Patti Dillon was a girl from the neighborhood, nothing more than that. She grew up in Quincy, a gray working-class town on the south shore of Boston. She went to school at Sacred Heart. She worked two jobs. College was not an option. This life never struck Dillon as something she should run away from, but she did anyway. She ran fast, too, becoming the best female distance runner in America, at a time - the height of the running boom in the 1970s - when that really meant something. It meant even more to her.
          "If you were going to beat me, you were going to have to spit blood," says Dillon, whom running fans will remember as Patti Catalano. "Because that's what I was going to do. I was going to spit blood. I wasn't going to make it easy for anyone to beat me." Twenty-five years ago, that kind of attitude from a woman was still a shock to the senses - and there were plenty of people from the neighborhood who let her know that, yelling epithets at her when she was out training, throwing rocks at her head. But for Dillon, her drive had little to do with competitiveness - or even the women's movement, for that matter. Dillon ran, and ran hard, because she didn't have any other choice. It was the only way she knew how to get attention.
         
When the starter's gun cracks Monday for the 106th Boston Marathon - the race that has been called "running's Holy Grail" - Patti Dillon isn't sure if she'll be watching. "I try to watch," she says from her home in New London, Conn., where she lives with her third husband and their two young children. "But it's a busy time in our lives now. A couple years ago, we were in Home Depot when we heard the marathon on the radio. We said, 'Hey, the marathon. OK, where's plumbing?' "
          Which goes to show how much Dillon's life has changed. Because there was a time when she defined herself by the Boston Marathon. Defined her marriage by it. Even more so because something always held her back there, on her home turf - her own fears, the Fates, who knows what. Three years in a row Dillon was the favorite, and three years in a row she finished second - emotionally spent and wracked with feelings of guilt.

           The problem wasn't the running. In her prime, Dillon was nearly unbeatable - she held every American record for women from five miles to the marathon, including world records at 30 kilometers and the half-marathon. But Boston was different - the cheers louder, the expectations simply huge, both for success and failure.