This Brutal 72-Mile Run Navigates Greece’s Most Isolated Ridges. It's the Perfect Way to Chase the Ancient Myths of Apollo and Zeus

It's day three, and my heart's beating out of my chest as I ascend the final climb of the Menalon Trail , a sneaky 425-foot steep slog over rocky terrain that my legs want nothing to do with. I've already drained them from nearly 5,200 feet of climbing on the day, but a storm is chasing me from behind. I knew it was coming, hence the 5:45 a.m. start time, but hearing the thunder start to roar sends me into an extra gear.

In a country rife with myths of ancient gods and heroes, I'm finding it impossible not to see the gods in everything around me. An odd sound in the forest is obviously Pan trying to send me into, well, a panic. That extra gear I find on the ascents is a gift from Hermes. And that storm isn't just a clash of cold and hot air—clearly, I've done something to displease Zeus, king of the gods, with his bolt of lightning always at the ready.

It could be worse. I could be Odysseus, lost at sea for 10 years in that classic tale told and retold for thousands of years—most recently in Christopher Nolan's forthcoming The Odyssey . Odysseus is often characterized as a man driven by curiosity with an insatiable restlessness. It's in that same spirit—though admittedly softened with a booked flight home—that I found myself in the Greek Peloponnese, running a selection of the peninsula's impressive 1,000-mile trail network set to be completely waymarked by early July.

Into the Menalon

The Peloponnesian network is the brainchild of Ioannis Lagos, born and raised in the village of Stemnitsa, where the roughly 47-mile Menalon Trail begins. On the first day, I meet him in the village center, where he walks me to his small trail office, goes over the route with me on a map, and sends me on my way with a photo and a handshake.

The first stage—eight miles from Stemnitsa to Dimitsana—is a short romp with 2,350 feet of climbing packed into a relatively brief run. It's enough to give me a taste of what the Menalon does. That is, link historic walking paths between mountain villages through dense pine forest and open ridgeline, the kind of trail that makes you feel genuinely remote 20 minutes after leaving the village square.

Just 2.5 miles into the day, I spot the Holy Monastery of Saint John the Forerunner, built into the rocky mountainside roughly 650 feet over the Lousios River. This, the myths say, is where a newborn Zeus was bathed by the nymphs Neda, Agno, and Theiosa. ("Louzo" means bathing in Greek.)

It's impossible to keep up with all the myths pouring out of the mud-streaked rock and pine forests. As Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote in his travel memoir on the southern Peloponnese: "All of Greece is absorbing and rewarding. There is hardly a rock or a stream without a battle or a myth, a miracle or a peasant anecdote or a superstition."

Trotting over the jigsaw puzzle-like flagstone of Dimitsana, I meet back up with Lagos for lunch. He tells me the idea came to him after hiking in Switzerland, a country rightly renowned for its expansive and well-marked trail system. A similar network, he thought, could bring international tourism to a region known only to Greek travelers—and seeing less even of those since the 2009 financial crisis. 

He was an accountant with no background in tourism. The powers that be were quick to dismiss him, insisting he was crazy to believe foreign travelers would plunge deep into the heart of the Peloponnese. He persisted, launching the Menalon Trail in 2015. It quickly became the first trail in Greece certified by the European Ramblers' Association—a designation requiring at least 50 kilometers (31 miles) of well-marked trail with strict standards for natural surfaces and waymarking.

At just under 50 miles, the Menalon Trail fit the bill. And tomorrow, I'll throw myself into the thick of it.

The Thick of It

Day two is where the trail opens up. The 16.5-mile run from Dimitsana to Vytina showcases the variety of the Menalon Trail—a seamless mixture of challenging, rocky climbs and long runnable stretches through pine tree forests with a thick canopy that blankets the sky and blots out the sun. This is my happy place, so much so, I don't even mind the occasional scrape from brambles reaching across the trail—overgrown from an unusually rainy springtime.

