BOSTON -- Trying to lose weight? Forget about the Scarsdale Diet or the ones pitched by Nathan Pritikin, Oprah Winfrey and Jenny Craig.
Kenya's Elijah Lagat has results to put those to shame. He lost 33 pounds and then won the Boston Marathon, just seven years after his doctor told him to start exercising or maybe die."I was not an athlete. I was fat," he said Monday in a testimonial that seemed more appropriate for a Richard Simmons video than a Boston Marathon winner's news conference. "One time I got sick and I went to the doctor. The doctor told me to do some exercise to cut down my weight."
It being Kenya, where road racing is a national sport, Lagat began to run. From a high of 158 pounds at his doctor's appointment in late 1992, when he was having difficulty breathing and an erratic pulse, he dropped to 125 pounds.
No one needed to tell Lagat what to do on Monday.
Staying with the lead pack through a race slowed by a 13 mph headwind, Lagat came into the final stretch locked in a dramatic duel with training partner Moses Tanui and Ethiopia's Gezahenge Abera.
The lead went back and forth before Tanui made his surge with 200 yards to go. But Tanui, a two-time Boston winner, tired as Lagat began his sprint.
In the closest finish in the race's 104-year history, Lagat and Abera clocked the same time of 2 hours, 9 minutes, 47 seconds, with Tanui three seconds back.
The victory was an unprecedented 10th in a row for Kenya.
Catherine Ndereba won the women's race in 2:26:11 --16 seconds ahead of Kyrgyzstan's Irina Bogacheva and Ethiopia's Fatuma Roba.
The winners earned $80,000 each from the total purse of $525,000.
Jean Driscoll won the women's wheelchair race, securing an unprecedented eighth laurel wreath in a time of 2:00:53. Franz Nietlispach of Switzerland won his fifth wheelchair race and his fourth in a row, in 1:33:32, with a gap of more than five minutes.