In Olympia I visited the ruins of the original Olympic games. I arrived by 8am to avoid the heat and tourists, but by the time I had walked through the remains of the temple where atheletes were ritually greeted by priests and into the pillared gymnasium where they grappled the sun was doing its Mediterranean duty. The incessant whine of thousands of cicadas in the olive trees were the living voice of the sun fused into a single hypnotic note. I sweated and slipped from one thin Doric shadow to the next.

The hippodrome where chariot races was held was washed away a thousand years ago when the river Alph changed its course slightly (That same sacred river, though I must say Greece is disappointingly short on pleasure domes and the river empties into the gulf entirely unaware of its literary duty; I saw no mapless caverns or sunless seas.) so I could not see where Nero’s ten horses made their laps, vainly trying to carry the mad emperor to victory over his opponents—who by his Imperial decree could have only four horses each. He fell off his chariot, but the judges wisely declared him the victor.

The stadium, though, is still remarkably intact. I stood in the shadow of the arch through which runners would enter, where a cool breeze rushed from behind me and emptied out into the broad, flat field. Forty thousand people sat under this same sun to watch the races, and only the emperor and favored senators had shade. A clever marble aqueduct (still intact) carried running water diverted from the Alph all the way around the rim of the stadium, allowing the spectators (all male; women sneaking in where thrown from a rock nearby) at least some refreshment. The atheletes got no such luxury, standing resolute against a sun determind to reduce everything it could touch to an ashen shell. The thought of those perfect bodies, drops of sweat puffing into the gravel as they stood at the grooved marble line, waiting for the start—and then running the 192.28m meter length (measured, so they say, by Hercules’ own feet—though they don’t say how many steps he took, rendering that little tidbit useless in fitting him for Reeboks) through that heat.

I didn’t have a priest to start me so I just dropped my bag, took a deep breath of oven-hot air, and ran. The dust I kicked up was hotter than I had expected and I was breathing in gasps by the time I had crossed the length of the field. A crowd of French tourists huddled in the shade of a lone plane tree (like all plane trees in Greece, it is the one under which Socrates lectured and St. Paul painted) saw me as I came around the third corner, and started applauding. It was 40+ degrees that day and when I finished I hadn’t even started sweating yet; my body was incredulous at what I had asked it to do. I picked up my bag and trotted to the cool marble arch to recover. Once there my body came out of its shock and started shouting orders like a senile old General woken in the night by imaginary burglers, wringing every drop of moisture from each bone. It was a several minutes before my breathing had slowed and I started toward the fountains near the entrance.

It being the off season, the priests were not in attendance. My time was not impressive, but the competition hadn’t been stiff. I snapped an olive branch from a descendant of the olives in the sacred grove behind Athena’s temple and crowned myself.