Over dinner at a quiet taverna, Vasilis Paliakis—who operates the Aiora Suites in Vytina and is a member of the Menalon Social Enterprise, a group of hundreds of volunteers and business owners who promote and maintain the trail—tells me no foreigners ever came to this region before the trail existed. For him, there are two time periods: before Menalon and after.

The final Menalon stage on day three is the one that nearly breaks me. At 23 miles with 5,390 feet of climbing, it's the longest and hardest day of the trip, including a final 425-foot slog into Lagkadia with a storm roaring behind me. But it's not just the profile itself that sends me to the brink. It's how hard I'm pushing myself across this rumbling terrain in order to beat out the storm that's been lurking in the forecast all week. 

The clear, sunny skies throughout the morning are a misnomer of what's to come. Because by the time I hit the switchback tarmac leading into Lagkadia, I can see the dark clouds rolling over the peaks like a blackout curtain. Thunder cracks across the valley—the kind of sound that, in a mythical age, might have been a Cyclops stomping around his cave in search of 'Nobody.'

I scamper into the Maniatis Mountain Resort with flashes of lightning bouncing across the sky. Not 15 minutes later, a tremendous storm unleashes thick pellets of hail slamming against my balcony with booming cracks of lightning less than a mile away. Pure luck? Or a blessing of wisdom from Athena to leave during the morning twilight instead of waiting for the sunrise? Who can say?

In three days, I covered the 47-mile Menalon Trail with roughly 13,000 feet of elevation. My legs are cooked. But I'm not done just yet.

Temple of Apollo to Sanctuary of Zeus

On the fourth day, I get a ride from Lagkadia to the Temple of Apollo Epicurius a couple of hours away, perched on a remote ridge at 3,700 feet. The temple has stood here since the fifth century BCE, built by the Phigaleians as an act of gratitude to Apollo for protecting them from plague. 

Pausanias, the second-century Greek traveler and writer, detailed his own journey through this region in fascinating detail—visiting temples to Poseidon and Zeus, recording myths, and noting architectural wonders. It's through Pausanias that we know the architect of this temple is the same man who co-designed the Parthenon: Ictinus.

Today it stands in remarkably preserved condition, which is exactly why officials in 1987 erected what was meant to be a temporary tent over it to prevent further deterioration. Nearly 40 years later, the tent is still there. 

Going inside is the only way to see the temple, and standing beneath the canvas with Ictinus's extraordinary achievement overhead—the only Greek temple to use all three classical orders, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian in a single building—you understand both why they protected it and what the protection costs. It was built for open sky and to tower over the raw Arcadian landscape. The tent robs us of that view while preserving the building for future generations.

It's from here that I start my 11-mile run to the Sanctuary of Zeus. When else can you say such a thing? That you're running from Apollo to Zeus? Truly, only in Greece.

The trail is one stage of the aptly named Apollo Trails , separate from the Menalon network but part of the grander Peloponnese system. Unusually heavy spring rains have led to overgrowth of sharp phrygana, oak scrub, and bramble, slicing my legs to bits as I make my way across pale limestone boulders streaked with mud, scattered about like a toddler painting the floor with Lego.

This slice of Arcadia is known as the Land of Pan—the goat-legged, syrinx-playing god of fertility, shepherds, and the wild. Greek myth holds that Pan lives in this chunk of Peloponnese wilderness. Tapdancing across rocky trails, boulders, and ancient roots rising out of the ground, it's easy to see why the mischievous Pan needed a pair of goat legs to get around.

The flat limestone flagstone through the villages of Skliros, Ambeliona, and Agios Sostis are a respite from the butchery of my shins. But just as Odysseus survives torment at the hands of Poseidon only to find peace when he wakes on the shore of Scheria, the paths finally clear, and I'm running up pleasantly packed dirt trails to the top of Mount Lykaion.

