From humble beginnings in the early 1980s, Albatros Travel grew over the next couple of decades to become Denmark’s leader in specialist travel to exotic destinations in every corner of the Earth, leaving ordinary package holidays to other providers.
One hot summer day in 1998, a group of the company’s staff met on Kultorvet, a square in central Copenhagen, to develop new and original ideas for future destinations. Suddenly, one of them burst out: ”How about a marathon on the Great Wall of China? ” We all agreed that the idea was crazy, but there was something rather exciting about it, and the ball was in play. The idea had been proposed by Thomas Thomsen, chairman of the Danish Athletics Association, and marathon runner and tabloid reporter Peter Fredberg. The seeds of a future classic had been sown.
The marathon sport can be traced back more than 2,500 years, when the soldier Phidippedes ran the classic distance and, according to myth, subsequently died. The discipline has been on the Olympic programme since the first games of the modern era in 1896. The marathon has grown tremendously in popularity over the last few decades and people have been extremely inventive. In this light it comes as little surprise that runners have started negotiating the Great Wall of China, Greenland’s inland ice, mountains and other spectucular places on Earth. Only the imagination sets the limits for what the future will bring.