When Jeremy Keene crossed the Krispy Kreme Challenge finish line three years ago, he swore he would never compete in the race again.
And he hasn’t, nor does the senior in civil engineering plan to run in this Saturday’s race.
He hasn’t even eaten a glazed doughnut since that morning.
“That’s a once in a lifetime thing,” Keene said.
It’s not too surprising that Keene doesn’t want to go through the process of running 2 miles, shoving 2,400 calories worth of glazed doughnuts into his mouth and running 2 miles back.
The amount of calories consumed is more than the average person burns — or eats — in a day, nutrition professor Sarah Ash said. A person engaging in light physical activity will, on average, burn about 2,200 calories a day “just going about their life,” she said.
Those who run from the Bell Tower to the Krispy Kreme on Peace Street, she said, will likely burn just a few hundred more calories.
But the imbalance resulting from the amount of calories consumed and the amount burned off — or, rather, not burned — is not what made Keene so physically nauseous that he was “very close to letting it fly.”
It was the fat content from the doughnuts, Ash said, which “tends to hang around in the stomach longer.”
“There are all kinds of hormones and receptors in your GI tract that can be sensitive to large quantities of food that aren’t going anywhere soon,” Ash said, adding that pressure receptors in the stomach can respond uncomfortably to its expansion due to large quantities of food. “It wouldn’t matter if you ate a big bowl of beef stew. Large quantities of food landing in your stomach is just unnatural.”
The body tends to want to maximize the digestive process, she said, and engaging in high-intensity physical activity after a large meal can reduce the tract’s ability to quickly digest food.
During exercise, Ash said part of the blood supply is directed toward working muscles so they can get the oxygen they need to keep going. But to properly digest food, the gastrointestinal tract needs an extra supply of blood to absorb nutrients from the small intestine and send waste on its way out of the body.
So a race like KKC, she said, can prolong the time food sits in the small intestine by as much as an hour. Food usually makes its way out of the small intestine in about an hour, and this effect could explain why many competitors get sick on their way to the finish line.
“The reality is, in this particular situation when somebody eats a dozen doughnuts and then tries to run pretty quickly afterward, the principle issue for those people is likely to be the fact that they’ve got a stomach full of dough. Most people do not find that comfortable,” Ash said. “You’ve got a dozen doughnuts in your stomach and it can make you kind of nauseated. If it makes you nauseated, you’ll throw it right back up.”
Keene said he tried two different techniques while eating the dozen doughnuts: rolling two doughnuts together like a hot dog and “smushing them together like a hamburger.”
Neither technique helped much.
“It’s just a lot of sugar. That’s a lot of sugar in 10 minutes. When you’re darting away to run another two miles, the nausea seems to be amplified when you run,” he said. “Luckily, I was ahead of a good amount of people so I didn’t see too many people puking. That definitely would have triggered something.”
Ash said no technique — even dipping the doughnuts in water to dissolve the glaze — exists to minimize the amount of fat from the dough that enters contestants’ stomachs.
“Water isn’t going to take the fat away. Water and fat are not soluble, so it’s probably really not going to help you much in that regard,” Ash said. “The bottom line is you can either tolerate it or you can’t. A lot of that is just personal preferences.”
People like Allison Robbins, a junior in psychology and political science, are hesitant to find out if they fit in the group that can’t tolerate a dozen glazed doughnuts.
“My goal is to eat six doughnuts. I have no idea if I’ll actually be able to do that,” Robbins said. “For this, just to make sure I was healthy, I went to the gym more often
to make sure my heart rate is good and I am healthy enough to be able to do it. I’m eating what I can and then jogging and running and walking as needed.”
Robbins, a member of Tri-Delta who organized a “group of 30 girls within Tri-Delta to compete,” is running casually with 15 other members of the sorority.
Brittany Hansen, one of the students Robbins recruited, is going to support her friends who are competing.
She did the same thing last year, choosing to stand at the Krispy Kreme.
“I saw a lot of people vomiting last year, so I’m a little bit more prepared for it,” said Hansen, a senior in textile technology and fashion and textiles management. “Hopefully my stomach’s prepared for it.”
She said the amiable and excited atmosphere on the sidewalk was interesting to watch.
“From what I saw, it was when they got there and they were on their fourth or fifth doughnut, and they were gulping down milk and then throwing up,” Hansen said. “As soon as they finished, they would come back and eat more doughnuts, I guess so they had more room in their stomachs.”
