Los Submarinos 5K Race Report

Today was the sixth greatest day of my life, today I ran for Twinkies.

While I’ve been playing up my frustration at the Lansing Marathon, my actual A-race of the season was this afternoon’s Ann Arbor Twinkie Run for ALS. I had prepared for this monumental race the way one would expect; I ran my 16 mile long run that morning followed by a hearty breakfast at Panera; after which I showered, put on a new set of running clothes, and headed to A2 to meet Racer there. As I entered the staging area I bellowed, “Where are you, you spongy, yellow, delicious bastards?!” ala Tallahassee. And then I saw it; the table filled with trays upon trays of those luscious crème filled “Los Submarinos.”

We were instructed to grab one and head to the start area; just as I was about to bite in to that little spongy brick of heaven a fellow runner warned that eating it before the race would cost me penalty of one minute. It was at that moment I aspired to become the first person in race history to finish with a negative race time via Twinkie consumption. Racer talked me out of this as we had planned to run the race together, but I now have a mission for next year.

It took me just over a half mile to eat the first twinkie as I tried to encourage my fellow runners by reminding them that this race was good preparation for the Krispy Kreme Challenge. Unfortunately discomfort was already high as was apparent in the lackluster response. Redhead would go on to utter, “You’re disgusting,” no less than thirty-six times over the course of the race.

As we reached the half-way point we were awarded our second twinkie; Racer passed on it, but I graciously accepted by shoving as much of it in my mouth as I could. My strategy was to pack my cheeks like a squirrel and hope it would melt without much effort. Minutes later I had the unfortunate experience of snotrocketing crème just as Racer ill-timed the question of what I wanted to do for dinner after the race.

We finished the race and were awarded a golden twinkie shaped medal, complete with three crème holes on the back. I searched the crowd for Twinkie the Kid to pick up my lifetime supply of Twinkies for my appearance fee, as discussed in my nonofficial sponsorship contract, but the race officials claimed to have no knowledge of this information. Weird.*

*Happy April Fool’s Day! This post was authored by the Redhead, but rest assure Spike did in fact happily consume multiple Twinkies at the race this afternoon.