苦しい失敗

It was a day that had long been coming. I had hoped to avoid it, but I knew deep down that ultimately it was inevitable. Today my friends, I, Tyler MacFadden, failed at an eating contest.

A ramen store by the name Nippon Ichi has a contest where in if you completly finish 2 monster bowls of ramen in 20 minutes then, you eat for free and you get your name up on the wall. If you do 3 in 40 minutes you eat for free, get your own poster on the wall as well as a 10,000 yen prize. Fail, and all you get is a bloated stomach and the unsatisfying feeling of paying 900 yen per bowl.

Today I challenge the 2 bowl contest. These bowls of ramen are ungodly. Clearly a device created by the devil himself. When the bowl is filled completely with soup, noodles, massive amounts of bean sprouts, and more meat than I've ever seen in a ramen, the total weight is probably close to 5 lbs.

The first bowl went quite fast actually. I finished the solid parts in about 6 minutes and then took another two to finish the soup. Shortly after the first bowl I hit a wall and knew that there was no chance of finishing bowl number 2. My pace had slowed to a crawl compared with how I flew through bowl number one, and I was at the point where eating more was actually starting to taste bad. There was no way to finish at the pace I was going, and eating more would have only resulted in some vomiting later on. I had no choice but to throw in the towel a quarter of the way through bowl two.

This challenege is definately not for the faint of heart. With some nearly 3000 challengers, only a couple of hundred have succeeded in the two bowl challenge, the last victory having taken place last August. Those who complete the three bowl challenge join an elite consisting of merely a dozen or so members. Oddly enough, many who have completed the 3 bowl challenge have repeated their victories as many of the posters up said 2 time champion on them. I couldn't find a winner for the three bowl challenge within the last 5 years though which leads me to believe that in that time they started making the bowls even bigger than before. Still an impressive feat nonetheless and I say this taking nothing away from those who have completed either challenge at anytime.

Will I ever challenge again? Maybe, but in my current condition I'm quite sure that I would never be able to succeed in the Nippon Ichi ramen challenge. I'm sure there will be other challenges that will present themselves in the future and I learned a lot today about my limits as well a a few key points that should help maximize the chances of success should I ever decide to challenge the Nippon Ichi ramen again.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I just can't eat the way I used to in my prime. I don't know what made me think I could do it today, perhaps it was just some part of me that wished to relive the glory days of my past, but whatever it was it only resulted in a taint on a once perfect record of eating challenges.