The last week of school my roommates and I decided to take on the Sensuous Sandwich 24-inch Challenge. It requires you to eat a 24 inch sub sandwich in 30 minutes. Winners get a t-shirt and your picture on the wall. If you wear the t-shirt when you come back in, you get free drinks with your sandwich. I, however, was in it for the glory.
The six of us got our 24-inch subs. We all got something different. I went with the French dip, thinking I could get more down with the sandwich dipped in au jus. I asked for Swiss cheese on it. You can imagine it takes a while to make six 24-inch subs, so we sat and waited. They brought the sandwiches and I noticed my cheese looked funny. I soon realized it was cream cheese. I guess the lady misheard me...anyway it was either wait another 5 minutes or just start the challenge so I said I didn't care...and that was a mistake.
24 inches didn't sound like it was going to be that tough. I can pound a 12-inch Subway sandwich in less than five minutes, so I only had to do that twice in 30 minutes. The first 12 inches was so easy. The cream cheese was a little weird, but whatever. The next six inches took me a good bit of time. I started to feel it, and I had to tackle a glob of cream cheese that just wouldn't go away. The last six inches was Hell on Earth. A real mental wall was hit. My brain was furiously sending out hormones telling me to stop. My taste buds even started to play tricks on me to make me think that I was dying. The sandwich that at the beginning of the 30 minutes was tender beef dipped in a deliciously savory au jus sauce had become baby flesh (beef) dipped in paint thinner (au jus) covered in thick chunks of pasty glue (cream cheese). It was repulsive. It literally tasted toxic. It took everything I had to get it done, but I came out victorious!!! The first 18 inches took me 10 minutes. The last 6 inches took me 18 minutes.
Here are the victors. I learned something about each of my roommates that day. The sheer horror of the situation brought out our deepest characteristics.
1. Zach. He finished in 12 minutes. He never slowed down. He never seemed weak at any point. When he finished his hands were literally shaking from the adrenaline. He is a weirdo that likes eating challenges.
2. Kyle. He finished in 26 minutes. He was mostly silent the entire time. The longer time went on, the less he talked. He didn't complain much, but did not actively lift the spirits of others when they were complaining.
3. Sean. I finished in 28 minutes. In the face of pure terror I was making jokes incessantly. In between bites, hyperbole about the ridiculousness of what we were doing was flying from my mouth. I kept laughing and laughing when we all knew there was nothing funny to laugh about. I was crying on the inside.
4. Brett. He finished in 29 minutes. Brett actually got angry. At one point he actually told me to shut up. And I quote, "Shut up! This isn't funny! This is the stupidest thing we have ever done. Why are we even doing this?" He also vowed never to eat Pastrami again.
5. Shane. He did not finish. That is not to say he didn't come close. Shane was overly-confident the entire time. He was so confident he would be able to do it that he drank large quantities of soda with his sandwich, and took frequent breaks to walk around and see how the rest of us were doing. Very considerate. He even insulted the girl working behind the counter when he found out she had done the challenge by exclaiming how easy it must be if she could do it. He gagged on his last piece of chicken breast as time expired.
6. Joseph. He did not finish. I guess Joseph gets extremely nervous about eating challenges. He worked himself up into some sort of anxiety attack and started to gag two bites into his sandwich. He literally sat and watched us for 29 minutes and 45 seconds, because he threw in the towel after 15 seconds.
