The Dirty Dozen Challenge & Donut Dash

Sunday was a free Toledo Roadrunners race.  I tell ya, if you’re a runner in the Toledo area and you are not a member, you are missing out on quite a few free/cheap fun runs!  This one is the Donut Dash, which is a 4 mile prediction run (where you guess what your time is going to be and closest predictions win).  This year there was a twist – the Dirty Dozen Challenge!  Dozen stood for the 4 miles plus the 8 donuts you had to eat on the race.  2 donuts were eaten right away, and then 2 more donuts were eaten at each mile stop.  I had considered it, but was a bit scared to make a fool of myself by throwing up.  On Thursday night I heard that two of the other Glass City Marathon Ambassadors were doing the challenge, so I figured “why not?”.  I quickly emailed the race director and told him to make sure there were some donuts for me too.

I had to laugh <nervously> when my race instructions included this information:

Donuts will need to be consumed at each station before continuing to run or walk.  Should you have a reversal once you resume running there are no penalties for crossing the finish line minus consumed doughnuts. Should you have a reversal, please try to be considerate of the other runners and property we are using. The hope is to have trash can at each mile marker as well.

Well, OK then!  We woke up to terrible weather on Sunday morning.  Snowing (not bad) with winds of 20-25 mph (yikes!!!!).  Since I signed up, the weather was not going to stop me and my family.  I did tell the kids that they didn’t need to run, and they quickly agreed that they would just stay at the store and wait for us.  Good choice kids!  🙂  I did get to meet up with a group of women from our “She RUNS this town” group.  Fun group of ladies whom I hope to see more at runs and races.

I showed up at the race *starving*!  I could not wait to get to those donuts.

We lined up for the race start and as soon as the gun went off, around 20 of us with bib numbers (those participating in the challenge) started chowing down on our donuts.  Oh man, the donuts were MUCH bigger than I expected.  The technique was to mush them down together to make a pancake.  That worked well, but no matter how much I ate, there was still a lot more left.  One guy ate one donut and said he was quitting already.  It took me a long time to get those first two donuts eaten.  Alan ran with me and we were the next to last people out of the first donut stop.

The weather was quite challenging with the winds blowing so hard against our faces that we had to shield our eyes when we ran.  The temperature was right around 30 degrees, but felt like 15!  We made it to the first mile marker and joined a few of the donut eaters.  Once again, I was almost last getting out of that donut stop too.  Several people had already dropped out of the donut challenge by that point.  One lady ate one more donut and decided she didn’t even run any more due to the weather conditions.  My goal had been to eat at least 4 donuts, so after I ate my 4th, I was done.  It was taking way too long for me to eat those donuts and it was pretty darn cold out there.  We finished the 4 mile run with the rest of the runners.  I didn’t see any “reversals”, although I heard a few did happen.  One lady in our group made it through 7 donuts!!  Incredible.  One of the other women actually came within 10 seconds of her predicted time.  I never heard how many challenge runners actually ate all of the donuts, but I know some did.

Our predicted time of 44:00 was WAY off and we finished in 51:36.   Just imagine what our time would have been if I would have eaten 4 more donuts!!  At least we were still smiling at the end.  And look at the frosty eyebrows and lashes!  So glad to have Alan along with me for the silliness.  I think I convinced him to run it next year! 🙂

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Q:  Have you done any interesting races?

Q:  Have you ever done any eating challenges??

I can eat a lot of donuts, but certainly not fast I have discovered!

Q:  Did the winter storm hit your area too?

Woohoo, so excited the snow has arrived!!