The marathon — what other event lauds the guy who died at the end?

Having crossed the finish line, the runners go into shock, shivering in a way that rocks a small car on its wheels and begin personal comparison: did they do better than they did last year, or last month in this city or on another continent?

YOU stuff them with pasta the night before and, when they’re done, you wrap them in tinfoil. The pasta is to ensure they’re fully loaded with carbohydrates as stored fuel, and it should not have a rich creamy sauce on it, lest it upset their enviably flat stomachs. Pasta has more carbohydrates per square spoonful than rice or potatoes and stays in your stomach longer than either.

More than 10,000 pasta-stuffed persons will run today’s Dublin Marathon. I know this because Tracy has come all the way from the US — undeterred by a death in the recent Chicago Marathon — to run in Dublin. I took her to the RDS on Saturday to pick up her pack. She created quite a stir. All the other runners were in sloppy tracksuits. Because she was on her way to the theatre, she looked like Audrey Hepburn, all pearls and French-pleated blonde hair. Which may explain the kiss.

In front of her in the queue was a man with thighs the size of the Isle of Man, planning to run his fifth marathon this year. He explained to her that he runs a lot of marathons (all for charity) but completed none of them in a particularly fast time, because he’s a rugby player, and so has a superfluity of precisely the wrong muscles. They both signed the waiver indicating that if either of them popped their clogs in the race, they wouldn’t blame the organisers, and wished each other luck. He kissed her on the cheek.

Tracy was surprised by the kiss, but not much. Marathons bring out the oddest collective warmth in runners and observers. Apparently there’s a bunch of people who spend their bank holiday Monday rushing from one point on the route of the race to another, to offer moral support to perfect (and extremely sweaty) strangers.

“Some of them have their first names on their sweatshirts,” one of the supporters says. “So you can shout ‘C’mon, Alexander, you’re doing great’.”

Alexander, who may have come from Mongolia and knows nobody in Dublin, is buoyed up by this kindness of strangers. (Or perhaps put off his stroke, wondering how they hell they know who he is.)

The pack marathoners get is a perverse version of the goodie-bag Maxi sends listeners to her early morning programme. Like Maxi’s goodie-bag, this has reading material. Deeply depressing it is, too, recording the thrilling finish to the first marathon.

“Pheidippides delivered the momentous message of victory [in a war] then collapsed and died,” it announces cheerily. What a way to motivate today’s runners.

The reading material is pretty terse about negative possibilities.

“If you drop out,” it says, “go to the nearest aid station.”

It doesn’t say what they’ll do to you — or with you — at the nearest aid station. Put you on display, possibly, as a modern version of Pheidippides.

Also in the pack is a timing chip. Up to now, runners wore a version of this on their shoes, but this year’s version goes on the shirt. There was much discussion in the RDS about the significance of this. When I asked if this chip would prevent the fraud perpetrated by a runner in New York a few years ago, who nipped into the subway at one point, shortening her race time by travelling a few of the miles on a train, I was favoured with don’t-mention-the-war dirty looks. Which, when you think about it, makes sense, since we have no underground and the route of the marathon is so tied off by the gardaí as to render such fraud unlikely.

Delving deeper into the runner’s back, after the reading material and the timing chip, the marathoner comes upon the freebies. A giant bottle of water. A slightly smaller bottle of an energised liquid. Last year, some runners swapped energised gels between themselves. They came in plastic pouches off which you tore the end before ingesting a produce of the taste and consistency of liquidised slugs, heavily sweetened. Rumour had it that some of those ingesting the slugs seriously considered a visit to a first aid station as a direct result. Slug-energised gels are in small supply this year.

The pack also contains intimate wipes, which give one pause for thought, some cooling gel, which claims to “cool and soothe the skin and ease aching muscles”, suggesting it’s for post-race use, rather than to be applied on the fly, so to speak. Then there are the Velvet Crunch crisps, described as cheddar cheese and spring onion snacks “inspired by the Brazilian Cassava plant”. Just how the Cassava plant does this inspiration isn’t clear.

Strangest of all of the freebies is a deodorant. Now, I have known powerful deodorants in my time, but I defy any anti-perspirant to cope with the stench arising from any human body which has run 26.2 miles through a capital city, even in the autumn. But it’s an optimistic gesture.

Leaving aside the benefits to charity, the amusement provided by those marathoners wearing peculiar clothing, and the education about disability offered by participants in wheelchairs — and, occasionally, wearing prosthetic limbs — the marathon creates an extraordinary, if transient, relationship between people who would never otherwise encounter each other. In this context, marathons in Ireland have an advantage over those run in US cities like Chicago, where the sheer numbers taking part are terrifying, not least to participants who are fearful that if they tripped they would be trampled.

The marathon in Ireland is small enough to allow civil words between runners. It’s also small enough for marathoners to recognise the faces and voices of supporters in the crowds lining the route and be lifted by their encouragement. Those supporters have to do a truncated marathon of their own, rushing away from viewing points to locate their cars to drive to the next stage of the race and finally to the point where the exhausted runners totter to a halt. (Experienced marathoners maintain that this is the only place where a stop is a good idea. Apparently even the briefest halt at a drinks station can cause your joints to seize up and your resolution to falter.)

This is where the tinfoil comes into play, as friends and supporters wrap their runner in a light shiny covering that makes it look as if the next step is a gently-warmed oven. The supporters, at this point, are chuffed with themselves because their runner made it to the final line.

The marathoners, on the other hand, are never quite as chuffed. Partly because they go into shock, shivering in a way that rocks a small car on its wheels. But partly because they immediately go into personal comparison: did they do better than they did last year, or last month in this city or on another Continent.

The whole thing is admirable — and seriously weird. What other sport lauds as its defining hero the guy who dropped dead at the end of his first (and perhaps only) outing?