The Half Gallon Challenge
Each subculture has its own customs and practices. With thru-hikers many of them have to do
with food. In numerous restaurants thru-hikers can eat for free if they manage a certain amount.
Among these food competitions one especially stands out, the Half Gallon Challenge! The venue
is a small supermarket at Pine Grove Furnace State Park. The challenge is very special among
thru-hikers also because it takes place only a couple of miles short of the Half-Way-Point of
the 2176 miles.
It is very simple! You go to the supermarket buy a gallon ice-cream (about 2 l), tell the
supermarket owner that you want to participate in the challenge and start to eat the ice-cream
as fast as possible. The time is being taken, of course. Even if you don’t have the fastest
time you will receive an award and can call yourself "Member of the Half Gallon Club".
What starts as very tasty and funny, becomes less fun by and by, and toward the end it
turns into real work like the trail. It is interesting when several thru-hikers start at the
same time or slightly time-staggered because then you can watch hikers in different stages of
distress.
Like with every challenge tactics are important. I made a big mistake when choosing the
ice-cream flavor. I picked the obviously most delicious and calorie richest ice cream,
"Hershey’s Moose Tracks", with a total of 3500 calories which exceed the other flavors with about
600 to 700 calories. I started right away without letting the ice-cream to soften up which
is allowed. The softer ice-cream is easier to get out of the packaging which saves
maybe 4-5 min. but which had become irrelevant for my time.
I listed myself with a time of 1:09h and belonged to the slowest finishers. 42 min. was the
fastest time of my direct competitor and a good friend who had participated in the challenge
1-2 day earlier had made it in 9 min.!
After the challenge I felt sick and was unable to move for about 1h. I had participated in
the challenge 3h after a good breakfast of around 800 calories and was still so full that I
feared to throw up. One hour later though everything was fine again and thinking that today
would be a day without any calorie deficiency I simply ordered a cheeseburger, a hot dog and
flushed all this with one liter of Pepsi. But this should not mean that I would skip dinner...
Thru-hikers burn daily between 4000 and 5000 calories and continuously loose weight. So it
doesn’t matter if you have a day of gluttony every now and then.
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