I’m not the type of runner who feels particularly confident before a race. My goal is generally just to finish. Secondary goals include finishing without walking, and not completely bonking with several miles still to go.
Maybe, just maybe I can PR. But it won’t be a time that sounds impressive to anyone other than my non-running friends. But I recently found a race where my goals were very different. It was a race that I was born to compete in.
On February 25, 2017 at 10 a.m. sharp, my town of Tuscaloosa hosted its version of the Krispy Kreme Challenge. The challenge’s premise is simple: run one mile, eat a dozen donuts, then run another mile while trying not to bonk or vomit (or both). (The race wasfounded by college students in Raleigh, North Carolina, where they run five miles total, instead of two.)
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You could say that running is in my blood, and this is true—my grandfather founded the Barcelona Marathon. But I have many more family members with diabetes than distance running pedigrees.
My grandfather, Ramon Oliu, began running in the early 70s at the age of 48. He was out of shape and overweight, though it is hard for me to picture him like this. My strongest memory is seeing him return from a run, covered in sweat and Vaseline, doubled over the kitchen sink, trying to guzzle as much water as possible.
By the time I was old enough to know him, he had already run dozens of marathons. He organized the inaugural Catalan marathon in Palafrugell in 1978. In 1980, after obtaining permits, he moved the race to Barcelona.
He was a consultant for the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona—during my first trip to Spain in 1991, when I was eight years old, I remember walking part of the course with him and my father, as he wondered aloud whether they would finish the construction on the Olympic Stadium in time for the games the following July.
In 1979, he wrote a book: L’Essència del córrer, a treatise on endurance running, written in his native language of Catalan. A writer myself, I decided that I wanted to translate the book into English—and write about the experience. My grandfather passed away from Alzheimer’s in 2005. I have many memories of my grandfather while I was growing up, but I never truly got to know him, as by the time I was old enough, his memory was failing. Stories of his extraordinary life as a runner and as an immigrant all came to me second-hand—I thought that translating his book would allow me to experience these stories through his own words.
My grandfather also had a sweet tooth: while in Barcelona, he would regularly eat a pound of pastries for dinner—xuixos, puff-pastries filled with crema catalana, and ensaimadas, a powdered cinnamon roll made with pork fat. In the U.S. he consumed apple turnovers and coffee, and flan in little plastic containers. He could do this because he would run for over two hours a day.
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My biggest vice is also sugar. I can eat a dozen donuts without blinking. I order coffee over ice with caramel and cream, down chocolate chip cookies and lemon cake by the pound. By the time I was 30, after years of a sedentary and sugar-laced lifestyle, I weighed 331 pounds. (Want to lose weight?Lose the pounds, feel great, and run your fastest with Run to Lose from Runner’s World.)
As I started to translate my grandfather’s book, I came to the realization that in order to truly understand the work, I needed to start running. I needed to immerse myself in the project, to know how one’s knees feel after a run, to be truly amazed at every feat. How my grandfather, forever the running optimist, talked about how every instance of weather, from extreme heat to freezing rain, improved the experience of running. Of how he explained when one runs a marathon, “Here, the people put you on a pedestal, the eyes of the innocent child who gives you a drink, the delirium in the people, the inexhaustible humor and fervor of the crowd: it all keeps you running.”
I knew that translating a book required knowledge of the original language, but I hadn’t considered that the “original language” could be physical as well as verbal.
So I started running. This was in 2014, right before my 32nd birthday. In this instance—and in this instance only—I got a head start on my grandfather. He began his career running in place in the basem*nt. I started on a treadmill while a Couch to 5K app kindly barked orders every few seconds.
Through this process I have lost over 100 pounds. I have survived two marathons and run multiple shorter distance races. I won a medal for placing third in my age group during a 5K (because only three men in my age group ran the thing). I am proud of these accomplishments.
Anyone who is a long distance runner can tell you that there is a mentality of going big or going home. This tends to translate to other aspects of life—it is either done to its limits, or it is not done at all. I am either running 16 miles, or I am trying to get into a comfortable position on the couch because I have eaten too much—people refer to retired greyhounds as “the world’s fastest couch potatoes” and this is something that I greatly identify with.
This is how my diet works as well: I eat “clean” for six days out of the week. I avoid carbs, with the exception of legumes. I eat no sugar, even in the form of fruit. I drink no beer. It is a steady diet of chicken and vegetables.
But on that glorious seventh day, I eat whatever I want, and in whatever quantity I deem “enough.” Within the first twenty minutes of waking, I have consumed more calories than I have during the past three days combined. Sometimes there is pizza, sometimes onion rings. There is often ice cream. Alcohol is involved. But one constant, always, is donuts.
At the race, what I quickly ascertained was that most people were there for either one thing or the other: The running or the eating. Many people skipped the donuts, and simply ran two miles. Others were snacking casually on donuts before the gun even sounded, at which point they started walking. Only about twenty-five percent of all participants were there for the “challenge” part of the race—to run fast, and to eat fast as well. I was most definitely one of them.
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For me, there is something incredibly satisfying in “the binge.” I do not get the same satisfaction in running five miles that I do running ten. In the same spirit, unless I can eat an entire box of donuts, I don’t tend to bother. Why would I want to eat just one?
