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Meals on sandals ...

Three Mexican runners about to take part in the 1999 London Marathon

The last Aztec emperor Moctezuma II reputedly enjoyed a selection of some 200 dishes for dinner - including fresh fish brought hot foot by a series of professional relay runners every day from the Atlantic coast, some 250 miles from the Aztec capital! (Written/compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

[When Moctezuma dined, according to Cortés himself, '300 or 400 boys brought dishes "without number", of every kind of food - meat, fish, fruit, vegetables - and because the climate was cold, braziers kept the platters warm. All the food was placed in a great room, which was almost always filled, where the emperor ate seated on a "finely made, small leather cushion"'. (Info from 'The Essential Codex Mendoza" by Frances F. Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, p.223)]

According to Manuel Aguilar-Moreno (‘Handbook to Life in the Aztec World’) Aztec messengers were stationed along main roads at two-league intervals (1 league = 2.6 miles), relaying messages at a rough rate of 4-5 leagues per hour, or 100 leagues per day. That translates into an average speed of something like 10-12 miles per hour! When you consider that English horseback couriers in the Middle Ages only averaged some 35 miles per day (Professor Robert Bartlett, ‘Inside the Medieval Mind’), the Mexican system was over 7 times as fast!
It comes as little surprise to read that Hernán Cortés himself wrote that within 24 hours of his landing near Veracruz in May 1519, runners had described to Moctezuma, 260 miles away, his ships, men, guns and horses...

Peter Nabokov has shown ('Indian Running', 1980) that there were courier runner networks among most of the local American Indian cultures before the Spanish arrived - from the Hopi to the Incas - ALL capable of relaying messages at speeds of 150-200 miles per day. The most famous of these are the chasquis of the Inca empire. Back in the 1970s Ian named his trusty 1962 Mk IIIA Sunbeam Rapier 'El Chasqui'! (Sadly, it caught fire and died on Feb 2nd 1983; Ian had huarache sandals made from the old tyres...)

Little wonder that a Mexican, Dionicio Cerón, won the London Marathon 3 times running, in 1994, 1995 and 1996.

(Top right) Three Mexican runners before the start of the 1999 London Marathon (Lauro, Maria and Tino were part of our own unique and memorable Run For It! team of 12 runners that helped raise over £13,000 for development projects in Central America devastated by Hurricane Mitch).

For more information on the impressive history of long-distance ('ultra') running throughout the American continent before contact with Europe, follow the links below.

Photo sources
• Mexican runners/Run For It! team/’El Chasqui’ car - photos by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore
• Moctezuma II - image scanned from our own copy of the 1938 Cooper Clark facsimile edition of the Codex Mendoza
• Chasqui illustration - from Wikipedia
• Florentine Codex (original in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence): image scanned from our own copy of the Club Internacional del Libro 3-volume facsimile edition, Madrid, 1994.

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Meals on sandals ...

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