On March 16, the Atlanta Track Club placed an entry form in the Sunday Atlanta Journal-Constitution for its Peachtree 10K Road Race, held annually on July 4. By March 17, 70,000 applications had been received for a 6.2-mile race that caps its field at 50,000.
The response is representative of what some people are calling the second running boom in the United States. More accurately, it reflects an evolution in the types of people who choose to run and their reasons for doing so.
The new boom bears little resemblance to the first one in the 1970's, which was propelled by the American marathon champions Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers and was characterized by its obsessiveness. Back then, zealous runners often logged 70 miles a week and were considered as geeky as today's computer nerds.
Now, there are no great American distance runners. Instead, the sport has become much more informal, mainstream, socially acceptable and even part of the fashion world through athletic footwear. In this more casual climate, running's icons are President Clinton and Oprah Winfrey.
''We've always been the Oprah-Clinton model,'' said Julia Emmons, who has been the Peachtree race director for 13 years, during which time the field has doubled. ''I invented two people, my Uber-runners, that I call Dorothy and Frank. They are in early middle age, a bit plump, and this is the biggest thing in their athletic lives. Most of us are not born with a lot of athletic talent, but with a will and a focus and desire to be as healthy as we can within reason. It is an extraordinary sense of accomplishment for the ordinary person to run 6.2 miles in the heat of Atlanta on July 4.''
There may be twice as many runners now as in the 1970's, according to USA Track and Field, the sport's national governing body. But today's runners are older and slower than those in the earlier boom. The average age for male marathoners rose from 34 years old to 38 from 1980 to 1995, USA Track and Field says; for women, the average age increased from 31 to 35. The average finishing time in the 26.2-mile race has risen, too, from 3 hours 32 minutes to 3:54 for men and from 4:03 to 4:15 for women.
Although race participation has increased fourfold since the early 1980's, runners are now more concerned with overall fitness than with race performance. The goal of many runners is simply to finish a marathon, not to finish in under three, or even four, hours. Running is often incorporated as part of a cross-training regimen that might include two days a week on the roads and three in a gym. The aim is often not to run a personal best in a race, but to run for charitable causes or to take control of one's life by losing weight or reducing stress.
''Oprah lost 70 pounds and ran a marathon,'' said George Hirsch, publisher of Runner's World magazine, whose largest-selling single issue was one that pictured Winfrey on the cover in March 1995. ''She represents the idea that running can improve the quality of your life; it's a great way to lose weight and keep it off. President Clinton, I think, represents the idea that you can't use the excuse that you're too busy. If he can find the time to run, we can find the time.''
A Simple Escape From Wired Lives
Running involves no special equipment other than shoes (although top-of-the-line shoes can cost as much as $140 these days), is an efficient form of exercise and, unlike, say, tennis, it requires neither a partner nor a drive to an open court. It requires only a step out the front door. For more and more Americans, a daily run provides a simple escape from complex lives, a brief disconnect from the wired omnipresence of technology.
''All the advancements in technology -- computers, the Internet, E-mail -- that were supposed to free everyone up just have everyone working more,'' said Shorter, the 1972 Olympic marathon champion. ''Isn't it nice that running allows you at a certain point to say: 'I'm turning off the computer, hanging up the phone and I'm going out running for an hour. I'm doing it for me.' The easiest way to get booted out of your running group is to carry a phone.''
While running did not seem to have the sizzle of in-line skating, snowboarding, stair-climbing and mountain biking in recent years, it received a twin boost in 1996 with the Summer Olympics in Atlanta and the 100th Boston Marathon, which drew 38,708 participants from 84 countries.
According to figures provided by the National Sporting Goods Association, 22.2 million Americans ran at least six days in 1996, up from 20.6 million in 1995.
Nike, which controls about half of the running shoe market, has experienced more than 60 percent growth in running shoe sales for three consecutive quarters. Worldwide, Nike sells more running shoes than basketball shoes, according to Kirk Richardson, the business director of Nike's running division.
Adidas said it has experienced a 200 percent growth in its running shoe business in the past two years. Brooks, another footwear company, said that shoe orders for 1997 are running 180 percent ahead of 1996. Other athletic shoe companies, such as New Balance and Reebok, are reporting significant double-digit growth.
While the National Sporting Goods Association uses more conservative estimates, some running company officials believe that domestic running shoe sales could reach $2 billion this year.
There have been some stumbles in this running revival. Nike has been accused of making its shoes in Asian sweatshops.
And the industry cringed when Reebok recently named a running shoe for women the Incubus. Also, it was not exactly in Nike's marketing campaign to have the 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult commit suicide in identical pairs of its running shoes.
Not everyone is convinced that shoe-sale figures truly represent a running revival. It is an accepted industry standard that up to 80 percent of athletic shoes are bought for fashion reasons, not for performance.
