Why more millennials are joining Sweden’s Marathon March – a ‘Stephen King horror story’
- Stockholm’s endurance event, which can last days, sees competitors pay US$90 to march continuously at 5km/h (3 mph) – with only 24 minutes every 24 hours for their toilet breaks
Reservoirs of sweat, bunions the size of golf balls and shattered limbs.
This is the unedifying picture of me after I’ve walked just a few miles. God help me, then, if I ever enter the race that happens towards the end of every June in Stockholm – Maratonmarschen, or Marathon March.
Why? Because it finishes only when the penultimate participant gives up so, like termites scattering after a rhino stomp, it’s an event that can go on and on and on … Last year, it lasted a staggering 87 hours and 48 minutes!
This endurance test like no other was inspired by Stephen King’s psychological horror novel The Long Walk, which this year celebrates the 40th anniversary of its publication.
Occurring in a dystopian United States of the future, where a militaristic despot is calling the shots, the plot centres around 100 adolescent boys participating in a brutal annual walking contest.
They have to stride along at a continual speed of 4 miles per hour (6.4km/h), monitored on surveillance equipment by soldiers who are accompanying them by the roadside.
The Swedish version, which was set up in 2009 – the contest lasted less than 10 hours that year – begins at the Maritime Museum in central Stockholm and follows a route that circumnavigates the impressive body of enticing indigo that amounts to Lake Malaren.
In this event, entrants – men, women and even teams are allowed – have to walk at 5km/h, with two exceptions: they are permitted 24 minutes per day for toilet breaks (in a portable loo that’s situated behind a trailer), and each sixth hour, a 90-second stop at a support station – to pick up food, liquid and medicine, etc.
To ensure contestants, who pay an entry fee of 850 kronor (US$90), stick to the designated pace throughout, they are supervised by one official at the back of the “walk-a-thon” pack and another at the front.