The Carnival of Running #49

Welcome to the 49th edition of The Carnival of Running!

When you run really fast, they make you do oddball things to promote your sport – like reading a top ten list on The Late Show with David Letterman, or adopting a baby cheetah:

I could bury you in links to stories about the New York City Marathon, but let’s keep it reasonable.

* Here’s an interview with Meb Keflezighi published two days before the race. It finishes with this:

And to critics who believe his best days are in the rear-view mirror?

“Keep thinking that way,” Keflezighi said, “and I’ll prove you wrong.”

* A minor controversy erupted when a couple of blogging morons wrote Meb was only “technically” an American. The CNBC nitwit was read the riot act, corrected his errors and apologized. The Deadspin blog and the New York Times completed the dissection.

* If you want a roundup of the celebrity marathoners, E!Online has the best one, but the funniest belongs to Gawker, which reports, “Marathons are weird things. Lots of people running around with a bunch of numbers on their chests. Seems like a lot of work for nothing, from this vantage point. Either way, a lot of people like to do it, and I hear some of them enjoy it so much they pee themselves.”

* Almost lost in the shuffle was Joan Benoit Samuelson’s age-group record.

* Here’s a trio of offbeat stories: what it’s like at the elite athlete fluid stations; how chronic unemployment helped some people train for the race; and what the elites ate afterwards. (Paula Radcliffe had “a buttery steak, cooked rare, and had a few glasses of red wine and a fat slice of gluten-free chocolate cake.”)

Thanks to researchers at Penn State, we now possess the crucial knowledge that longer toes and shorter legs makes you a faster runner. Surely we can develop a medical procedure to improve both these attributes at the same time – like pulling on your toes so forcefully it not only lengthens them, but shortens your legs at the same time. Or maybe we can just do it administratively, by defining toes to include the instep, arch and heel, and have the leg officially start at the kneecap.

We also learned that higher levels of coarse particle pollution appear to slow marathon times for women, but even more debilitating for women is running the Hot Chocolate 15k and discovering they’ve run out of chocolate.

A 74-year-old New York grandmother was trampled by a herd of runners as she was walking her Shih Tzu. She claims the runners helped her to a cab, shoved $10 in her hand, and sent her on her way. Her jaw was broken in two places. With behavior like that, it’s no surprise that Nikes with severed feet still in them are washing up on beaches.

If you have ever been to Venice, you surely wonder how they can have a marathon. LetsRun.com provides visual evidence.

This week’s linky love goes out to Life After 40. Oh, those halcyon days.

That’s all for this week, friends. Here’s one for Xenia: Eighty-seven years ago today, Howard Carter found the first step to the tomb of Tutankhamun. Submit your posts to carnival@runningisfunny.com. Until next time, run away!