Surviving the Krispy Kreme Challenge

Today's blog comes courtesy of Kevin Magee of the Expion team, which ran the Krispy Kreme Challenge last Saturday.  The Krispy Kreme Challenge is a 5 mile run that requires participants to eat a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts at the halfway point.  

Kevin eating the 12th donut

Yet another Krispy Kreme Challenge is over. I've proudly completed 4 of these and can't really tell you where the pride comes from. People look at you funny when you tell them you pay money to run 2.5 miles, power through a dozen doughnuts, and somehow stumble back another 2.5 miles to complete the Challenge in under an hour. You do feel good knowing the race raises big money for NC Childrens Hospital and the atmosphere is sufficiently quirky with people of all ages costuming up to celebrate with 8000 people. 

I huddled up at the chilly start with 8 teammates from Expion knowing that only 2 of us were there to eat the dozen. Like any road race, the start is fast and the pace crazy, people were passing me until the first few hills evened things up a bit. Seeing the boxes and boxes of doughnuts at Krispy Kreme, you just know its on and somehow you have to catch your breath to eat. In past years, the first few were tasty. Not this year, for me at least. The first doughnuts were dense and sent immediate signal that this was going to be tough. My style is to squish 3 together into a doughnut sandwich and drink just enough water to get it down. Hard to explain what its like chewing doughnuts to eat them fast- until you do it. When I got to my last single doughnut- just hammered it in, sipped water, started running and then rinsed my mouth out and tried to get a running rhythm down.

Expion team's Jenny feeling triumphant

For whatever reason, I felt really good on my run back to the bell tower. I have no explanation for that and you just don't question.  I dodged 3 different people bending over and returning their doughnuts to the earth, never focused on that ,and finished in my personal best time of 47:14. I had the pride to know I beat everyone else on my team back to the start and kept the doughnuts down. How did I celebrate? With a massive nap about 2 hours later that I awoke from not knowing the day, time or where I was supposed to be. 

Already looking forward to next year. And I don't know why. 

Kevin

The entire Expion team