The Krispy Kreme Challenge is the perfect balance between my present and past selves: the guy who ate entire pizzas without blinking an eye, and the athlete who logs miles of sidewalk. Perhaps this is why I’d never felt so prepared for something, or felt so present during a race.
I do not look like a typical distance runner. During marathons, onlookers address me as “big man” when cheering me on. I am not particularly light on my feet. During my first post-marathon run, a guy in an SUV rolled down his window and shouted “run faster, fatty,” at me.
Running has never been something that has belonged to me, even though I feel a sense of pride in my family’s history with the sport. My pride in my own self and my own history as a runner is still very much playing catch-up; It’s still at the first water station as the rest of the runners approach the finish line.
But that day, at that race, I had no doubts about whether I belonged. I judged the kids in cotton t-shirts and New Balances with weak arch support. I shook my head at the rail-thin athletes, ill-prepared to consume 2400 calories of sugar and fat and still operate at a high-level.
A young child sang the National Anthem. Big Al, the University of Alabama’s mascot sounded an airhorn. We were off.
In most races, I try to start off slow as I want to make sure that I conserve enough energy to finish the race. I try to go as long as possible without breathing through my mouth, instead focusing on my cadence, telling myself to remain calm.
But at the Krispy Kreme Challenge, I went all out, knowing that first mile would be the easiest part of the race, and knowing restraint would not be rewarded. Small children who started out ahead of the pack began to slow down. Couples conducted conversations as they ran two-by-two.
I made it to the “Transition Zone” in 07:09, where my own personalized box of twelve original glazed Krispy Kreme donuts were waiting for me. I felt like an elite at the Boston Marathon, with their personalized hydration schemes and individual water bottles.
There were approximately twenty people there by the time I arrived, already filling their mouths with fried dough. I allowed myself a moment to catch my breath before unveiling my strategy: I took three of the donuts and smashed them together, before tearing large hunks off and cramming the pastries into my mouth.
The donuts, thankfully, were fresh. They tasted pretty good despite the pure volume of it all. I breezed through the first six without breaking much of a sweat, although the heft of the box itself still remained intimidating. I began to slow down around the third of my four smashed-donut layer cakes.
A small moment of doubt crept into my mind: I wasn’t sure that I could finish. But I had two marathons underneath my belt, so this was not an unfamiliar thought. It’s a test of endurance, after all.
Some runners began laying down on the ground, clutching at their sides, or vomiting. Others gave up, threw their box of donuts in the trash, and joined their friends, spectating. I took a sip of water, swished it around in my mouth, and spit it out, to attempt to clear out the sugar coating my tongue.
I finished the final massive bite of donuts in just under 13 minutes and threw the empty box at the official’s feet. She recorded my bib number, and I took off to finish the second leg of the race, through the park where the casual donut eaters were lounging about.
The final lap was lonely. Out of the fifty or so people participating in the full mile/donuts/mile challenge, I was in fourth place, though there was major separation between myself and the runners ahead of me. By the time I hit the road, I couldn’t even see third place runner in the distance.
I thought running with a stomach full of donuts would be more difficult than it was, but the main challenge was trying to forget that I had just eaten a dozen donuts as quickly as I could.
At the final stretch, I held off a heavy-footed teenager, throwing himself at the finish line with reckless abandon. I was focusing on not feeling sick. It was, after all, only ten in the morning. I wasn’t about to have a cheat day completely derailed before noon—there was too much eating left to be done.
I crossed the finish line in 29:17. My time was approximately 50 seconds slower than my 5K PR.
This result is unofficial. The race website doesn’t track or post finishing times—because the whole race is treated more like a novelty than an event. But I remember the clock as I finished, and I corroborated my time with my GPS app.
There is an adage in running that says you are not racing the other runners, you are only racing your past self. For me, today, it is a reminder that there is no outrunning the ghost of my body, the space that it once inhabited.
After the race there were no oranges, bananas, or granola bars—instead, there was a free buffet at an Irish Pub, of which I did not partake. After my stomach had settled enough I finally drank a few bottles of water. And then I walked home—the fourth place finisher, with a participant’s medal around my neck and a car magnet with the number “12” on it and a picture of a donut. I put the magnet on my refrigerator and the medal on my mantle, next to my other awards—I wouldn’t know where else to put it.
I wondered what my grandfather would make of novelty runs like this: running in the middle of the night wearing glow sticks, or while dodging chalk paint, or being chased by runners dressed as zombies. I think he would love them, because they get people running—something that he believed anyone could (and everyone should) do. In his memoir, he writes several times that “running is for the people,” regardless of who they are.
This was a race between two different sides of my personality. And both finished. One took the rest of the day off, showered the sugar away, and ordered a pizza. The other checked the training calendar, and made preparations to hit the sidewalk the following morning, to make up whatever miles had been lost.
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BrianOliuis originally from New Jersey and currently teaches, writes, and runs in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He is writing a memoir about translating his grandfather’s book and his own relationship to long-distance running. He is hoping to break5:15at his next marathon & dominate next year’s Krispy Kreme Challenge. Read more on his website, or follow him on Twitter.
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