Marathon man - runner Mensen Ernst

UNESCO Courier, June, 1987 by Bredo Berntsen

On 1 July he stood outside the King'sresidence in Nauplion to receive his award of 1,000 guildres. He had covered 2,700 kilometres in just over twenty-four days. Allowing about four days' delay for various mishaps, he had done the run in twenty days, or about 135 kilometres daily. These statistics are so extraordinary that we are lucky to have contemporary sources to verify them.

Ernst's third and most dramatic projectbegan with an offer by British merchants of the East India Company in Constantinople: 150 to carry important documents to Calcutta. He left on 28 July 1836. The vigorous Norwegian had thought the journey would take perhaps six weeks; in fact he did it in four, on a route that took him through Anatolia, and finally across the Indian sub-continent.

On his twenty-eight-day return journeyhe took a more northerly route: Lahore, across Persia to the Caspian Sea, Teheran, Tabriz, and up to the Black Sea. He covered about 8,300 kilometres in fifty-nine days, 150 kilometres daily allowing for a three-day rest in Calcutta.

The newspapers of his day praised hisachievement in completing the Asiatic tour. The Times on 24 March stressed "the unquestionable certificates' held by Ernst.

His fourth epic run was to be his last. Itbegan when the German author, proprietor and adventurer, Count Hermann von Puckler-Muskau, thirty years before Stanley and Livingstone, asked him to find the source of the White Nile. Count Hermann had a keen interest in running stemming from a visit to Greece in 1837, when he had watched the Marathon and heard about the Norwegian's exploits four years previously.

Ernst left the Count's estate in PrussianSilesia on 11 May, 1842. He passed Constantinople and reached Jerusalem in thirty days, and then ran the 500 kilometres to Cairo. After some months in Cairo he headed south along the Nile.

But now his luck had run out. He succumbedto dysentery on 22 January 1843, ending his legendary career in the desert near Syene, now Aswan. Ten years later a Norwegian newspaper declared: "The world will never see his like again.' Nor has it!

Photo: The only surviving contemporary portraitof Mensen Ernst

Photo: Old London Bridge in the early 19th century,around the time when Mensen Ernst began his running career.

Photo: The desert near Theben, north of Syene(now Aswan) in southeast Egypt, where the great runner died from dysentery in 1843.