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week ago I hosted a fundraiser for Meals on Wheels, the charity benefiting from the Flowers Sea Swim this year. A capacity crowd at Tiki Beach got to meet Olympic swimmers and the amazing Penny Palfrey, who just four days previously had arrived on the shores of Grand Cayman after a gruelling 68-mile swim from Little Cayman. I interviewed Penny and her husband Chris that same evening, posing hard-hitting investigative questions like “Ermmm….so how did you two meet?” Both were extremely charming, and clearly Chris very much supports his wife’s swimming endeavours. At the end of the evening I couldn’t help wondering what drives some people to push their bodies to such limits; then I remembered that time I managed to get 15 whole Cheez Balls in my mouth at once. Yes, Penny Palfrey and I have a lot in common.
Isn’t it amazing what the human body can endure if the will exists? A marathon run is the first biggie that springs to mind. This popular distance is measured out all over the world each year in such well-known cities as London, New York, Boston and Dublin, and every year people are actually fighting for the opportunity to participate. Let’s digest that for a moment: they are not being paid and no one is chasing them with a life-threatening weapon. It simply doesn’t compute. Of course this is coming from someone whose big sporting achievement was completing a 5k without having to flash her health insurance card once.
Those of us who aren’t runners cannot conceive of constantly moving forwards for a marathonic number of miles. Por ejemplo: My friend Lynne and I recently took a short sojourn to Miami. Despite nicely packaging her 3oz of liquids in one of the 300 Ziplock bags she seems to have on her person at all times, she failed to remember the honking great Swiss Army Knife in her handbag featuring every blade and doohickey short of a spork. Security was willing to let one of us take it back out, and I volunteered. The jog from the main building to Long Term Parking left me pink in the face. The return journey had me gasping like a canary in a coal mine. I thought of my dear friend Nathalie O’Connor who completed her first marathon in Dublin last year with ease. Apparently she enjoyed “every last minute of it.” Next time I’ll send her to the car.
The standard marathon seems arduous enough, but when that distance becomes a doddle, there are plenty of other races to test the human spirit; running across deserts, Ironman events and basically anything that’ll peel the last shred of fat off your bones. How about the Badwater ULTRAMARATHON that covers 135 miles of brutal terrain from the top vacation spot of Death Valley to Mt. Whitney in California? On just the front page of this “Challenge of the Champions” website your eyes will skim over points along the route such as Devil’s Cornfield and Furnace Creek. Sounds delightful. Oh yes, and there’s a 48-hour limit to boot. Well that’s me out.
What can you look forward to should you complete the journey above without resembling a prawn cracker on a hotplate? The coveted Badwater Belt Buckle, that’s what. You’re all running to sign up now, aren’t you? Who couldn’t use another belt buckle in their wardrobe?
Extreme sports are not limited to just running. If you really want to live life to the fullest, there are plenty of mountains out there for the scaling: Everest, Kilimanjaro…take your pick. Biking the Tour de France looks like a piece of cake – it’s basically flat throughout that country, right? I like the competitions where men are pulling fire engines and private planes with their teeth towards a finish line. Somewhere there are a lot of dentists rubbing their hands together.
You would think that to be an extreme sport participant requires an extraordinary level of fitness, but then we come to the eating contests of this world. Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest is arguably one of the best known, to the point that I could actually name the previous champion without the assistance of Google. I was reading an article about it, and saw that Joey Chestnut has now held the title for a few years. “Hey!” said Lynne, “I thought it was Takeru Kobayashi!” With trivia like that at our fingertips we’re very popular at parties, but I digress. Indeed Mr. Kobayashi HAD been the winner for years but Joey Chestnut, a similarly slim-built man, unseated him in 2007 and has carried the crown ever since. What does it take to be an eater in this class? In 2010 Joey consumed 54 hot dogs (INCLUDING BUNS!) in 10 minutes. This fell short of his record the year before, where he shoveled down 68 dogs in the same amount of time. Guess he wasn’t as hungry last July 4th… Hey, we all love a hot dog, but that seems a touch excessive. Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas currently holds the title for eating 65 hard-boiled eggs in 400 seconds – less than seven minutes for those of you reaching for your calculators. Methinks “The Gassy Widow” would be more appropriate.
When we come back to what are considered to be the genuine endurance sports, and we look at what little monetary reward is often waiting for the competitors at the end of their journey, it is understandable that we may ask why they do it. Penny Palfrey is someone who didn’t just battle sheer distance – she was up against waves, strong currents and reached a level of physical exhaustion that many of us will never experience, yet she kept going. I asked her if she ever came to the end thinking “NEVER AGAIN!” but she smiled and said no; she just looked forward to the next one and the new challenges it would present. Perhaps we could all use a little bit of Penny’s spirit in our lives.
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