Nathan’s 4th of July Hot Dog Eating Contest
Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest is a modern American ritual with a cult following.
It’s an annual competitive eating competition where contestants try to eat as many hotdogs as they can within 12 minutes.
For decades, Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest was dominated by large, heavyset men. Not just this contest but competitive eating at large. Competitive eating was seen as a brute-force spectacle - not a technical sport. All that changed in 2001.
Kobi
Takeru Kobayashi aka Kobi.
Kobi was a broke university student from Japan who was struggling to pay his bills. He was literally struggling to keep the lights on and had to resort to lighting his apartment by candle. His girlfriend Kumi took a wild chance. She enrolled him in a televised eating competition that paid $5000 to the winner. Without telling him. At face value, this didn’t make any sense whatsoever. Kobi wasn’t heavy set or large by any stretch. He was a man of slight build - and stood at a very modest five foot eight. Not the kind of person who springs to mind when you’d imagine a competitive eater.
But Kobi reluctantly agreed to enter the competition. He was going to outmanoeuvre the opposition through technique and preparation. It was a 4 stage event - boiled potatoes, seafood, mutton barbecue and finally, noodles. He studied previous events obsessively and found out that most competitors went too hard in the early rounds and by the time the noodles rolled around, were too exhausted and stuffed to move. He decided to eat just enough in each round to qualify for the next, conserving energy and appetite. His strategy paid off - he won and pocketed the 5000$. The lights came back on. But now he was like a wild animal who’d tasted blood. He wanted more. There were other small-time eating contests in Japan that paid good money but he had his sight set on something bigger - the superbowl of competitive eating - Nathan’s 4th of July Hot Dog Eating Contest.
The Preparation
Kobi’s preparation was thorough, meticulous and intense. He started training for the competition several months before. He couldn’t find regular hot dogs in Japan so he started training with sausages made from minced fish, wrapped in pieces of bread.
Kobi studied the problem hard. He thought it was strange that all competitors went about eating the hot dogs in the same way - end to end. Essentially the same way people eat hot dogs at a barbecue.
He thought this was very inefficient. He got experimenting. He found that it was a lot more efficient to break the hotdog and bun into two halves and eat each half separately. The rulebook didn’t say anything about having to eat the hotdogs end to end.
Kobayashi asked himself another question -
Does it make sense to eat the bun and the hot dog together?
He wondered if this was yet another habit that was carried over from eating dogs for pleasure, without second thought.
When you’re eating for pleasure, it makes sense to eat the bun and the dog together - but when the objective is to eat as many hot dogs as possible in 12 minutes, does it still make sense? He experimented and found out that if he separated the dogs from the buns, he could essentially swallow the dogs in double quick time. That still left him with the buns though - they needed a lot of chewing and took a lot of time to get through. So, he decided to dunk the buns in water before eating them. The soggy buns went down easily. Also, this way, he wouldn’t get thirsty half way through and waste precious seconds chugging water.
He maintained a strict weight-training regimen - he found that having strong muscles and not carrying excess weight were huge advantages. He also found that being well-slept was non-negotiable.
He took meticulous notes and video taped all his training sessions. He kept mixing and matching - varying pace, loading techniques - the works. He systematically went about expanding his stomach’s capacity by increasing the amount of food and water he consumed - over months.
The Ceiling
Kobi entered the Hot Dog Eating Contest in the year 2001. Back then, the long-standing record was a whopping 25.125 hot dogs in 12 minutes!Kobi didn’t make much of the ceiling. He didn’t want to legitimize the 25 hot dog mark in his mind. As far as he was concerned, it was an artificial barrier seeing as how previous contestants hadn’t really “asked themselves the right questions”.
The wiry, Japanese 23 year old was not seen as anything approaching a serious threat. In fact, one of the contestants laughed at him saying “my arms are bigger than your legs”.
Kobi won the hot dog eating contest that year. But here’s the thing. He didn’t only win the competition - he had changed the whole landscape of the competition forever.
50 hot dogs!
That’s how many hot dogs Kobi ate. He’d almost doubled the previous record!
Frame is Everything
Kobi reframed the problem and in doing so, redefined the whole game.
Everyone before him asked the question how do I eat more hot dogs?
Kobi asked himself - how do I make eating one hot dog easier?
Kobi saw the competition for what it was - a sport. He boiled it down to the first principles - the constituent parts of the problem - the mechanical nitty gritty.
The way he saw it, competitive hot dog eating was no more similar to everyday eating than marathon running was to taking strolls in the countryside.
On one level, Kobi found a better solution to an old problem. On another level, it could be argued, Kobi was solving a whole other problem.
