot beside the empty road.

Waiting. For what? For how long? They start to congregate, necks arching down the road. I look back. A bus. Temptation.

"Athena?" I ask. Several nod their heads and begin talking. One points up the road, up a hill in the distance, to where other people stand. "Athena," he says. MILES 11-15 It costs 1.60 euros to get on the bus, which is nearly full, apparently working people returning to the city.

I take a seat, stretch my legs and nod at the man beside me, who begins talking in Greek. I shrug my shoulders. He tries Italian. I try Spanish. He tries French.

I try to remember German. "Bella Grecia," he says, pointing to the hills that indeed look bella from this comfortable bus seat as the early evening arrives. Through the international language of gesture and first-grade sentences, he says he's Albanian, a truck driver and travels among Greece, Italy and Albania. In the past two decades, thousands of Albanians have immigrated to Greece, lured by the promise of work and presenting many of the social challenges that South Florida has faced over that same span. Service jobs have been taken.

Language is an issue. "Many Greek parents have put their children in private schools, because there's so many Albanians in their public-school plasses," one tourist guide says. "Bella Grecia," the Albanian truck driver says again as the bus stops in the town of Pallini and I get up. MILE 16 The final hour of a Greek twilight has arrived. The air is cooling, the sky still gray.

My legs have stiffened from 20 minutes on the bus. From the town of Pallini, looking west, you can see the road start gently to rise again in a manner that says the again will snarl. At this point in 1896 France's Albin Lermusiaux began to stagger from exhaustion, lost his lead and would eventually collapse in the first Olympic marathon. Arthur Flack, an Australian accountant who had won the 800-meter race the previous day, overtook Lermusiaux. Flack had never run more than 10 miles, though, and quickly began to tire.

Greece's Spiridon Louis then found the lead and held it. He wore shoes donated by his small village. He was handed red wine and an egg by his stepfather at the 1 4th mile. But upon entering Athens all of Greece seemed to cheer him, and on the final lap in the all-marble Panathenaic Stadium the prince ran beside him. The first marathon winner became such a Greek hero that the phrase egine Louis meaning "became Louis," for someone who ran fast still registers in the Greek vernacular.

MILE 17 For a diversion, I begin to note the make of cars that pass: Fiat. Skoda. BMW. Mercedes, Honda. Volvo.

Renault. Citroen. Hyundai. Peugeot. Saab.

Taxi long the run took. No one knows that it was actually Philippides who did the running, though he had recently completed a 144-mile, round-trip run to Sparta asking to send military help (Sparta answered its army would wait for "a full moon" to march, which translates into an ancient politician saying, "Don't hold your To conclude the George-Washington-chops-the-cherry-tree feel to Philippides' marathon run, the legend of him dying in Athens at run's end doesn't appear anywhere until six centuries after it allegedly took place. That's a long time dying. But every student of Greek history understands what the message conveyed. "Liberty proved herpower," Edith Hamilton wrote in her classic book, The Greek Way.

"A wave of exultant courage and faith swept through the city, and Athens started on her career." MILE 4 In the parking lot of a gas station, off a stretch of road closed to expand Marathonos Avenue into four lanes, Yannis Katosta-rakias shovels dirt into a wheelbarrow. He is renovating his station, partially out of bigger plans and partially because he has little else to do. The station has been closed for six months because the lane before it has been closed for six months. Traffic has been diverted. Customers lost.

This has happened all along the road from Marathon to Athens while the road is upgraded for the Olympics. "The cars cannot get to my store," he says. "The business is too low." This station was his young life's grand plan, opening it a few years ago and chasing the kind of success anyone in any business in any country wants. He was reaching it, too. Business was up each year.

Now he looks out at the road under construction. "The improvements are good but speed up," he says. He throws a shovelful of dirt in the wheelbarrow. "Many Greeks think the Olympics will be good for us, and many wonder why we're spending so much money for stadiums we don't need," he says. What does he think? "I just want my store open," he said.

