Hungry For News

I have said it before, and I am certain that I will have a chance to say it again, probably before the week is over: "It's not news if anyone could have predicted it." A recent example of this would be the end of an "unlikely friendship" between a Siberian Tiger and a goat at a Russian zoo. After a couple months of avoiding the natural order of things, the tiger lost its temper with results that were not a surprise to anyone, save the zookeepers who had to rush in and rescue the goat.
There was no zookeeper on hand to save the life of a participant in this year's Krispy Kreme Challenge. A fifty-eight year old participant dropped dead at the start of the contest that uses as its mantra: 2400 Calories, 12 Donuts, 5 Miles, 1 Hour." If that's not enough of a description to make your aorta strain at the thought, let's break it down. Each contestant must run two and a half miles to a Krispy Kreme store, eat a dozen glazed donuts, then run back to the starting line before the sixty minute time limit expires. And, if you're ready for it, the punch line is that all the money raised goes to support the North Carolina Children's Hospital.
When you're signing up for this event, for which part of the experience do you suppose you could count on being prepared? I am over fifty and proud of the fact that I can still manage a nine or ten minute mile pace over a pretty flat course. While I have retired from my career as a semi-professional stunt-eater, I can imagine a mind and body space in which eating a box full of fried dough and sugar would have seemed manageable. Only in America would it become a good idea to marry these two feats together. Running two blocks, let alone two and a half miles, to the local doughnut shop to eat any number of doughnuts seems like a bad idea, and it would be contraindicated by most clever folks to jump up from that snack and run back home. Unless you were trying to make your chest explode.
It should be pointed out, for the sake of "news" that the odd thing about this story is that the person who collapsed did so in the first mile of the event. Before the doughnuts. Another "newsworthy" mention might be that this is the first fatality in more than a decade of Krispy Kreme Challenges. It would also be news to announce that next year's even will include the introduction of live tigers tot he course. Hungry live tigers.