Six months later, Dillon ran a marathon - Rhode Island's Ocean State Marathon - and won. She was still smoking two packs of cigarettes a day and gorging on doughnuts every morning. Still, it never dawned on her that she was a natural. She kept at it for another reason. "When I won that first marathon, in 1976, suddenly there were people all over me, who wanted to know who I was," she says, her voice rising. "All this attention! And I was, like, 'Wow! This is pretty cool.' People liked me. People really liked me. Oh, I sound like Sally Field, but that's just how I felt." But it seemed too simple: All she had to do was run. So she ran very hard. "I picture a lion when I think of Patti," says Jacqueline Gareau, the great French Canadian runner who won the Boston Marathon in 1980. "Every time she was on the starting line I remember her clapping her hands, so hyper, just going all the time. She was always very fierce, very hungry."
          She wasn't the only one. The running boom and the women's movement were both at their height in the 1970s, and women runners - restricted from competing at distances longer than a mile and a half until 1971 - rushed to road racing with the zeal of missionaries, producing a clutch of elite athletes who were determined to prove they belonged. They knew it wasn't going to be easy. It had been only a few years earlier, in 1967, that Kathrine Switzer, signing her entry application "K.V. Switzer," surreptitiously entered the Boston Marathon, warded off an attempt by race officials to pull her off the course and triumphantly crossed the finish line - as dozens of spectators booed and taunted her. (Switzer was immediately suspended by the Amateur Athletic Union, U.S. track and field's sanctioning body, for, among other transgressions, "traveling without a chaperone.") But Switzer was out there for show. The women who followed her wanted to win. And they ran fast - faster than many people thought women could ever run. In a little more than a decade, the women's marathon record dropped by an hour, with Norway's Grete Waitz pushing it to two hours and 27 minutes in 1979 - fast enough to win all men's Olympic marathons before 1952. To many observers, these women seemed like they came from another planet. Dillon, even after she had won in Rhode Island, was one of the awestruck. "I didn't think I could ever run with them," she says. "I mean, how do you beat Grete Waitz? It just seemed impossible."
         
          Female marathoners of the 1970s were indisputably of a type. Waitz, Kim Merritt, Allison Roe: They were all tall, angular golden girls, with an unnerving earth-mother calmness, and a long and languid stride - the picture on a Greek vase. Dillon stood in stark contrast, and she knew it. She was short and boxy. She looked rumpled, no matter what she did with her clothes. And she ran as if the cops were after her. How could she possibly compete with Waitz, who'd been in serious training since age 16 and who set world records the first three times she ran the marathon? That's where Joe Catalano came in. Catalano was a 28-year-old Quincy high school track coach and second-tier competitive marathoner when he noticed Dillon working out at the local YMCA in 1978. Soon, he was her coach. "I was very unsure of myself," says Dillon. "So when Joe said, 'You should give yourself a chance, you can be really good,' I said, 'What do you mean, really good?' I honestly didn't know what he meant." Catalano took his new job seriously. He taught Dillon about diet, got her to start a speed-training regimen and badgered her to stop smoking - which didn't sit well with his fledgling pupil. "I couldn't believe it," she says, laughing. "I remember thinking, 'I have to stop smoking? Why?' I didn't know anything." Dillon, who would marry Catalano in 1980 (it was her second marriage, after a brief union in 1977), compensated for her lack of knowledge by overcompensating. After sponsorship through Nike's Athletics West team allowed her to quit her day job, Dillon became one of the first women to run up to 150 miles a week, pushing her body to its limits.
          "When she was there, she was really there," says Gareau. "She put 100 percent of everything she had into it. She was very competitive. She trained hard. She was very focused, very, very thin." As it turned out, too thin. Determined to be what Catalano said she could be - the best in the world - Dillon tried to fit herself into that physical ideal she saw running next to her. And she didn't see anything wrong with how she was accomplishing it. "Being a woman and being service-minded, I always wanted to please," she says. "You know, you hear, 'Coach wants you thinner. You really need to be thinner.' And I'd say, 'I can do that. I can definitely do that.' " She did do it - until she was barely over a hundred pounds, a mere wisp at 5 feet 4 inches tall. When she realized what she was doing, she was shocked - at first. "I read about bulimia in a Dear Abby column," Dillon remembers. "And I thought, 'Oh my gosh, that's me!' " Without her husband's knowledge, Dillon went to the food-disorder center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "But I was recognized," she says, "so I left." She would go back some other time, she thought. But she didn't. After all, it seemed to be working.

           1980 was Dillon's year. She won 12 of 16 major races, including the Bermuda International Marathon and a record third consecutive Honolulu Marathon (she would win in Honolulu again in 1981). She beat Gareau in a pressure-cooker atmosphere in Gareau's hometown of Montreal by posting the second-fastest woman's marathon ever recorded. She won the 10-kilometer Bonne Bell Race with an American record. In West Virginia, in front of 70,000 screaming fans, she set the world record for 20 kilometers. But despite it all - the splashy Sports Illustrated spread, the "Runner of the Year" awards, the trip to Japan where she remembers being "received like a baseball star" - there was always Boston to keep her doubts gnawing away at her. Even now, Dillon speaks of the Boston Marathon with awe, as if remembering a vivid dream. She offers no excuses - never has. "Joanie ran a really terrific race," she says of her first race there in 1979 - not mentioning the painful bursitis in her foot that prevented her from responding to Joan Benoit's challenge at 16 miles. The following year she was back, and late in the race thought she had the thing sewed up - when a male runner called out to her. "It was in Kenmore Square, near [Boston University], and he yelled to me, 'Patti, there's someone ahead. It's Jackie, the Canadian girl,' " Dillon remembers. "And I thought, 'What?' I really thought I was leading. I looked ahead, and he called to me, 'Yellow shorts! Yellow shorts!' And I kept looking and looking, and sure enough I saw them. Oh, my heart just went right to my throat. All I could think was, 'I have to catch her.' " Dillon ran the last few miles as if she were on fire - male runners actually jumped out of her way - but it was too late.   GO TO PAGE THREE