Bicycle Tour, Day 28: Food challenge - FREE MEAL or FAILURE?

Yesterday I told you that I reserved a food challenge for myself from Kuurnan Kulma in Joensuu - 1.2 kg of stake + some potatoes.

Now, I can eat quite a lot, but that plate board made even me go like "damn, that's quite a lot of food." As I told you I started a long fast prior to this challenge - about 36 hour-long one. Then early this morning I made another "water tankin" - 1.5 liters.

One hour might sound like a long time, but with this kinda volume, it's not, and I knew that time would likely be my biggest enemy. With this in mind, I set out to start eating quickly, the beef first because that's much more tougher than pork.

Eating that beef I realized I wouldn't have the time to chew it thoroughly - I would have to swallow quickly, and use water every now and then to make it easier, but I tried to use as little as possible because I still had to spare room for the food itself.

I finished the 3 beef stakes in about 20 minutes - a good pace aiming under an hour. But obviously the eating speed stops to go linearly the more near you get your maximum capacity.

At about 40 minutes I had probably half a pork stake left and some blank potatoes. And that's where the real challenge began: peace by piece I force fed myself the last stake. I've never gone this far with the amount of food eaten - especially this fast. Even my body was saying "it's time to stop!" But failure wasn't an option, well, really it was the 50€ that I would have to pay in the case of failing which wasn't the option (yes, I did have money, I'm just really motivated to not use it). And it was rather affirming to know that there was an ambulance waiting just in case something went wrong.

50 minutes gone, about 10 potatoes left.

Have you ever taken yourself physically and/or mentally so far that your mind feels like it's starting to shut down and there's no reasonable thought left, but only the goal that you've hopefully burned deep enough into your mind - to reach with pure will power.
During the last potatoes I was REALLY close to throwing up - the reflex already came, but I suppressed it before anything came out. I fully focused on keeping everything down during the last three potatoes - the hardest three peaces I've ever eaten.

Close your eyes...

Chew potato...

Relax your belly...

Swallow...

Put another in your mouth...

Do everything you can not to throw up...

Chew...

Swallow...

Potato...

Chew...

Chew...

Chew so that you can swallow everything to show your mouth's empty.

56 minutes.

Fuck I fucking did it.

At this point I was hovering way beyond the typical state of human consciousness and I had to sit for an hour before I felt like I could move.
^{I guess that's one way to reach altered state of mind, though I would recommend some other procedure than mine.}

^{I think my face describes it all.}

Even now after 7 hours the challenge I'm feeling full... I think I'm good without another challenge for a while, that was pretty hardcore. But hey, got what I went for: free meal (+ I will get my face on the restaurant's hall of fame :D).

Anyhow, for obvious reasons I didn't cycle for a long distance today, but I did some googling and found a public lean-to place really close to my route, so for the night I don't have to set up my tarp, which is really nice.

In the restaurant there was also this experienced cycler who gave me some advice for a better alternative route road-wise, because the main big road to the next city is really narrow and busy with truck traffic - that's a bad combination.

The staff was really nice too, particularly the one lady who was supervising the challenge - we chatted for a good while after my eating.

Overall, a pretty good experience.