The Donut Dash is a race held every year on my school’s campus as a fundraiser to support ALS research. The race offers two options for participants: competitive and casual. Being the person I am, I opted for the competitive competition. This involves running one mile, eating six glazed Dunkin Donuts as fast as you can, then running another mile.
Disclaimer: I love donuts. A lot. I also enjoy running. So it seemed like this competition was pretty much made for me. I woke up ready to kill it.
I didn’t eat breakfast. I think this decision was a good one because there was nothing in the way of the impending half dozen bundles of sugar that were about to be stuffed into my body.
Honestly, my game plan was to run the first mile as fast as I could, eat the donuts and try not to vomit, then see what happened for the second mile.
Boy, do I eat donuts faster than I imagined I could.
I ran the first mile at around a 7:20 pace. When I walked into the donut-eating corral, I was all business. I grabbed a box of donuts from one of the volunteers hands, flipped the lid, stuck a donut in my mouth, grabbed a bottle of water, and flung the box down onto a table to get to work.
My friend had run the first mile with me and we stood together shoving the donuts into our mouths while people waved their cameras in our faces. “We’re going to be on so many SnapChat stories,” I said to her through a mouthful of glazed, sugary, goodness.
Our strategy was the stack and smash: take one donut, put it on top of another, then smash the two together into one donut sandwich. I also think I only chewed everything like twice then just forced it down.
Before I knew it, I was standing in front of one of the race volunteers, placing the last bit of donut into my mouth. I showed him the empty box, got my hand marked, and quickly ran back out onto the course for the second mile, the donuts jumbling around in my belly within the first 30 seconds.
I quickly realized that I was one of the first females back out on the course. Then I was in the lead and I had no clue how. All I knew that was that I wanted to keep the lead and keep the food in my stomach all at the same time.
As I came back down the hill, I heard fast footsteps behind me and prayed it wasn’t another woman. Unfortunately, it was, and she was haaulliinnng. As I rounded the final turn, she was way too far ahead for me to try and catch her. I accepted defeat and crossed the finish line happy with my place as second overall female.
Immediately after finishing, I felt pretty awful. However, after copious amounts of water I was able to walk home without feeling like I was going to vomit. The rest of the day I was super tired because all I had to run on was 1500 empty calories that had been eaten in the span of a few minutes.
At the end of the day, I finished 8th overall out of 105 people, running the entire thing in about 15 minutes. According to the watch I used to track time, I ran the first half (each part ended up being around .8 miles instead of a full mile) in around 6.5 minutes and the second in around 5.5 minutes (the power of processed sugar am I right?). This means that I ate six donuts in around three minutes.
I don’t know whether to be disgusted or proud of myself… I think I’m both. More importantly, I think I’ve found my true calling.