"If you had told me in 1970 that this stretch of Peachtree would be a preferred place to live, I would have laughed at you."

Jeff Galloway, the first winner of the Peachtree Road Race

Ben Gray / bgray@ajc.com

A bikini-clad runner temporarily jumps in front of the lead pack.

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How different Atlanta's July 4 would be had Tim Singleton and a few of his skinny buddies gone with Plan B in 1970.

When these distance-running forebears first contemplated a holiday 10K in the steamy centerpiece of the New South, any good stretch of paved road was a possibility.

"One of my thoughts was to run around Stone Mountain and finish at the top," said the 71-year-old father of the Peachtree Road Race. "About five miles around it, with another mile to the top.

"We talked about that, but then said, 'No, let's do something in the city.'"

It is impossible to imagine the Peachtree scene as anything else but what unfolded again Friday — the great, happy surge through the soul of Atlanta. As it has rolled from Buckhead to midtown, the sweaty wave has been both contributor and witness to the molten, ever-changing nature of life beyond the curbs of the city's most famous street.

Here is a route and a race that live by a common credo: No matter what, never, ever, stand still.

The Peachtree "is the spirit of the Fourth of July and the spirit of Atlanta," declared Mishana Mogelnicki, of Sandy Springs, finishing her 15th race Friday. Atop her head was a bandana propping up a pair of mouse ears. Her running shorts were true red, white and blue. Even as this race has all grown up, the healthy sense of playfulness remains.

It is a restless spirit. When Singleton and 150 runners gathered on the Fourth in 1970, they started their little race near the corner of East Paces Ferry and Peachtree. Then, a parking lot for a long-departed Sears store was the dominant landmark. That was at least two incarnations ago.

Capitalistic Darwinism has run double-time on this particular acreage, as it has gone from blue-collar shopping to a sundown-to-sunup party scene to a construction site for the toney Streets of Buckhead development.

"I think Buckhead is looking better and better every year," Mogelnicki said.

Change has been the one Peachtree constant. With 55,000 runners, it is the world's grandest 10K. And the surroundings have undergone a bit of growth, too.

"Well, I don't think the open-air watermelon stand is there on Peachtree anymore," laughed Sam Massell, head of the Buckhead Coalition and Atlanta's mayor back when the road race was first organized out of the trunk of Singleton's car.

"Buckhead has grown up literally towards the sky," said Julia Emmons, who directed the race from 1985-2006. "Not a year went by in a quarter century in which something wasn't changing with the race and the course. It's a good analogy to Atlanta itself."

Or, as Massell further sold his share of the race, "The Peachtree is Buckhead and Buckhead is the Peachtree."

Thus has a road race come to mean more than a good walk squared. To follow the course of the Peachtree is to chart the changes in the attitudes and the architecture and the very feel of Atlanta.

They certainly made runners differently back then. The thousands who flooded the city Friday did not fit the same mold as the 150 committed runners of 1970. There is a very precise formula currently at work -- the farther back in the Peachtree field you go, the more, ah, diverse the body types become.

"You talk about all the changes in the Atlanta skyline [from 1970]. I look at how the runners were built. Everyone was so skinny then," Singleton said. Only serious runners were getting up at that hour to slog past just a few confused passers-by while dodging the sparse holiday traffic (no closed streets).

A few scenes from Friday confirmed that whimsy is a part of the program now: Tucker's Kristin Morgan "ran Hawaiian," with a synthetic grass skirt over her running shorts and a lei sewn onto her singlet. Tyler Mattix, 18 and preparing to go off to North Georgia College, had one last fling with his hair before his date with the clippers at the military school. "It's my aerodynamic style, helps me run faster," he said, of the spiked mohawk with a checkerboard pattern cut into the sides.

The look of the race always has been a dead-on reflection of the time in which it's run.

Born shortly after the Summer of Love, the first Peachtree also had a certain Haight-Ashbury ambiance. "A lot of long hair and tie-dyed shirts," remembered Singleton.

So hard to picture now, but sections of Peachtree Road had been co-opted by the "hippie" trade. As Massell recalled it, other parts towards midtown were known for storefronts with the windows painted over in yellow. Such was the fashion for those places where they sold certain adult-themed diversions.

Piedmont Park, designated the finish in 1978 until drought forced the runners out this year, had a similarly sketchy past. Now, it is too precious to walk upon during big events.

Not all change is universally embraced. Doing the cool-down walk on Piedmont Avenue rather than in Piedmont Park was not wildly popular with Friday's runners.

"You're used to swooshing around a corner and down a hill and seeing the beautiful green of the park," Morgan said. "Now — welcome to asphalt Atlanta."

The evolution of the race setting has been far more dramatic than just the tweaking of the endpoint. Take those first Peachtree runners, stick them in a monastery for 38 years and bring them back for Friday's race. They'd have no clue where they were. The route has had more work done on it than Pamela Anderson.

Where did all these big buildings come from? The tallest still-standing office building in Buckhead dating from 1970 is all of 11 stories. The skyline downtown, of course, has been turned into a forest of reflective glass.

They would have missed the whole Tongue & Groove/Disco Kroger era and leaped straight to the what-wine-goes-with-the-seared-ahi period.

Nor would they have any idea what to make of the hundreds of thousands of spectators lining the road, many of them stepping straight out onto the sidewalk from their new condos.

Even those who have been around for all this time have a difficult time believing the metamorphosis.

"If you had told me in 1970 that this stretch of Peachtree would be a preferred place to live, I would have laughed at you," said the race's first winner, Atlantan Jeff Galloway.

"That's Atlanta," said Bill Thorn, 77, of Tyrone, the last of the originals still running the Peachtree. "Nobody ever knew it would come out like it did."

Yes, isn't that Atlanta, a city all about ceaseless change. Which is exactly why Peachtree runners passed thickets of construction cranes Friday that reach high to spit in the eye of economic malaise.

For another year, the relationship between Atlanta and its signature race has been secured. They once again have described each other perfectly.