Newspaper Article

26.2 MILES AND 75,000 FEET / The lure of Boston has drawn a record number of runners for Monday's 100th marathon - 5,000 of whom didn't even have to qualify

By John Hanc. Newsday running and fitness columnist John Hanc is the author of "The Essential Marathoner: A Concise Guide to the Race of Your Life" (Lyons & Burford, $12.95). He will be wearing number 23,770 in Monday's race

1996

Overview

Minus mud, hash pipes and Jimi Hendrix, he just might be right: The 100th running of this storied, 26.2-mile foot race is an event of Woodstockian proportions. With 37,500 runners, 10,000 support staff, an estimated 1 million spectators and sufficient supplies for Desert Storm II, it's as much a celebration of one kind of lifestyle as Woodstock was of another. It's also safe to say that the Boston Marathon has come a long way in a century. In Massachusetts, the third Monday in April is Patriots Day, a holiday honoring the heroes of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, fought on April 19, 1775. The race that has become a Patriots Day tradition began on April 19, 1897, when 15 runners, including six from New York, lined up on a dirt road in Ashland, a distant Boston suburb, to run a course patterned after the one used the previous year in the Athens Olympics. Officials of the Boston Athletic Association had been in Athens for the 1896 Games and were so inspired by the marathon, which featured a dramatic victory by an itinerant Greek worker named Spridion Louis, that they decided to hold a similar race back home. The first race was won by one of the New Yorkers, a lithographer named John McDermott, in a time of 2 hours, 55 minutes, 10 seconds - about 46 minutes slower than Kenyan Cosmas Ndeti's 1995 winning time of 2:09:22 (and Ndeti's race was two miles longer; until 1923, the Boston course was only 24 miles). And yet, while Boston always has loomed large in the running world, it took a major change - in attitudes toward sports, fitness and health - to make it relevant to the world at large. \"If there had never been a running and fitness boom, there might be a few thousand runners doing {the 100th Boston},\" says Hal Higdon, author of \"Boston: A Century of Running\" (Rodale, $40). \"But it wouldn't be anything like this.\"

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