Only one woman has run the Boston Marathon 30 times, and she is, at 70, a remarkable figure in a number of other ways as well. Margo Fish spoke about her life and thoughts with Eve Pell early this summer. Pell is formerly the number one ranked woman road runner over 60 in the United States, and writes a regular column on veteran athletes for Pacific New Service.

Dressed in flowing black, Margo Fish moves more like a dancer than like an athlete and, at 70, looks more like Greta Garbo than Billie Jean King.

This last spring, she completed her 30th Boston marathon -- more than any other woman has run. Yet her attitude toward sport is quite unconventional -- while most women who race are, like their male counterparts, competitive, Fish dislikes rivalry.

"If someone wants to beat me, I hope they do," she says with a smile. "It will make them happy, and I'd prefer that. I could never understand why you should hurt someone or be better than them for the sake of your own valor."

She was raised in a family that loved music and theater -- her skylit Manhattan apartment is hung with her paintings -- not sport. "Once we had to run around a track in school," she recalled. "It seemed foolish to me."

But Fish admits she is delighted to be the only member of the group of woman "pioneers" who began running in the Boston marathon in the late 1960s who is still running there.

She tells the story with some pride. In the early 1960s, her husband, a Congregationalist minister, was hired as a teacher and coach at Exeter, an old-line New England prep school. He took up running in order to get fit, and Margo, who was used to doing things with him, followed him out the door.

The first day, she survived only half a block and had to sit down on a curb, gasping. But, piqued by the challenge, she went out the next day and the next, until she could run five miles without stopping.

In 1967, she cheered her husband on as he ran the Boston marathon, America's oldest foot race, for the first time. "I thought then, I'd like to do that," she recalled in a recent interview.

Women were not permitted to enter the race. Experts argued over whether women were physically capable of long distance competition -- the longest race open to women in the Olympics at the time was 800 meters, only half a mile.

But a woman named Roberta Gibb sneaked into the Boston marathon in 1966, and Kathy Switzer ran in 1967 despite the furious attempts of marathon officials to eject her.

In that highly political era, with millions marching to protest the Vietnam war and racial segregation, women were challenging the barriers that kept them out of sports, professions, and other areas of endeavor. Fish hid behind a telephone pole at the start of the marathon in 1968 and jumped in as she saw her husband run by. Carrying a home-made McCarthy for President sign, she became the third woman to finish a Boston marathon.

With a wry smile, she describes how male runners' attitudes toward her have changed over the years. "At first I was a fairly sleek-looking young blonde and they would ask me 'What are you doing after the race?' Now, people ask me, 'Darling, do you think you will finish?"' Her times have changed, as well. While she used to finish the 26.2 miles in well under four hours, now it takes at least six.

The mother of four grown children and several times a grandmother, the still-glamorous Fish has seen vast changes in attitudes toward women. In 1951, she married her childhood sweetheart while she was a senior at Penn State. When she became pregnant, the school refused to let her finish. "They said it would be an embarrassment."

For years, while raising her children and pursuing a career as a painter -- her work has been featured in 21 exhibitions -- she took college courses earning a degree in 1979 and a graduate degree from Union Theological Seminary, and expects to be ordained as a Congregationalist minister.

Fish brings her spirituality to her running. "It humbles you any time you encounter what this dear little body can do," she went on. "You have every bone and muscle and eyebrow working together," she added, leaning forward intently. "Your body can run twenty miles just fine, but you have to dig into the psyche for the last six."

She has tried to spread that spiritual view to marathon competitors: "I thought I could introduce a gentleness into the race. There is only one winner, but all the runners are necessary for there to be a marathon. The foot needs the baby toe and the big toe both; all are needed to make a whole." But she has not made many converts.

Just as age has not stopped Fish from running marathons, it has not stopped her from taking up new ventures. She is learning ballet, raising money to rebuild an ancient nunnery in Scotland, turning her thesis into a book, and continuing to exhibit her art work.

"I don't mind getting older. It's important to return gifts to life, to not be irrelevant," she said. "Part of growing old is to let go of fears."

Margo Fish's resume reads, "Preacher, teacher, artist, athlete." Look for her at Boston next April, as she goes for marathon number thirty-one.