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Home > Featured Stories > Engaging Society > February 2009 > Glazed and Confused Raise $35,000Glazed and Confused Raise $35,000
I'm very, very proud of what this group has accomplished. This event shines a great light on NC State and the community that surrounds it.
Co-chair Kendall Fitzgerald ('09)
A Krispy Kreme Challenge participant works his way through a dozen doughnuts during Saturday's race. More than $35,000 was raised for the North Carolina Children's Hospital during the record-setting event.
PHOTO GALLERY: Krisy Kreme ChallengeBy David Hunt, News Services
NC State University students celebrated victory in the ultimate triathlon Saturday when a Wolfpack runner took first place in the 2009 Krispy Kreme Challenge. It was a sweet victory for Eric Mack, a senior in natural resources and a member of the cross country team, who finished the three-part race in just over 28 minutes.
The race is simplicity itself. Participants must run two miles from the landmark Belltower on campus to the Krispy Kreme store in Raleigh, stop and eat a dozen doughnuts, then run back to the Belltower, all in less than one hour. The challenge for many is the additional, but not required, step of keeping the doughnuts down.
"I'm very, very proud of what this group has accomplished," said Kendall Fitzgerald, a senior in chemical engineering who is co-chair of this year's race. "This event shines a great light on NC State and the community that surrounds it."
This year's organizers added a new high-tech feature to the race, introducing an automated timing system. Before the race, runners were given ankle bracelets with chips embedded in them. As the runners crossed the finish line, sensors picked up radio signals emitted by the chips and automatically recorded their time.
More than 5,500 participants took part in the student-run event this year, raising $35,000 for North Carolina Children's Hospital. The explosive growth of the race, which started in 2004 with just 10 participants, has generated extensive national media coverage. ESPN shot footage of the race to air on its daily news program, SportsCenter, and papers across the country picked up the Associated Press story about the event on Sunday, under the headline: "Glazed and Confused Run Krispy Kreme Challenge."
Fitzgerald said organizers may have to limit the number of runners to about 6,500 next year.
"We're hitting a physical space barrier," he said. "There's not much more we can do down at the Krispy Kreme store, and we're already shutting down some of the biggest roads in Raleigh."
Logistically, the race runs smoothly, he said, but there's not much anyone can do to get participants to eat 12 doughnuts any faster.
For the participants, the focus was clearly on having a good time for a good cause. While some took the competitive nature of the race to heart, frantically mashing their doughnuts and eating them as quickly as possible, others went at a more leisurely pace.
Costumes were popular, with several students arriving as their favorite superheroes, others dressed as Thing 1 and Thing 2 from the Dr. Seuss books, and more than one person dressed as a cup of coffee and a doughnut.
Kevin and Deb Conroy and their kids showed up carrying a family heirloom of sorts, a painting of Elvis Presley they bought out of the back of a van in 1991 that has been present at all their major family events.
"Where my wife grew up, this is considered fine art," Conroy said of the painting.
They attached the framed picture to a pole and held it high so a friend who was running the race could pick them out of the crowd in the Krispy Kreme parking lot.
That was a wise idea. By the time several thousand runners had grabbed a box of doughnuts from volunteers and crowded onto the asphalt, it was hard to see more than a few inches in any direction.
There were other lessons to be learned from the challenge. At 42, the first woman to finish the race, Cindy Barbour of Greensboro, proved that being swift of foot and cast iron of stomach isn't just for adolescents. Then again, considering that among the first 500 finishers there was only one person over the age of 60, it could be that maturity brings its own kind of wisdom.
Perhaps the torch really should be passed to the next generation.
