EMMAUS, Pa. – Forget carb loading before a race; these runners are eating their way through one.<\/p>\n
In Emmaus, participants celebrated National Pierogi Day with a race that put their appetites to the test.<\/p>\n
At this race, runners can’t just hit the ground running. First, they’ve got to get through a pierogi, courtesy of local businesses: Morty’s Steaks and David’s Italian Market.<\/p>\n
“You eat four. You do four laps, and you have a pierogi just before you run your lap,” Emmaus Run Inn co-manager Budd Coates says.<\/p>\n
The Emmaus Run Inn hosted its first pierogi run Thursday, turning National Pierogi Day into a test of speed, strategy and stomach space.<\/p>\n
“We’ve done it with cookies, hot dogs, vegan wings, and tonight we’re doing it with pierogies,” Coates says.<\/p>\n
About 40 people signed up; some came ready to compete. Others, like the owner of nearby store Board to Death Games, joined on the fly.<\/p>\n
“I was getting off work, and I saw the crowd, and so I ran home and grabbed my running shoes,” Thomas Boone says. “Might have been a mistake because I think I’m in, like, second to last place right now.”<\/p>\n
“I feel terrible. Happy I finished first, but there’s, like, rocks in my stomach,” Kristin Susens says.<\/p>\n
For the first female finisher, the running was the easy part.<\/p>\n
“I feel like we’re fast runners but slow eaters, so we had to make up time in the run because we lost time in the eating,” Susens says.<\/p>\n
The overall winner is no stranger to food-fueled races.<\/p>\n
“I do all these food miles; they’re really fun,” Mark Jones says.<\/p>\n
“I did the pizza mile there was a little bit ago, and then the hot dog mile. This is my event,\u201d Jones remarks.<\/p>\n
But whether they came to win or just for the fun of it, the race brought everyone together.<\/p>\n
“It’s a great idea. It’s fun. I mean, why not?” Tom Lahovski says.<\/p>\n
“You’re getting to do this and have a little fun and some good food besides,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
However, the race left many needing a moment to recover.<\/p>\n
“It was fun, but torture,” one of the youngest runners says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EMMAUS, Pa. – Forget carb loading before a race; these runners are eating their way through one. In…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302811,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[214,119,121,120,232],"class_list":["post-302810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-allentown-area"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302810\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}