Heartbreak Hill

THE BOSTON MARATHON by JOE FALLS 203 pages. Illustrated. Macmillan. $9.95.

The road from Hopkinton, Mass., to Boston is well marked and in good repair; barring traffic jams, the automobile trip between cities takes about 40 minutes. Why, then, will a crowd gather on Hayden Rowe this month to risk shin splints, blisters and coronaries on the 26-mile, 385-yard run from there to Boston's Prudential Center? Because it is theirs: the Boston Marathon, an endurance test that makes a winner out of every runner who completes the course.

There are, as the Detroit Free Press sports editor Joe Falls admits in this bright, anecdotal history, dozens of 26-mile races. But there is only one Boston Marathon. The rewards for running in this unique race are nugatory. The win ner receives a laurel wreath; other top finishers get medals worth little more than the cost of the bus ride they have just avoided; all finishers are granted a bowl of generally inedible beef stew. Yet since 1897, the marathon has drawn an ever widening group of manic adherents.

Last year's start resembled a Cecil B.

DeMille epic, with a cast of thousands -- including celebrated distance special ists, 45-year-old joggers and some for mer heart-attack patients-- jostling for a chance to defeat heat, fatigue and a piece of local topography known appropriately as Heartbreak Hill. This year's field is expected to be even bigger.

Falls' chronicle, which will delight the sedentary as much as it may in spire fitness freaks, explains why. One must, after all, be a superb athlete to play left field for the Boston Red Sox, guard for the New York Knicks or quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings. But anyone with enough determination can run the marathon -- and even the stragglers do a good deal better than Pheidippides, the gallant Greek who started the madness back in 490 B.C., when he ran 25 miles to tell his fellow Athenians about their troops' great victory at Marathon. Though many have feared the worst, no one has ever expired in the Boston Marathon. Pheidippides, goes the legend, was so pooped by his performance that he staggered into Athens, gasped "Nike!" (Victory!) and dropped dead .

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