Dillon vowed to be back again the next year, and vowed to chase Gareau to the ends of the earth (she would catch her at the Montreal Marathon), but the brave front was only that. "I always felt like I was just this little local girl, but everyone was expecting me to win," she says. "It was a lot of pressure, and when I lost I felt like I had let everyone down." The third consecutive loss at Boston, in 1981, was the backbreaker. Once again, Dillon was in the lead late in the race, running strong with New Zealand's Allison Roe in hot pursuit - and the crowd growing and surging in anticipation.
          "Twenty years ago, it wasn't like it is now," Dillon says. "You didn't have barriers to keep people back." What happened next has become Boston Marathon lore. "The fans were lining each side, the road getting ever narrower, with each [person] leaning out to get a look, to the point where spectators were almost banging heads with those on the other side," says Tom Derderian, a writer and college track coach who was running right behind Dillon. "People would lean forward, and then pull back as the runners came through.
          "So you had this narrowing canyon of spectators, and there's this [police officer] on a horse, and there are trolley tracks," Derderian continues. "The horse is sliding around and getting agitated because it can't get its footing on the tracks, and, of course, runners are coming through very fast. And between the crowd and the runners and the noise, Patti runs into this horse's ass - boom! - and bounces into me. I caught her, as anybody would, and after a moment she got her feet under her." But the impact had knocked the wind out of her, and Roe, who had been just a few steps behind Dillon, got around the smash-up and was gone.
          After Dillon came through the finish line, second place again, a photographer snapped a shot of her with two of her sisters, holding onto each other, all three crying uncontrollably. In the background is Catalano, looking disgusted. "Joe was not happy with my performance," Dillon says. That's putting it mildly. Catalano was angry. He had created Dillon. He'd taught her how to train, how to eat, how to win. And now look what had happened. "It was kind of a strange relationship," says one observer who knew the couple. "He was very hard on her."
          It only got worse from there. Dillon, a vocal proponent of making the sport professional (which it now is), got suspended by the AAU for speaking publicly about the under-the-table payments that race promoters used to lure top runners to their races. "It was a very contentious issue, between the old guard of amateur athletics and those pushing for professionalism," says Derderian, author of Boston Marathon: The First Century of the World's Premier Running Event. "There had been under-the-table payments for years, but now the money was big enough to be pushed out into the open. [Dillon] was one of the first to speak up." But with the Boston loss, the suspension and then a rash of injuries that kept her out of the 1982 season, Dillon's marriage became increasingly volatile.
           "I tried many times to leave him," Dillon says. "And he would do things to stop me. Just stupid husband-wife stuff, nasty divorce stuff. It was ugly and awful." Catalano did not return calls seeking comment. For Dillon, the injuries were almost a relief. They gave her a chance to rethink her life. "Whatever it was, it wasn't there anymore," she says of her competitive desire. "I just didn't really want to do it anymore." Still, it was difficult to just walk away. And in 1983, after the International Olympic Committee instituted a women's marathon beginning with the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, Dillon made one last push. She was back in training, and also finally confronting her bulimia - and getting little support from her husband. "It was a very difficult time for me, and I needed my husband so much, but he was driving me so hard," she says. "I was finally trying to clear up my food disorder and my training wasn't going well, and one day he said, 'If I knew you were like this, I never would have married you.' "I was crushed, absolutely crushed." It was also exactly what she needed. She finished far back in the pack at the Olympic Trials, but she left her husband that week.

          Today, Dillon lives in Connecticut in a large, Cape-style house, with her two children and a menagerie of pets ("It's a zoo!" exclaims 5-year-old Raven). Her husband of 10 years, former cross-country runner Dan Dillon, works as a free-lance sound engineer. Nearly 20 years removed from her running career, Dillon now seems more like a fan than one of its pioneers. When Jacqueline Gareau, with whom she battled in two of the era's truly great races, comes up in conversation, Dillon says to herself, "I have a picture of her with Aaron [Dillon's 8-year-old son]. I need a picture of her with Raven. I have Raven with [Olympic champion] Frank Shorter. I have to get a picture of my daughter with Jackie, too."
          Dillon's focus now is her children, whom she home-schools. "Danny has these wonderful memories of being hugged and loved and talked to when he was a kid, and I had the opposite," she says. "But we both arrived at the same place as parents. We want our kids to be responsible and loved - and to come back to us after they go out in the world. That's what we hope for." With this busy life, the Boston Marathon can easily slip under the radar. "It was a good time to be there," she says of her three years in the race. "It meant something, I think." And she is missed by the running community. "I wish there were more American women like her around now," says Derderian. "Fewer women now see themselves as being on the edge, doing something important. They just see it as a sport, or a fitness exercise." Was Dillon cursed at Boston? Derderian, for one, isn't quite willing to call it that. "It's a big race with the best athletes in the world," he says. "It's just once a year, and the chances of things being just a little off are strong. All three years she ran races that would've won almost anywhere else." 
          Whatever the case, Dillon seems to be at peace with her Boston Marathon record. After all, it wasn't the trophies she wanted out of her running but something else. And, in the end, she got it. She recalls one afternoon around 1980, when she was out on the track at Boston College and the school's football team tromped onto the field for a workout. "I was out there doing repeat miles," she says. "It was a hot day, and I was already there when they came out." Dillon just continued with her workout, and made no effort to even acknowledge the football players' presence. "They did their warm-up, and I was running," she says. "And they did their workout session, and I was running. Then they did their practice, and I was still running. I could see them watching me now and again, glancing over as they took breaks. Wondering who the heck I was. Finally, they finished and I was still going. But instead of leaving, they came over and lined up along the right side of the track and clapped and clapped and cheered me on. "It was great," she says. "I think I danced all the way home."  GO TO HOME