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A prize purse of $1,000 in athletes' development funds will be divided among runners completing the run in less than 30 minutes in proportion to the runner's finish. Officials are stressing the race is not only for the elite woman road racers, but for part-time runners, joggers and fitness enthusiasts.

An important purpose of the race is to raise funds for the 1988 U.S. Olympic team. Merrill Lynch Realty, national sponsor for the U.S. Olympic team, is giving a major portion of all entry fees to the U.S. Olympic Fund.

-- Former Fort Lauderdale Heart Run (1983) and Boston Marathon winner Greg Meyer sat out this year's Boston Marathon. Some say he has never recovered from his 2:09:00 winning performance in '83.

"I think I paid a high price for winning Boston, only because I didn't give myself a chance to recover," Meyer said. "I came back too soon, and it ripped me apart. I should have been smart and bagged everything. I haven't regained my form since. You keep wanting to get back on the merry-go-round, at the same place where you got off, but I kept getting hurt."

Rodgers has cut down his mileage training; he used to run in the 140s in the 1970s and now runs 60 miles per week.

"When I begin a new year the whole goal is to crack into the Top 10 in the world," Rodgers said.

PAST WINNERS

Year Runner Country Time

1978 Pat Chmiel U.S. 2:24:20

Jane Killian U.S. 2:54:13

1979 Stan Curran England 2:19:12

Gayle Olinek Canada 2:55:08

1980 Ken Misner U.S. 2:18:31

D. Rasmussen Denmark 2:40:35

1981 Benji Durden U.S. 2:12:33

Carol Gould England 2:41:39

1982 David Long England 2:12:16

Char. Teske W.Germany 2:29:01

1983 Bill Rodgers U.S. 2:15:07

M. Lovinich W.Germany 2:35:16

1984 Tommy Persson Sweden 2:13:26

J.D. Brouwer France 2:44:41

1985 Jimmy Ashworth England 2:18:49

Jan Yerkes U.S. 2:41:30

While he doesn't win many big races these days, Rodgers remains almost as fast as ever. While the track stars and foreigners have replaced him at the finish tape, his times are still impressive. Last September he ran 59:08 in the New Haven (Conn.) 20K. That's two 29:34 10Ks back-to-back and his second fastest New Haven time in seven years. He has an impressive collection of American single-age records, owning more than 30.

Miami's Ruben Rodriguez, 24, was South Florida's top male finisher, placing 82nd overall in 2:31:08. Bobbi Rothman, 40, of Coconut Creek was the top woman finisher, placing 14th in 2:43:46. Rothman placed second in the Masters 40-49 age group.

Hostility is the word the runners turn to. Objects are tossed at them, obscenities hurled, gauntlets flung. Tires squeal and exhausts belch in their faces. The comics lean out the window and bark "hut, hut, hut," like sergeants, or make crude sexual comments. In Gainesville, where Shorter attended the University of Florida Law School, his wife Louise had to give up running alone because of the constant vicious provocation. In New Mexico, where Shorter's parents live, his father once had to shadow him in a car, packing a handgun, to ward off those psychotics whose regular amusement was to try to run Shorter down.

Frank Shorter (testifying before the President's Commission on Olympic Sports): "Well, I graduated from Yale in 1969, and I decided that rather than go into medical school I would become a runner, much to the chagrin of all the Puritan-ethic people in New England, and I started training about 80 miles a week, and it has gone up to 150 and 200 miles in a week, and I think in the last seven years I have maybe not run 15 days, and that is twice every day in the last seven years, and just day in and day out, all of the year round...."

Shorter says, "It is a fine line, but to me the object is not to beat someone, but merely to live up to your potential. If you do, then you will end up winning a lot, but you won't be beating anybody. I hate to lose as much as anybody I know, but beat people? I guess that's why I never could have been a good team player—because it's never been that important for me to beat people

The coach says, "Even after he won the gold medal, if he was at a track meet and heard a gun go off, he'd start running—5,000 meters or something, which he couldn't possibly win. So once I told him, 'Hey, Frank, if you really want to get beat, why don't you go in the shotput?' You see, I was worried for him. Most guys get very upset when they're beat. But then it occurred to me that Frank isn't ever bothered by losing, so why shouldn't he compete?

"To start with, distance runners have a more ascetic mentality, the kind that the saints of the ancient church exhibited. But that doesn't mean we should ever make the mistake of feeling sorry for them. Why should we? After all, to feel good again all they have to do is stop. Now Frank's of this type, like all these sackcloth and ashes guys, but he can still have a lot of fun, too. Life is more important to Frank Shorter.

With time on his hands, he approached Giegengack one day and said, "Gieg, if I really worked at it, how good could I be?"

Without pausing for breath, the coach shot back, "Well, I think if you really applied yourself you could be very good. I think you could make the Olympics and even win a gold medal."

Shorter nodded and promptly began two-a-day workouts. A month later, he was the NCAA six-mile champion. And one thing led to another and so on and so forth, and three years later he won the gold.

Says Kenny Moore, a fellow Olympian, a good friend and the man who introduced Shorter to the marathon, "Frank does whatever he has to do, whatever is needed. Ultimately, he even won a gold medal that way. That may not make much sense unless you know him, but that's the way he is."

"These things just work out for me. I've always been a good scrambler. I was always predicted to underachieve, but I always got by. If one approach doesn't work, I'll try another, and I have the confidence that it'll work out. And if you're living where you want to live, like I am, then it's easy to be satisfied with your work, with your life. I'm not iconoclastic or a misanthrope—nothing dramatic. I just get by. It's nothing complicated. But I guess it's just functionally impossible for the cafe mentality to comprehend my life."

"I've always been able to work hard at what I was doing," Shorter says. "That's never been my problem. It's only a matter of making up my mind in the first place. Whenever I've made decisions, major decisions, it's just been a case of me getting up in the morning and sitting there on the bed and deciding, yes, I'll do this. Like that."

Shorter says, "After 20 miles everybody slows down, and it is just a matter of trying to hold on. It's no longer a question of racing. In distance running, the definition of faster doesn't mean speed anyway, but just a matter of maintaining a pace longer. After 20 miles, the places are set unless a guy dies." Marathoners commonly use that verb instead of "collapse," "drop out," or whatever. They all say die.

The best runners are those that attend strictly to business once they are on the course. The less successful long-distance men tend to be those who "disassociate," who admire the scenery or who let their minds wander. By contrast, Shorter cannot even recall running through two beautiful parks in Munich. All the time he is running, he is busy concentrating on strategy—how the race is shaping up, his form and rhythm; indeed, he uses the word "feedback" as if his own body were a foreign object he was studying. But then, we all know time just flies when you're having fun. Instead of two hours and a quarter—to be precise, 2:12:19.8 in Munich, the second-fastest Olympic marathon—it hardly seems like 45 minutes to Shorter.

Despite the overriding issue of stamina, a marathon is not devoid of strategy. The matter of the lead is crucial, for the man in front carries an emotional burden. The runners-up dogging his footsteps may be moving exactly as fast, expending exactly as much energy, but somehow the man out front assumes a great burden. The others wear down, but the man in the lead is torn apart.

"Psychologically, we are using the leader not unlike the way automobile drivers use the physical principle of drafting," Shorter says. "If the man in front cannot break away, he will eventually get caught. I cannot tell you exactly why, but I can promise you that it will happen. Therefore, if I am in a position to take the lead, I know that I must be capable of more than that. Once I've committed myself on the lead, I have to quickly pull away, break that mental contact—if just by five or 10 yards—so that the others can't use me to get drawn along."