Marathon runners are lonely men. We stood on a hill in Newton and watched the first ten of them pass. Before the leader came running evenly up the hill the balloon salesmen and the ice-cream salesmen and the newsboys and the police had prepared things.

Only official vehicles could use the road. There were the State Police motorcycles, the Newton Police loudspeaker cars, and one car with oranges. ("Eat Babijuice oranges, All the Marathon runners use Babijuice oranges," the car's poster told us).

A black sedan, flags flying, pulled up nearby and two young Koreans with beanies popped out and bounded up the steps of a neat suburban home. Sweeping off their caps, the boys politely commandeered the water supply, and while the residents uneasily tried to be helpful, the Korans dashd out, each with a glass of water.

A wave of applause was rolling slowly up the hillside with Kee Young Ham. Compact, muscular, dead-pan, he ran easily in his white trunks and jersey, staring in front of him, apparently ignoring the shouted messages from the sedan. He was gone as quickly and unobtrusively as he had come. The boys with the water followed, and craning our necks we could see the Korean dousing his head. After he had passed, everything was exactly as it had been a moment before, and it seemed much too long before the second runner, Yun Chil Choi, slipped by in another formal envelope of applause.

A balloon man with one balloon left was trying to sell it to a man with a baby on his shoulders. The baby was trying to eat an ice-cream sandwich. The red balloon moved down the hill over the balloon man. Two runners moved up the steep hill. Both looked ready to quit. The first one grimaced showing all his teeth, and holding his stomach. The checks of the second billowed and flattened as he breathed. His hands were fists, his feet landed heavily on the asphalt. Across the road, a little girl let go of her balloon and it soared up quickly. "Look," one of the bicycle boys said, "there goes a flying saucer," and everyone, except the lonely runners, laughed.

Later on, we weren't the only ones trying to get downtown in time to see the runners again. Little hands of police everywhere routed traffic away from the course. Most of the racers were walking as they came into Kenmore Square. The sixth place runner was passing whn we reached the Square. Leandersson and Van Zant, someone told us painfully, hadn't shown up yet. In a second floor window a man in a trench coat, with carphones around his head, watched the runners and talked calmly into a microphone.

They passed silently, by ones and twos. The crowds began to break up just before a whisper ran down Beacon Street. "Clarence, it's Clarence. Is it Clarence?" Clarence DcMar was coming. The crowd held together for just a few more minutes while the old man puffed by, tired, but smiling. For DcMar the applause was possessive. He turned into the pre-dusk cocktails-and-dinner hour of Commonwealth Avenue, and disappeared between two taxicabs. Behind him, Fred Murphy, a very young man from Dorchester, dragged himself up the next to last hill of the race, the trestle just west of the Square, paused on the crest, and slowly sank toward the ground. A woman nearby gasped. A roar rose from Fenway Park. Murphy's hands, thin and bony, gripped his knees, then slid down along his calves until the fingers stood on the asphalt. There were few spectators left, and fewer moved toward him. For a moment, even the scraps of torn paper in the gutter were resting. Then Murphy's hands pushed him up; he started to run again. "He'll never make it," a man muttered. "Attaboy, Fred," shouted another.

Two men in street clothes are jogging beside another racer. "Come on, Joe. Attaboy. Almost there." At the corner of Exeter street they stop and he heads for the finish line alone. The street is broad and empty and he runs straight down the middle of it. On the sidewalk, a little girl is whimpering because her balloon has been destroyed.