‘For the rest of the weekend I got to be a celebrity around the campus which was fun,’ says good egg who is also a personal trainer, fitness instructor at rec centre
Jonathan Clarke is a good egg. And he recently showed those in the United States that Orillia is no yoke by winning the Ultimate Frisbee Egg Eating Contest at the Poultry Days Festival in Ohio.
“I ate 42 in 10 minutes. I came first and set the all-time contest record in 44 years,” said Clarke of his accomplishments at the marquee June event.
He ate a dozen more hard boiled eggs than the second place finisher, who ate 30 during the competition.
“The guy who came in second was the runner-up from last year’s contest. He said he was going to go for 30 and I said I was going to go for 50,” he told OrilliaMatters.
Technically, Clarke, 35, is retired from competitive eating, but his friend was entering the event and egged him on to enter the eating challenge by telling him it was a fundraiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
“That’s what really convinced me,” said Clarke, a personal trainer and fitness instructor at the Orillia Recreation Centre.
The atmosphere at the Poultry Days festival on the Saturday night was “incredible,” said Clarke.
“There were 300 or so athletes competing in the tournament and they all came to support over this egg eating contest, they were cheering on and getting the crowd hyped. They were chanting ‘Eggs, Eggs, Eggs’. For the rest of the weekend I got to be a celebrity around the campus which was fun.”
Approximately $20,000 was raised this year, he said.
Clarke got into competitive eating when he went to Western University where he entered a lot of challenges. His favourite is the big burger challenge.
“I watched a documentary on a competitive eater and I thought, ‘I could do that.’ My favourite one was in Sault Ste. Marie and the prize was a trip to Vegas. It was a gigantic five-pound burger. The buns were grilled cheese. There was a poutine you had to finish as well. I just made it in under an hour,” he said.
Clarke started his own YouTube channel called Junkfood Bodybuilding where he posted his eating challenges, including a five-dozen egg challenge. He ate 60 eggs, cooked in a variety of ways without a time limit.
Some of the challenges people might know him from is the Kenzington Burger Bar ‘Big Burger’ challenge in downtown Orillia; he’s also done the Brewery Bay lava wings challenge.
The Patrick Fogarty Catholic Secondary School graduate said there is a trick to being a successful eater. His “regimen” includes expanding his stomach by eating large quantities of low-calorie foods like salad about 24 hours before the event and supplementing with water.
“There is a science behind it,” he said.
Clarke said he has a good gastro-intestinal system and is able to digest the high volume of food after the challenges.
He also uses the gimmick of unhealthy eating to educate others about proper eating.
“The whole gimmick when I started to eat these unhealthy things was that I was also involved in other healthy things to keep fit and live a balanced lifestyle while having the imbalance on one side as well,” he said.