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BY JULIAN CHENDER

In print | Published December 1, 2005

When your professor brings donuts to your 8:30 a.m. math class the day before Thanksgiving and puts them right next to your desk, it’s usually a good thing. But when Faith Pampel ‘09 found the sweet confections next to her seat, she had to do everything in her power to keep her breakfast down. Just a few days earlier she had run her first 4xDonut race, and now she wanted to stay as far away from the fried treats as possible, at least until next year’s race. Luckily, her professor was nice enough to move the donuts.

The 4xDonut is an annual race hosted by the cross-country team, which consists of four laps around the outdoor track, a mile in total, with each lap preceded by a donut. Runners eat a donut and run a lap, and then repeat three times. If a runner vomits, he or she is disqualified, lest the contestant chooses to eat the vomit. This has been done in the past.

Each lap has a different flavored donut: First comes Boston cream, then double chocolate, followed by cinnamon powder and finally toasted coconut.

For many, Boston cream is the favorite. “It’s the easiest to eat,” four-year reigning champion Jim Kreft ’06 said. He claimed he could do it in about four seconds.

Jones Nauseef ’06 appreciated the Boston cream because “it has the fewest calories, and lubricant.”

The other three donuts are much more difficult because they are cake donuts. “The cake donuts have much more volume and much less lube,” Kreft said.

Pampel agrees that the cake donuts are more difficult. “The toasted coconut was dry,” she said. “I felt like I was eating sandpaper.”

“The toasted coconut actually made me want to kill myself,” Kathy Feeney ’09 said.

However, one runner strays from the pack, lending her allegiance to a cake donut. “The toasted coconut was my favorite because it was the last,” Emily Wistar ’06 said. “But, oh, it was so bad.”

All four flavors were lined up on the outdoor track at 9:00 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 18 for the 15th annual running of the competition. Kreft led the men, winning his fourth race with a time of 8:12, 22 seconds behind his first-year best.

“I am one of the few people who crams the whole donut into my mouth and eats while I run,” Kreft said. This strategy is probably what has led him to be the first runner with a four-year winning streak.

This year, however, Kreft ran into some fierce competition in Jon Estey ‘08. Estey had adopted Kreft’s strategy of chewing while he ran. The two finished the final lap at the same time, but both had some donut remaining. “It came down to who could chew the last bit of donut faster,” Kreft said.

The women’s race was close as well, with Elise Garrity ’09 finishing only eight seconds ahead of Pampel in 11 minutes and 59 seconds. “The second donut went down like a rock and I had my doubts,” Garrity said, “but the field slowed down a lot around the third donut. Faith [Pampel] was really good competition.”

Not everybody who participated, though, had a great time. “It is important to acknowledge that nobody hates this event more than I do,” Nauseef said after finishing his fourth and final 4xDonut race in the “29-minute range.”

“It was one of the worst experiences of my life,” Pam Davis ’07 said. She ran the race this year, she explained, because “I cheated my freshman year so I had to do it again.”

The 4xDonut was “much more painful than I remembered,” Wistar said.

Even the winner wasn’t a fan. “Overall it was a pretty unpleasant experience,” Garrity said. However, she did add that despite this, it is “fun to look back on, I guess.”

Others, still, took a more practical approach to the contest. Feeney was relieved to come out alive. “I survived, which is all that matters in the long run,” she said.

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