Dimitri Vlahandreas is set to embark on a journey to Athens as he looks to complete a major bucket list item at the age of 74 alongside his son Peter, 40 to compete in the city’s marathon race.

The father-son pair are experienced marathon runners, having completed around 40 of them collectively, and they are set to take their long-distance running talents all the way to Greece for the Athens Marathon event on 10 November.

“That has been a little bit of a pipedream of mine for a long time, something that has been on the bucket list,” Dimitri Vlahandreas told Neos Kosmos.

The 74-year-old revealed that his son Peter, who took up long-distance running himself ten years ago, was the one to suggest they run it together and finally complete his dream.

“I was planning to go to Greece earlier in the year and my youngest son said ‘What about the Athens marathon, dad? Do you want to give it a go?’,” he said.

“It was a combination of my willingness to do it for a long time and my youngest son being keen to do it as well.”

Vlahandreas, who migrated from Sparta to Australia in 1956, has decades of experience as a long-distance runner that goes back to the 1970s when he took it up after he stopped playing football.

He joined Tally Ho Fitness Group with whom he began a consistent program of Saturday morning gatherings, and it was with them that he began running marathons.

The 74-year-old has cultivated an esteemed reputation in the Melbourne Marathon (which he first ran in the late 1970s), completing it 15 times officially to ironically earn himself the Spartan 15-year award.

“It is interesting because I come from the region of Spartan, so it is a very rewarding achievement for me to be able to be recognised as a ‘Spartan’,” Vlahandreas said to Neos Kosmos.

He explained that Athens will be his first full marathon since 2010 when he ran one on the Gold Coast, which he did alongside Peter.

Vlahandreas remarked that training for a marathon involves months of preparation that includes careful dieting, restricting alcohol intake, and roughly 100kms of running a week.

“You have got to be prepared to put the time into it. In the early days, when I was younger, it took me about three months to prepare for a marathon,” he said.

“It has definitely become more challenging as the body has gotten older, of course… you do become slower, you are more prone to injuries, your motivation is not as good, and so it has become harder.”

Nevertheless, the 74-year-old has maintained his good physical shape and has even run numerous half marathons in the years since 2010.

“I still have plenty of energy, my health is good, and luckily my body is still holding up,” Vlahandreas said.

The long-distance runner stressed that marathon running has been a wonderful outlet for social interaction and has also been a fantastic bonding experience for himself and his son.

“Distance running is something you can do with someone without a lot of talking but you know that they are with you… Running is something that has bonded my youngest son and myself over the years through the shared knowledge of what it takes to run a marathon,” he said.

“You feel some sort of connection in the running fraternity as well.”

Vlahandreas remarked on the immense level of encouragement his family has shown him in regards to his marathon running, which he will also receive in Athens.

“My eldest son and my eldest granddaughter, who is 16, are also coming to support us which is fantastic. The family has always been supportive of me running, and my children have grown up with it so they are very accustomed to it.”

The Athens Marathon will be his first he has competed in overseas and arguably comes at the perfect point in his life, with Vlahandreas explaining that he had a most enlightening visit to Greece two years ago to his home village.

“I have been back to my home region of Sparta numerous times. Two years ago, I spent a whole month in my home village by myself and I did a lot of walking around to explore it and really feel the environment of where I was born,” he said.

The trip really illuminated his sense of identity, which he said was always a question to him as he was born in Greece but moved as a young child.

“For years I did question what my identity was, not knowing if I am Greek or if I am Australian. I felt like I did reconnect with my roots in that trip two years ago and I am very proud of that.”

Having gone through that personal journey, it seems appropriate that Vlahandreas will now finally run the Athens Marathon and complete his dream with an assured sense of his own identity.