I TAMED THE BEAST
I CAN still smell the dried mustard under my fingernails, and the food headache is only just subsiding.
Call me lucky, unlucky or just plain stupid, but yesterday I battled the heat sweats and the meat sweats at Geelong Baseball Centre to chow down on a 25-inch hot dog making headlines at Geelong-Korea home games.
In metric terms, that’s 63.5cm, and it’s aptly named the Home Run Hotdog.
You could say I hit one, although accepting a challenge to try to smash it down in 10 minutes was not something I thought I was up to.
Instead, I had set myself a more achievable 15-minute target.
But when Geelong-Korea general manager Alex Pallerano informed me the brainchild of these giants — a little place called Massive Weiners in Prahran — set a five-minute challenge, I had to at least meet them halfway.
When the cheer squad presented me a loaded-up dog lined with cheese and smothered in ketchup and mustard — in full-on American style — my heart and my stomach dropped.
I think I managed to spit out an “Oh dear”. But I’d planned for this. Breakfast was my previous meal of the day, so by 6pm I was starving.
I looked odds-on about three minutes in.
Even though I’m not a condiments guy, I made it work with the slathering of sauce and, incredibly, I was just about halfway through.
Maybe the cheer squad enthusi- asm had something to do with the inspiration.
But then I hit the wall. I don’t really know what hit first — the 35C heat sweats or the 64cm meat sweats — but by then it was just a blur.
It got worse when the ketchup and mustard pooled in one spot on the bun, and that was everything that made up the next bite.
When I got through another quarter in the next five minutes, I was just about done for. But I pushed on just to be able to say I’d managed it.
It still felt like a triumph when I lifted that empty box, stopping the clock at 14:57.
When the adrenaline left, I left the ballpark with some serious eating pains in my head and my gut.
If you think you can handle it, I would recommend spending a good hour or so on it and nd taking in some toppquality baseball from the hill, right up close to the action.
If I can do it, any- one can.
The challenge e awaits at every Geeelong-Korea home me game, and you can try ry it tonight when they take e on the Adelaide Bite from 6.30pm 0pm and twice more over the weekend. nd. me