Competitive Eating is . . .

Way harder than it looks. Defying our mantra of not researching, I decided to find out for myself. Although this might be more of a loophole than a violation. For those of you who know me you can probably guess what I attempted to stuff my face with. No not Subway. No Lindsay, not ice cream. Of course the answer is shrimp.

My love of shrimp is no secret. There's a Dias family legend that I once ruined one of our Christmas parties by eating all of the shrimp. I'm not sure how accurate the legend is, but I think my dad was really mad and I'm pretty sure I ate most of the shrimp. Mmmmopinions . . . where checking facts doesn't happen. It's like the NBA with traveling. Nevertheless, I challenged myself to see just how much of those curvy little bastards I could eat.

Turns out its a lot, but not as much as I would have thought. I confidently boasted that I could probably eat at least 6 pounds, but that's most likely because I've never actually seen exactly what 1 pound of shrimp looks like. If I had, I probably would not have been so confident. But even if I drastically overestimated my ability, I was still sure that I could polish off 4 pounds. I don't know, it sounded like a reasonable estimation. 6 pounds . . . not even close. 4 pounds . . . I came within striking distance. At this point I would like to thank my coach and sponsor, Mr. Christopher Dias. His moral support, and financial support, are much appreciated. Three 2 pound bags, that was the challenge in front of me. First bag? I absolutely crushed it. I mean, I knocked it out of the freaking park. But then I made a crucial error in judgment. Most eating competitions have some sort of time limit, but this was more for personal glory so we set the limit at four hours so that I would have either finished the shrimp or have thrown up. Unfortunately I did neither. My mistake was that instead of moving on to bag #2 I decided to wait about 45 minutes. HUGE mistake, although not as bad as trying Samuel Adams Cranberry Lambic. Self-promotion? Only a little, but if you're reading this you probably already know my thoughts on that crap. The beer . . . not self-promotion. I began losing steam like a fat kid halfway through a pick up game. I finished somewhere between 3 1/4 and 3 1/2 pounds which is still a new personal best and something to be proud of, but I let myself and my sponsors down. I was just a street-kid out of nowhere with a shot at the title, and I blew it.

-Slick