Don't Back Down

In something of an unlikely series of events, there were actually a couple of events happening on the same weekend that we wanted to try out. So after the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest Regional Qualifier, we headed to the Charlotte Dragonboat Festival. Unfortunately, by the time we finally got through at the qualifier, it was getting on a bit in the afternoon.

There were multiple problems with this. First and foremost, it gets hotter towards that part of the day. Naturally, we were thinking that boats have to have water, so we were going to be okay. Not necessarily a good idea, because (of course) we weren't on the boats. Perhaps we should have been. Second, the capacity planning coordinator should have been shot.

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In 1916, two Polish immigrants started Nathan's Famous, and over 100 years later, the idea is still going strong. Legend has it that on July 4, 1916, four immigrants held a hot-dog eating contest outside the original stand on Coney Island to see who who was the most patriotic. There is no word on why eating the most dogs in the shortest amount of time makes you the most patriotic, but 90-odd years later, the contest is still going strong.

Among the competitive eaters, there is no shortage of events. As recently as one week ago, someone consumed almost 60 hot dogs and buns (HDBs for short) in just 12 minutes (update: this record itself fell in the official event on July 4, 2007 - the record now stands at a whopping 66 HDBs!). The record for spam is 6 pounds in 12 minutes. Butter? 7 quarter-pound sticks in 5 minutes. French fries? 4.46 pounds in 6 minutes. You get the idea. But Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest may well be the oldest event there is, so when a regional qualifying event came to Charlotte, we had to check it out.

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