Yesterday the Marine Corps Marathon sold out in a jaw dropping two hours and forty-one minutes. Without a doubt, it ws the fastest sell out for any 26.2 mile race held in the United States. It wasn't an isolated incident. Last month the 2012 Chicago Marathon sold out within a week and in 2010 Boston filled up in a blistering eight hours.

These land rush-style marathon registrations are a direct result of the growing popularity of these premier big city events. That demand is also feeding the spiraling costs associated with running in them. And it doesn't seem like either are likely to ease anytime soon.

Last month, Running USA released their annual report on the marathon and found that 2011 was, once again, a record breaking year. While the amount of growth has slowed considerably the demand for the so-called "destination races" remains robust.

A month ago Stride Nation looked at the costs of the nation's premier marathons and found they have risen precipitously over the past half-decade or so. The 2012 New York City Marathon's $255 registration fee for non-member domestic entrants is a 30% jump from last year making it, by far, the priciest of all the country's big-city races.

That has prompted concerns from some that these events could be nearing a ceiling -- the point where the exorbitant costs affect participation. Yet news this week out of Boston shows that the market for entry into nation's oldest most prestigious marathon has a long way to go before topping out.

Entry into the 2012 race cost qualified entrants just $150. According to Boston Magazine, those places in the April 16 race are now worth thousands of dollars on the black market. That's a huge jump from even the prices demanded to participate in the event's centennial running back in 1996.

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How my London 2012 marathon plans were run off the road | guardian.co.uk

A British newspaper columnist was planning to run the 2012 London Marathon in and Olympics-themed costume. Then he was informed of the copyrights...

There are all sorts of combinations of words you can't use: Olympics, Olympiad, London, 2012, Games, medals, breadknife (OK, I made the last one up). You can't use the symbol of the Olympic rings, the paralympic logo, the Olympic mascots Wenlock and Mandeville (they're keeping an special eye on those). You can't use athletic images, representations of an Olympic-style torch and flame, even the colours of the Olympic rings.

Preliminary Autopsy Shows No Obvious Cause of Death for LR Marathon Runner | KARK-TV

The Pulaski County Coroner's Office says its preliminary autopsy on the body of Little Rock Marathon runner Mike Kelly shows no obvious cause of death. Kelly, 38, of Little Rock, collapsed at mile 11, around 11:30 Sunday morning. He died after being taken to UAMS.

Vitamin D linked to stronger bones in girls | latimes.com

Shock therapy does not reveal the cause of my leg problems | 5ksAndCabernets

Miley Cyrus: Jean Jogger | Celebuzz

And, finally, a bit of sorta-running-related nightmare fuel for us all...

Meet Cheetah, Boston Dynamics' Terrifyingly Fast Running Robot (Video) | Forbes

Chrissie Wellington currently holds the women's world record for all Ironman distance races (8:18:13 at the Challenge Roth triathalon last July) and has won four world championships. Not only has the British endurance athlete never been defeated over the Ironman distance, she holds the five fastest times ever recorded by a woman in the race.

Chrissie Wellington is, in short, a badass.

She's also a survivor of serious eating disorders. In her forthcoming autobiography, Wellington details how her insecurity as a young adult led to a struggle with anorexia and bulimia. While her family successfully intervened Wellington told The Guardian newspaper she now gets emails from other female athletes and recognizes the exact same symptoms.

"The victims of such illnesses are often very ambitious, outwardly successful young women who pursue these ideas of control and achievement," she said. "We're driven, compulsive, obsessive, competitive, persistent and seek perfection. That can be channelled incredibly negatively."

This week is National Eating Disorder Awareness Week and it's a good time to take a look at the problem of eating disorders among runners and endurance athletes, particularly for women.

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It used to be said that to finish a marathon made you one in a thousand. Turns out it's actually a little lower than that now. For every 607 Americans, one person finished a US marathon in 2011.

The 26.2 mile race continues to enjoy growing popularity with approximately 518,000 people finishing more than 720 marathons held in the United States last year, according to Running USA's annual report. In the past 12 years, there has been a 47% increase in the number of marathon finishers in races held in the United States. This graph, using stats compiled by Running USA and Marathon Guide, shows how that popularity has increased year-to-year since 2000.

The trend can be seen in the participation in the premier marathons over the past decade. Last year the New York City Marathon saw more than 47,000 people cross the finish line making it the largest such race ever held. For the most part, all the major races have seen progressive annual growth over the past decade with the exception of Honolulu. These figures are also compiled from Running USA and Marathon Guide numbers.

Entrant caps on big-city races and a growing interest in half-marathon events has tempered the runaway growth of destination marathons seen a few years ago but those are only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.

According to Running USA, a total of 94 U.S. marathons reported more than than 1,000 finishers in 2011. The year prior, 89 races surpassed that mark and, since 1999, the number of U.S. marathons topping a thousand finishers in a single year has more than doubled.

And the overall number of marathons has grown tremendously. In 2000 there were only an estimated 300 26.2 mile races; last year there were more than 720.

As you might expect, all this is translating to more people running more training miles. Running USA's survey of 11,800 runners found that US marathoners ran approximately 4.4 days per week for an average of 29.4 miles. They also purchased approximately 4 pairs of running shoes and 83% had spent $100 or more on running apparel in the last 12 months.

In the past decade or so, massage therapy has become an ubiquitous part of athletic training. As the practice has gained legitimacy as more and more athletes have turned to it to help recovery.

The treatment has become such a part of endurance exercise that a major running event, like the P.F. Chang's Rock n Roll Arizona races that saw more than 25,000 participants take to the streets of Phoenix last month, can cause a big boom in business for local massage therapists.

The most popular theory concerning the effectiveness of massage is linked to the idea that lactic acid and other waste products as the culprit behind muscle soreness. Exercise prompts a build up of these, the logic goes, and massage ameliorates their removal.

The problem is the science backing it up simply hasn't been there.

That may have changed with the recent findings of a study published in the most recent issue of Science Translational Medicine. It found nothing to support the "waste product" theory but, instead, it seems that massages somehow activating genes that promote recovery at the cellular-level.

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The Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation became immersed in controversy this week after making a decision to cut funding to Planned Parenthood. The organization reversed that decision today but there are lingering questions of how the action will affect the foundation's wildly popular Race for the Cure running events.

The Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure is an annual series of walks, jogs and runs that raises money for breast cancer research and prevention. In 2010, more than 1.6 million people participated in approximately 130 race events that made up the fundraising series. The Komen St. Louis Race for the Cure that year drew 71,800 participants alone.

While the reversal of the decision to end grants to Planned Parenthood may resolve the immediate controversy surrounding the foundation, the effect on the race series going forward is not at all clear. The dispute has tarnished the foundation's reputation and, by extension, its flagship running series.

Numerous commenters on the foundation's Facebook page said they would canceling their donations and demanding refunds for Race for the Cure events they had registered for. The same claims were very common on twitter throughout the day.

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Running, for those of us not blessed with a surfeit of talent, is a personal challenge that has a side benefit of keeping us healthy. In fact, for a lot of amateur runners, the latter is much more important than the former. But how, exactly, does running make us healthier?

It seems so common-sense as to be obvious but, very often, that's exactly the reason we should give the question a bit more scrutiny. Turns out there's been a bit of progress on this front recently.

A paper published this month in the scientific journal Nature suggests that exercise helps belay illness through the process of autophagy. This is the cellular mechanism by which the body processes unneeded components (such as proteins) for re-use as energy sources (such as amino acids). As an area of scientific inquiry, autophagy has been around since the 60s, but interest in it has blossomed in recent years due to its promise as an anti-aging strategy.

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