Kenyan marathoner Nicholas Manza Kamakaya won the Gold Coast Marathon in Queensland, Australia, set a course record, and lost $27,000 in the process.

Kamakaya can run a marathon in under two hours, ten minutes. He did it in Beijing, setting a record of 2:08:49. The Gold Coast Marathon was offering a 27K bonus to anyone with a time of 2:10 or under. Kamakaya set the record at 2:10:01, winning $10,000, but if that time had been one second, just ONE second of a marathon shorter, he would’ve more than tripled his pay. That’s the futility of life, isn’t it? Guy Fieri tells you you can do this, but you don’t keep ping pong balls bouncing on a slanted table long enough and you lose like a hundred grand. What the f**k is the point of our lives?

Kamakaya seemed much cheerier about the situation.

“I’m just happy. For me it’s so nice [to win],” said Manza. “It’s very special for me because it’s my first time in Australia and I’m happy because I’ve run the course record.”

This was his first win, having finished sixth at Rome and second at Beijing and Los Angeles. I guess 10K is still a pretty sweet sum for an afternoon of running, and I applaud him for being a better, much less bitter, and way, way faster person than me.

[h/t to Fourth-Place Medal]

Kenyan Olympic marathon champion Sammy Wanjiru is dead, having jumped from a balcony after a domestic dispute with his wife and another woman. National police spokesmen are saying it was a “fact of the matter” suicide, but his agent says it wasn’t. Here’s a quick recap from a local official.

“Wanjiru came home with another woman friend at around 11:30 p.m. and then when his wife came home and found them she inquired who the lady was,” area police chief Jasper Ombati said. “They got into an argument. His wife locked them in the bedroom and ran off.

“He then jumped from the bedroom balcony. He is not here to tell us what he thinking when he jumped. We do not suspect foul play. In our estimation we think he wanted to stop his wife from leaving the compound.”

The interesting thing about THAT (besides the fact that a Kenyan Olympic champion killed himself after being caught cheating on his wife, I mean) is that the balcony is being described as “13 to 19 feet high.” I’m not an Olympian, but I’m fairly certain I could survive a 13 foot drop. There’s an entire thing in The Dark Knight where Eric Roberts is all, “a fall from this height won’t kill me!” and Batman is counting on that and throws him off the fire escape. And that brings up further questions, such as “why did he think doing this would stop his wife from leaving the compound,” and, “how did his wife lock them in the bedroom, or maybe I don’t understand how Kenyan houses work.”

Regardless, a promising, gifted young athlete is dead for an absolutely ridiculous reason, and that’s a shame. People always say “it doesn’t make sense” when somebody dies, and for once, they’re really right.

[NESN]

Who can think about the “labor situation” in pro football when THIS CAT HAS A PERSONAL TRAINER. Cats are the most spoiled animals on earth. I saw cat walking to the mailbox on Tuesday and I wanted to punch him in the face. Anyway, fitness trainer Michael Greenblatt found this stray cat and just took him home one day BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT YOU DO WHEN YOU SEE A CAT YOU JUST STEAL IT. But I guess the cat likes to run.

In fact, this black cat likes and actually demands to go for a daily run. So much so that Greenblatt is training Roadrunner “like an athlete” and using the same fitness principles that he does with his human clients. Greenblatt runs Roadrunner through a series of speed drills, timing her speed on every drill.

–Paw Nation.

And you thought the NFL combine was pointless and stupid. Just shut it, America. This cat will be representing you in the London Olympics. I can’t wait to see him working at Home Depot in 2014.

via @HollyEgg.

Does combining your favorite thing in the world with your least favorite thing in the world make the thing you hate better, or the thing you love worse? One San Francisco man was willing to give us an answer when he did just that, combining the greatest thing in the world, drinking, with the worst, exercise. He drank 13 beers while running the 13 mile San Francisco Half Marathon at a rate of one beer per mile. And, as you can expect, adding the sauce to your morning jog doesn’t make it better.

I puked three times, blacked out for miles 11 and 12, and needed five hours to finish. This is my story.

–Exercising While Intoxicated via Uncoached

Best opening sentence ever. I’m always a fan of people who pioneer new ways to pound brews, but running’s painful enough sober. I’ll set the over/under at the number of times he fell down at 10.5.

Block quotes don’t do this article the justice it deserves, but you can find a full description of how the race turned out for the alcoholic athlete here. I also made the executive decision to put a video of beer drinking cats after the jump. It’s funny because they think they’re people. Read the rest of this entry »

Scientists from SMU, Rice, and the University of Wyoming have discovered that humans have potential to run at a rate exceeding 35-40+ MILES PER HOUR.  They were inspired by Usain Bolt’s near-28 mph achievements to see just how far the human body could be pushed.

“If one considers that elite sprinters can apply peak forces of 800 to 1,000 pounds with a single limb during each sprinting step, it’s easy to believe that runners are probably operating at or near the force limits of their muscles and limbs,” he said. “However, our new data clearly show that this is not the case. Despite how large the running forces can be, we found that the limbs are capable of applying much greater ground forces than those present during top-speed forward running.” …

According to Matthew Bundle, an assistant professor of biomechanics at the University of Wyoming, “The very close agreement in the briefest periods of foot-ground contact at top speed in these two very different gaits points to a biological limit on how quickly the active muscle fibers can generate the forces necessary to get the runner back up off the ground during each step.”

The researchers said the new work shows that running speed limits are set by the contractile speed limits of the muscle fibers themselves, with fiber contractile speeds setting the limit on how quickly the runner’s limb can apply force to the running surface.–Science Daily

But why?  Why do people need to run this fast or push themselves to these limits?  As far as the article is concerned, they present no predictions of long-term effects on the human body.  Athletes today operate under great amounts of pressure to perform at higher and higher levels.  The stress they put on their bodies is great, and can even be fatal.  At what point is it too much?  They endure massive amounts of training, and even resort to steroids and HGH, in order to achieve peak physical fitness and ultimately peak performance.  However, this can be a bit myopic and the long-term effects are far greater than the short term results.  Is it worth it?  Maybe pushing the human limits and enduring all of the pain is part of the evolution and innovation process, but at what cost?

This is Aimee Mullins, who has done everything from working at the Pentagon while studying at Georgetown to modeling in London to working as an actor in film. I guess we’re calling them actors now. But anyway, you’re going to feel like an even lazier bastard when I tell you that Aimee has done all of these things with prosthetic legs.

Mullins was born with missing fibulae and had to endure double amputation just below the knee when she was just a year old. But that never stopped her from running track at Georgetown. Or from being a smoking hot piece of tail. And her carbon fiber legs that she uses to run? They cost over $15,000 a pop. That’s 15 large for each leg. That’s a couple of Toyotas. And you thought that necklace you were buying for your girlfriend for Christmas was pricey. Panda.