''One retailer said to me a few weeks ago, 'There's not a running boom, there's a running shoe boom,' '' said Marty Kaufmann, footwear editor of Sportstyle, a New York trade magazine.
The Golden Age Of Road Races
The differences between runners today and their counterparts during the first boom can be seen in the growing numbers of participants in formal races, which is an indication of the sport's movement from a personal, solitary agenda to a more community based and social experience.
In fact, the number of American runners has remained relatively static -- between 20.6 million and 24.8 million who say they run at least six times a year, and between 31.5 million and 32.9 million who say they run at least once a year. American Sports Data, a firm based in Hartsdale, N.Y., that specializes in sports and fitness research, reports that while the number of runners who ran more than 100 times a year rose from 8.1 million in 1989 to 9.5 million in 1995, the figure dipped to 8.3 million in 1996.
''Everybody thought running died in 1988; I railed against that for years,'' said Harvey Lauer, president of American Sports Data. ''In the same vein, I argue against any alleged renaissance. If you want to say that racing is trendy and that races have become happenings and spectacles, I'm sure it's true. Saying running is growing in terms of overall numbers, it's not true.''
There can be no denying, however, the significant growth in race participation. Last year, 6.2 million Americans finished a road race, compared with an estimated 1.5 million in the early 1980's, according to USA Track and Field's road-running information center. For the first time, the 100 largest races in the country produced a million finishers in 1996, contrasted with 350,000 in 1980. Three road races last year had at least 50,000 finishers apiece: the Lilac Bloomsday 12K Run in Spokane, Wash., with 56,156; the Examiner Bay to Breakers, a 12-kilometer race in San Francisco, 53,030, and the Peachtree, with an estimated 50,000.
The New York City Marathon gets between 50,000 and 60,000 applications annually and limits its field to about 29,000 runners. ''Now, you really don't see the loneliness of the long-distance runner,'' said Allan Steinfeld, president of the New York Road Runners Club and director of the New York City Marathon. ''There's a greater sense of camaraderie. It's more socially acceptable. I don't see cars aiming at runners or people shouting and screaming at runners anymore.''
Dr. Romulo Navarro, a surgeon from Douglas, Ga., did not begin running until three years ago at 58, after having heart disease and undergoing an angioplasty. He has since run the Peachtree Road Race twice and, last summer, he carried the Olympic torch on its way to Atlanta.
''If you feel depressed, just go for a run; it makes you feel great,'' Navarro said. ''My goal is a marathon. Carrying the Olympic torch was the pinnacle of my life. A marathon would be second.''
More Women Take Up the Sport
Twenty-five years after the passage of the gender-equity law called Title IX, the number of women participating in road racing has jumped dramatically. Twenty-six percent of marathon finishers are women now, compared with 10 percent in 1980. About 400,000 women finished a marathon in 1995, a fourfold increase over 1980.
On the high school level, women's cross-country is one of the fastest-growing sports. Participation has increased from 104,160 in the 1989-90 school year to 140,187 in the 1996-97 school year. At least one of the country's largest road races, the Bloomsday 12K (7.4 miles) race in Spokane, Wash., had more female participants than male in its field of 55,000 on May 4.
Ramona Lee Jasso of Charleston, S.C., began running in January 1996. She was teaching full time at a preschool and had not lost all the weight she had intended to lose after the birth of her son. Inspired, in part, by the running success of Winfrey, Jasso has now run Charleston's 6.2-mile Cooper River Bridge Run twice.
''I needed something to relieve stress,'' Jasso said. ''I run two or three times a week now. It tones your body, and you feel better emotionally and physically.''
Where a runner may have competed in 18 races a year in the 1970's, today it is 1.8 races, said Jeff Galloway, a 1972 Olympian who is the author of popular running books and who gives clinics around the country to beginning marathoners. Often that one race may be for a cause such as breast cancer or leukemia.
The Race for the Cure series began with 800 runners in Dallas in 1983, and has spread to 77 cities this year with an expected participation of 400,000 runners. Last year, the series raised $10 million for breast cancer research, officials said.
On Mother's Day, Julie Kligerman, a 48-year-old lawyer from Moorestown, N.J., and her 17-year-old daughter, Laura Oppenheim, ran their first races ever at Philadelphia's Race for the Cure. They ran partly in memory of Kligerman's sister-in-law, who died of breast cancer last year, and partly to validate their two and a half years of jogging around the neighborhood at home.
''I don't consider myself to be an athlete; I just like to get outside,'' Kligerman said. ''I have plenty of drama in other places in my life.''
Photo: Julie Kligerman after running her first race, on Mother's Day. She doesn't consider herself an athlete. ''I just like to get outside,'' she says. (Christopher Gardner for The New York Times) (pg. B12)