A Rerun for Ndeti, Pippig : Boston Marathon: Kenyan wins for third consecutive time, German makes it two in a row.

BOSTON —  It’s a city of tradition. Every year, a short, chubby guy dresses like Paul Revere and talks about the night he rode out from the North End to warn the countryside about the Redcoats. Every year, the Red Sox tease their fans, then break their hearts.

Every year, Cosmas Ndeti is told he can’t win the Boston Marathon, and he does.

Three times in a row Ndeti has won, including Monday, when his time of 2 hours 9 minutes 22 seconds was one minute faster than countryman Moses Tanui’s as Kenyans finished 1-2-4-5, with only Brazil’s Luiz Antonio Do Santos to break them up.

Twice in a row Uta Pippig of Germany has won, Monday leading Elana Meyer of South Africa and the rest of the women’s field across the finish line by 1:40 in a pedestrian 2:25:11, and then apologizing for not doing it faster.

Ndeti ran in shoes on which he had printed Christian slogans in blue ink, and he showed their heels to the field earlier than in the last two races, breaking a 20-runner pack at 17 miles, staying with a five-runner group for a while, then taking off on the Newton hills at about 21 miles, with only Tanui close by--and for only a short while.

“I run well up hills, but I am not so good going down,” Tanui said.

To Ndeti, the rest of the race was downhill.

“Just after 35 (kilometers), I had only Moses Tanui,” Ndeti said. “Guys who had run with me earlier were still running. I had looked around, and there were five of us and they looked strong, but I felt like I was going to win.”

Tanui was no problem.

“A marathon is different from 10,000 meters,” said Ndeti, acknowledging that Tanui is a former world champion at that distance but that he has much to learn about running longer.

And Ndeti is a specialist, a marathoner to Boston as Al Unser Jr. is an Indy car racer to Long Beach. The runner named his son Gideon Boston, apparently after a Bible he found in his hotel room in Copley Square when the youngster was born, on the day of Cosmas Ndeti’s first victory.

He named his red station wagon Boston, after the place where he won the money to buy it.

Ndeti struggled in the Chicago Marathon last fall, dropping out of the race, then was 49th at Lisbon in a half-marathon, finishing only seven seconds ahead of Kenya’s Tegla Loroupe, the women’s winner.

But this was Boston, where he joined Bill Rodgers (1978-80) and Clarence DeMar (1922-24) as the only men to win three times in a row.

Take that, Ndeti said to skeptics.

“I trusted myself,” Ndeti said. “I trained especially for this race, and I won.”

Trained how? Like a fisherman who knows a good stream that isn’t on the map, Ndeti isn’t saying. “I don’t want to tell my secret,” he said, laughing. “I want to keep coming back to this race and maybe run it as many times as John (Kelley, who ran Boston 58 times). Maybe I will tell you when I will be like John (Kelley).”

Kelley is 87.

Pippig’s training is no secret. She works up to 180 miles a week, often running three times a day on mountain trails at up to 9,000-foot elevation around Boulder, Colo. “After mountains like that, Heartbreak Hill is like a bunny hill,” she said. “I can play on hills here.”

That’s where she began trying to break free of a four-women pack that also included Loroupe, who was running in Boston for the first time and was in only her second marathon; Meyer, who was third last year and is also a 10,000-meter specialist, and Valentina Yegorova of Russia.

Yegorova dropped back, then out at 22 miles, and Meyer and Loroupe became entangled at a water station. Meyer said she thought her water bottle was on Table 1 and she grabbed one from there, but she realized that it wasn’t hers and dropped it, heading for Table 2. Realizing her faux pas, she stopped to pick up the bottle of a competitor.

Meyer was so polite that she lost 20 yards to Pippig. So did Loroupe, who never regained it and eventually finished ninth in 2:33:10, almost six minutes slower than her winning time in New York.

Pippig wasn’t sure what was happening behind her but she recognized opportunity and sped up.

It took a while for Meyer to catch her, and the additional exertion resulted in a cramp at 22 1/2 miles.

Pippig was alone the rest of the way, smiling and blowing kisses to the crowd and trying to ignore the pain in her foot that had her limping in the final miles.

“I had some blisters on my feet, and my bone hurt a lot,” she said. “In the last 15K, it bothered me a lot, and I lost some time.”

She also lost a chance at a world record. Her time was 3:26 slower than her course record of last year.

“It was slow for me,” she said. “We had not so good conditions (with wind in the runners’ faces). That’s the first reason.

“The second reason was my feet.”

And what about Ndeti’s time, which was 2:07 slower than his course record of a year ago?

“I’m happy with it,” he said.

Why not? It won Boston, to him the only race.

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Jean Driscoll of Champaign, Ill., was the women’s wheelchair winner for the sixth year in a row, finishing in 1:40:42 without real competition. Franz Nietlispach of Switzerland led all the way in winning the men’s race in 1:25:59.

The first U.S. man to finish the open marathon was Michael Whittlesey, 27, of Willimantic, Conn., 29th in 2:22:48. The first American woman was Linda Somers, a former UC Davis student who trains in Oakland and was 11th, in 2:34:30.