MILE 5 Something grips me. Severe energy? Stupidity? The spirit of Philippides? I break into a jog. I keep it going for five minutes, seven minutes, nearly a mile, all the way to the town of Pandeiei1 monas. Under a thin layer of sweat I wonder: If the Persian army had been met here, if Athens had been victorious here, if Philippides had started running from here, would the marathon be called the pandeieimonas? MILE 6 The first large-scale sight of corporate civilization is found in Nea Makri. A Shell gas station.

A Vietnamese restaurant. A movie theater showing Brother Bear and Once Upon A Time in Mexico. There's also a McDonald's with a "McDrive" (four cars lined up) and a "Greek Mac Meal" (4,30 euros). ne uiympics marainun wm close down the road, just as the. Athens Marathon does every November.

But today cars whiz by faster than the 25 mph speed limit. One of the women cups a hand beside her mouth and shouts something in Greek. I shrug, not understanding. She shouts something else or maybe it's same thing. She points down the road.

A bus is mother from Athens. She grew up here, studied here, married here, at 36 raises a family here and has something to say. "I'm tired of reading from the foreign press how poorly Greece is preparing for the Olympics," she said. "Everything will be all right. It's going to look fabulous.

All I read about is how nothing will be ready." She points to the marathon road before her store. A concrete island has been constructed to divide the four lanes. It is finished. But barren. "So if there aren't plants in it for the Olympics, does that mean it won't be ready?" she asks.

"The runners will run the course just fine. The Olympic spirit wUl prevail." In some ways, Marathonos Avenue symbolizes how Greece has gone about these Olympics. It didn't want to create an international image with these Games like Barcelona or Sydney. It wanted to use the Games' money to rebuild Athens' infrastructure. A new airport.

New subway. Redone roads. The first 1 0 miles and miles-long stretches throughout the marathon course will be run on refurbished roads and rebuilt intersections to the tune of a budgeted $72 million. But construction started years late. One company went bankrupt, delaying it further.

The actual cost rose to more than 1 00 million. And now it's a sprint to the finish, not a marathon. "It will all be fine," Kolns says. She smiles. "Make sure you write that." MILE 9 If we don't understand something, we say, "It's all Greek to me." If the Greeks don't understand something, they say, "It's all Chinese to me." What do the Chinese say? "Some people think it's not good, this kind of food," says a customer, Nikos Iatrou.

"But many young people eat here." I ask how a "Greek Mac" tastes. He smiles and says he has been to New York. "It tastes like in America," he says. MILE 7 Until now, the ground has been civil, the landscape level. Now the road rises.

The course inflicts its first measure of pain. It was here, in 1896, that the 17 runners of the first Olympic marathon began to separate. Most had never run even the initial race's 25 miles. Some, such as the top three finishers of the run, entered on a whim. As much as Philippides inspired it, the marathon was the creation of Michel Breal, a French historian who invoked the messenger's memory in proposing a long-distance race for those first modern-day Olympics, according to David Walle-chinsky's Complete Book of the Summer Olympics.

The Greeks embraced it. People lined the course. The town of Pallini, at the 17th mile, put an archway over the road. The crown prince of Greece waited at the finish line. But it was here, as the road turns up, that the first marathon began to separate into a three-man race involving an Australian, a Frenchman and a Greek who would script an ending for this country's sporting lore.

MILE 8 At a roadside kiosk, I make a second stop for water. The store owner, Myrta Kolns, looks up from reading a book to her grandmother. "What would you like?" she asks in perfect English. Her father is from Boston, her ing to the next bend, and next field, and next farmhouse, with an ambition born of the second mile. MILE 3 To the west, the hills now stop, and the sloping horizon offers an open view to the Aegean Sea, dark blue and fierce.

It was from this sea, as well as overland, that the Persians invaded with overwhelming force in 490 B.C. They were met by a small Athenian army led by Militiades and yes, this is where we get the word militia. The Persians were a slave-supported army from a tyrannical empire. The Athenians were a democratic society that cherished freedom. And so when the Militiades ambushed the Persians, destroying their land forces and isolating their ships, Phi-lippides was sent running to Athens with word of an upset for the history books and confirmation of freedom's strength.

No one knows the exact distance he ran. No one knows how Dave Hyde can be reached at dhyde((.