Pausanias recorded the myths associated with this mountain, including one of the oldest tales of werewolves in Western literature. According to him, Lykaon was the son of Pelasgos, the first man. He founded the city of Lykosoura and instituted the Lykaian games—a modern version exists to this day. Pausanias noted that Lykaon brought a human infant to the altar of Zeus Lykaios, sacrificed it, and spread its blood on the altar, at which point he turned immediately into a wolf. 

Other ancient sources, including Ovid, add that Lykaon had served Zeus a meal of human flesh to test whether he was truly a god. Pausanias also retold the belief that anyone who ate human flesh at the Lykaian sacrifices would turn into a wolf themselves—and could only become human again by abstaining from human flesh for nine years. Taste it even once during that period, and they'd remain a beast forever.

I'm hungry, but not that hungry. Fortunately, Dr. David Gilman Romano—an archaeologist with the University of Arizona who has been working at the Sanctuary of Zeus for decades—has a veggie sandwich for me while giving me a brief tour of the site. He excitedly points to a grassy mound and proclaims, "That's where Zeus was born!" His team is busy uncovering ruins dating back as far as the 16th century BCE—roughly a millennium older than the Parthenon. In other words, it was ancient even when Pausanias stopped by.

Romano's most recent discovery is the Temple of Pan , long believed to be somewhere at the site based on Pausanias's writing, but never located until 2023 when his team found a roof tile bearing an inscription naming Pan. The sanctuary also has deep athletic roots as the host of the Lykaian Games, a major Panhellenic festival held every four years that rivaled Olympia with foot races, wrestling, and hoplite races.

You can still walk through the tunnel ancient athletes used to reach the hippodrome, the stone arch at the end of the old walkway still intact. It's all a reminder that long before Nolan, long before Homer even committed it to verse, people were already coming to this piece of Peloponnese wilderness to test themselves against something larger.

Gialova to the Palace of Nestor

The final day takes me south to Messinia and the earliest stories of the Odyssey itself. I start in the small port town of Gialova, running through town where the route of the forthcoming Messinia Trail Network officially begins. But the trail is not yet waymarked—volunteers hope it's done by early July—so I follow a GPX file on my watch.

The lagoon at Limni Divariou shimmers to my left like a Greek postcard as I set out towards the Palace of Nestor, the same king of Pylos whom Telemachus visits in Book III of the Odyssey, seeking news of his missing father. The trail starts on dirt farm roads before the climbing begins, and the path narrows to singletrack as I push towards the palace. Frequent run-ins with spiderwebs spun across the trail tell me I'm the only one silly enough to be on the trails in the midst of 85-degree heat with frequent brushes of unobstructed sun.

I'm roasting by the end of my 11-mile run to the palace. Fortunately, the ruins are covered. There's steel scaffolding to offer tourists an overhead view of the ruins, but little remains of what was once a two-story Bronze Age structure. Today, the ruined walls and floors are mostly covered in dust with informational signs offering renderings of what the rooms might have looked like in their heyday.

To be fair, I don't think I'll look so hot in 3,000 years either. Even now, at the end of 72 miles and 13,000 feet of climbing across five days—from the mountain villages of Arcadia to the Mycenaean coast—I'm feeling a bit ruined myself. But of course, Odysseus was certainly dealt a far worse hand.

From the blinding of the Cyclops to the slaughter of the suitors, Nolan's The Odyssey will likely rekindle the world's infatuation with ancient Greece. Modern Greece, of course, is a very different place than what we're bound to see at the cinema, and Zendaya 's Athena isn't likely to make an appearance during your next trip.

But if, like Odysseus, you have an insatiable thirst for adventure set in a land where you can feel the history, you could do worse than the Peloponnese and its trails. After all, as Romano put it, this is where myths like The Odyssey were born in the first place.

This story was originally published by Men's Journal on Jun 30, 2026, where it first appeared in the Travel section. Add Men's Journal as a Preferred Source by clicking here.