Boston Marathon

Twelve miles from the finish, his feet began to blister. Eleven miles farther on, he was overcome by nausea, stopped twice to vomit. Neither of these mishaps last week seriously inconvenienced Runner John Adelbert Kelley, who regarded them as incidental to an afternoon of sport. The pain of the blisters caused him to hurry into first place. A few minutes after becoming violently sick, a little more than two and a half hours after he had started, he crossed the finish line in last week's Boston A. A. Marathon, winner by a quarter-mile. With feet much too sore to stand, with lungs much too exhausted to speak. Runner Kelley vomited again, allowed his head to be crowned with the first-prize laurel wreath.

The Boston Marathon, its city's No. 1 sport event, is annually held on Patriot's Day. That Patriot's Day last week coincided with Good Friday served only to increase the excitement of the 500,000 enthusiasts who, as usual, lined the 26-mi. course from Hopkinton to Exeter Street. At Natick, one Mrs. Mary Bonfatti was so perturbed that she drove her automobile into two policemen. At Wellesley, students lined the streets, hooted or cheered contestants as they staggered past, 13 miles from the finish. At Auburndale, girl students of Lasell Junior College who were forbidden to watch the spectacle, held a strike, watched it anyway. At West Newton, a train killed Bartholomew C. Ryan on his way home from the race. On Commonwealth Avenue, one Edward Redman collapsed from a heart attack. Loudest cheers from spectators at what has been called the crudest sporting spectacle in the U. S. were heard for 46-year-old Clarence De Mar, Keene (N. H.) schoolteacher, who first won the race in 1911 and six times thereafter and who still regularly totters out to his annual day of notoriety. Last week, Runner De Mar finished 18th in a field of 190.

The notion that marathon races are cruel is debatable. Marathon runners undoubtedly enjoy them. When he regained enough strength and composure last week, skinny, sad-faced John Adelbert Kelley, who became one of this year's favorites by finishing second last year, explained about himself. He is the oldest child in a family of ten sired by an Arlington (Mass.) letter-carrier. William J. Kelley, a marathon enthusiast, took young John Adelbert to see Frank Zuna wobble across he finish line on Patriot's Day in 1921. Favorably impressed, 13-year-old John Adelbert Kelley thereupon went into training which he has maintained ever since. He made a habit of going three miles to the movies for the sake of the run home. By the time he was in high school, he could do ten miles easily, set out to increase his range. His four brothers contributed to buy him special steaks and chops. His trainer, Angus Macdonald, gave him violet rays, electric massages, cold spray baths, hydrotherapeutic and other scientific treatments. He secured the ideal job, pushing a wheelbarrow in a greenhouse, ran back & forth to work each day with a lunch box under his arm. This winter, in addition, he did a private marathon three times a week. To pass the time not spent in running, John Adelbert Kelley likes sketching pictures, smoking cigars of which he had time to puff three last week while describing his achievements.

Asked to explain the nausea that might have caused him to lose, certainly accounted for his failure to break the record of 2:31.1 made in 1933, Runner Kelley gave reporters an amazing revelation of a marathoner's methods. Last winter Harvard scientists who had often noticed him trotting around suburban Boston, secured Runner Kelley's permission to use him for metabolism tests. Before the race, they gave him glucose pills, each said to be the equivalent of a full meal, to eat when he grew tired. Said Runner Kelley: "I swallowed 15 glucose pills between Framingham and Newton. ... I think that's what upset my stomach."

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