Get me to the race on time!Robert...

Get me to the race on time!Robert Benun of Santa Monica has some advice for entrants in the March 5 L.A. Marathon: Don’t oversleep.

En route to last year’s race, Benun found himself entangled in a traffic jam at the Santa Monica/Harbor Freeway interchange at 8:20 a.m., 20 minutes before the start.

“Suddenly, runners who were smart enough to have someone drive them to the race began leaping out of their cars and running down the freeway toward the starting line,” he wrote marathon officials the other day.

“At 8:30, with no alternative available, I rolled down my window and begged the husband and wife in the next car over to park my car for me. The couple, whose son had just leaped out of their car, willingly and graciously obliged. I grabbed my shoes and socks, hopped out of my car, threw my keys to the husband and ran off through the traffic without looking back.”

It was all downhill for Benun, an attorney. He finished in just over three hours, then recovered his keys from Marathon volunteers--along with a map to the parking place drawn by his car-sitters.

As if all that weren’t enough, at mile 17, he “made eye contact with Kirstie Alley,” though he admits, “she probably doesn’t remember that special moment we shared.”

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List of the Day: Benun, the 110 Phantom, is taking this marathon off--the press of work didn’t leave him enough time to train.

But this 10th anniversary race will have plenty of characters, including:

* Dominic (the Pancake Man) Cuzzacrea of Lockport, N.Y., who holds the Guinness world record for completing a marathon while flipping a flapjack (three hours, six minutes and 22 seconds).

* Ernest the Clown, a.k.a. Michael Fandal, a New York City police officer, who runs in his funnyman outfit as part of an anti-crime message to kids.

* Edwin Ramsey of Corona del Mar, age 81, who calls himself “the first runner of Beverly Hills.” Ramsey told marathon officials that in 1946, while living in Beverly Hills, he was stopped by police while jogging, an almost unknown pastime back then. He said he was escorted home so that his wife could verify his story that he “was running for pleasure, not from a crime.”

* Dennis (the Coat Man) Marsella of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., who runs while clad in a trench coat and wingtip dress shoes. Yes, we’re sure he’ll have something on underneath that trench coat.

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Hey, that’s not one of the 31 flavors!Donald Doyen of Palm Desert came upon a napkin that seemed to advertise a new variety of Swensen’s ice cream. We’d recommend adding nuts for a bit more flavor.

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Words to live by: It turns out that the O.J. Simpson quote that a reader found in “Get Motivated! Daily Psych-Ups” also appears in another book, “The Best of Success.” It’s the quote that goes like this: “The day you take complete responsibility for yourself, the day you stop making any excuses--that’s the day you start to the top.”

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We didn’t know there were any: The electronic message board at Don Kott’s car dealership along the San Diego Freeway in Carson wished a happy Valentine’s Day “to all 405 lovers.”

miscelLAny Carole Lieberman, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who has been making herself available for interviews about the Simpson case, is versatile. She lists more than a dozen specialties, including one field that we never had heard of: “media-incited behavior.” Oh, yes, Lieberman also is the “Show-Biz Shrink” columnist for the National Examiner tabloid.