For Glory, & for Stew

TRACK & FIELD

There is something positively un-American about the Boston Marathon. Sure, it is run on Patriots' Day, which is about as American as a day can get. But a Greek started the whole thing. And Britain's King Edward VII dictated the modern distance in 1908, when that year's Olympic started under his balcony at Windsor Castle -- which happened to be 26 miles and 385 yards from the finish line. What's more, in Boston, a foreigner almost always wins.

But Americans never stop trying, and Bostonians never stop loving it. In Boston the marathon is bigger than the Harvard-Yale game -- and certainly bigger than all the Red Sox games strung end to endless. Traffic is banished from streets along the route, and 250,000 spectators line the curbs five deep in spots. Newspapers run extras, and TV and radio carry the scene into thousands of Boston homes. Why not? Where else could Sam Oellet, a 59-year-old janitor from Augusta, Me., put on his long-johns and run in the same race with a barefoot 17-year-old? And where else could a fat man in a sweatshirt with MCDONALD'S HAMBURGERS written across the front swap liniment with an Olympic champion?

"I'm a Runner." At the start of the 68th marathon last week, no fewer than 302 "athletes" crowded up to the line in suburban Hopkinton. A motlier crew never trotted down a pike. "I'm trying to get back into shape," explained Konrad Ulbrich, onetime captain of the Harvard swimming team. "The guys at the bar bet me I couldn't do it," mum bled a red-eyed fellow in pajama bot toms. There was a doctor from Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, who talked about the "mental and spiritual uplift" of running to the point of physical collapse. And a college English teacher announced: "I'm a runner, so what am I supposed to do? Enter the Olympics?"

Then, of course, there was the favorite: Aurele Vandendriessche, 31, a skinny, hook-nosed Belgian who once held the world record for 30,000 meters, and likes to train before dawn -- running 30 miles or so through pine forests when "it's dark, and peaceful, and beautiful." Vandendriessche was the defending champion; in 1963 he did not even arrive in Boston until the night before the race, still breezed to an easy victory in a record 2 hrs. 28 min. 58 sec. This time he lounged confidently around his hotel room while competitors were inspecting the course and plotting strategy. "I'll decide halfway through the race what I'm going to do," he said. On race day, Vandendriessche got up at 1 a.m. "Belgian time," he explained.

Leashes, Anyone? At the noon starting gun the temperature was in the 30s, and a 20-m.p.h. head wind pelted the marathoners with sleet. Water seeped through the soles of their thin racing shoes. Here and there, an angry dog snapped at a runner's ankles, although an A.S.P.C.A. truck drove ahead, offering free leashes to bystanders with mutts. A few little boys tried to press orange slices into their heroes' hands. A pair of collegians, wearing shirts emblazoned "Pseudo A.C.," loped up to harry the leaders until the cops shooed them off.

For 15 miles, Vandendriessche padded along peacefully in the pack, using his competitors as windbreaks. But in the tortuous Newton Hills, Vandendriessche turned on his speed. By the time he reached the crest of "Heartbreak Hill," with six miles still to go, the Belgian had opened up a 150-yd. gap. Half an hour later, he trotted across the finish line at Exeter Street so far ahead that the second-place finisher, Finland's Tenho Salakka, was nowhere to be seen. His time--2 hrs. 19 min. 59 sec.--was only 61 sec. off his own record. "I never had an easier race," he said. "I could go another 25 miles." To prove it, Vandendriessche reran the last block for the benefit of photographers, put on his laurel wreath, and sprinted up four flights of stairs to attend a press conference in the Lenox Hotel.

A clammy dusk fell over Boston. In the hotel, exhausted marathoners wrapped themselves in blankets and fell asleep. Officials walked up and down the rows of cots, tenderly placing medals on the chests of the early finishers. The stragglers staggered on. No medals for them. But anybody who could make it to the Lenox was assured a heaping bowl of beef stew.

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