Vermonster and more

What a Memorial day weekend...My friend Orion came up to visit me in DC and we went on a 4 day food extravaganza. He arrived on Thursday evening at the Baltimore airport. Before picking him up I went for my first bike ride since the half. I just spun easy for about 75 minutes. My legs were still sore but slowly recovering. It was 8:30pm when I picked him up and we went out to eat at Ruby Tuesday and proceeded to destroy the all you can eat salad bar. The trip's starting off good.

On Friday morning, we woke up at 5AM and went swimming at my LA Fitness as well as doing the spin class. Orion really hammered the spin class as I still took it easy. Afterwards, we went to IHOP for breakfast. I had 5 pancakes, 1 egg, and hashbrowns. Orion had 5 pancakes, 2 eggs, and 4 bacon. We proceeded to play a marathon session of Rock Band up until 5ish.

Friday evening we were going to the Nationals/Brewers game in downtown DC. Their new park is amazing and I got great tickets in the front row of right field off of StubHub. Orion had this massive chili nachos, garlic fries and some soda. I had a chicken sandwich, fries, pretzel and peanuts during the game. We had planned to take it easy on the food because Saturday would be the ultimate in eating...the Vermonster at Ben & Jerry's. Orion and I had found out about this behemoth of an ice cream sundae on the Travel Channel on the top 10 "pig out" places in America.

The plan was to go for a long swim, ride the spin bike for an hour and then finish up with a 30 minute run. We'd be good and hungry and then we would stop over at Ben & Jerry's and test out stomachs. The Vermonster consists of 20 scoops of ice cream, 4 bananas, 4 ladles of hot fudge, 10 scoops of walnuts, 4 scoops of other toppings, 3 chocolate chip cookies and 1 fudge brownie. It costs $32 which is cheap considering one scoop of Ben & Jerry's costs like $3.

They come in the tubs pictured below:
This Ben & Jerry's had run out of cookies and brownies so our Vermonsters had 4 extra scoops of ice cream for a total of 24. I brought my own spoon as the little plastic spoon wouldn't be enough for me and my eating. Orion got 10 scoops of vanilla and 14 scoops of Chocolate Fudge Brownie. I couldn't get any Chocolate Fudge brownie as his Vermonster had emptied that tub. I got 8 scoops of chocolate, 8 scoops of Mint Chocolate chip and 8 scoops of Cheesecake brownie.

Elena was there to watch the whole event and we dug in. I had to go slow at first because it was so cold. The first half went quite well but man it started to get super sweet towards the end. Also the ice cream had started to melt and became a layer of soupy mess on the top. The soup was really hard for me but Orion did quite well with his.

Finally we were finished..

We figured Orion had about 2 scoops of ice cream left and I had about 4 scoops of ice cream and probably at least one whole Hersey sized chocolate bar left in chocolate chunks from the mint chocolate ice cream. We both decided that vanilla would've been the way to go because it got so sweet at the end. We walked out of the Ben & Jerrys and stumbled back to the car in quite serious pain. We dropped off Elena and made it home. We immediately took a nap for 3 hours as our guts were just hurting. For the rest of the weekend Orion was having nightmares about not finishing and wanting to try again as soon as the next day. Orion got hungry about 9pm and we went to Wendy's for food. I even stomached a little food but Orion ate normal food. What an ice cream animal!

We went to the gym Sunday morning for a technique swim. Orion went to lift arms afterwards and I did a full on spin class. Afterwards, we went over to the movie theater to catch the new Indy flick and immediately downed 2 tubs of popcorn only 10 minutes into the movie. Oh well, we could've easily downed 3 tubs but didn't want to leave during the movie. The movie really didn't have too many slow spots so it was pretty good although the concept wasn't the best.

For the final dinner, we got reservations at Fogo de Chao, a Brazilian steakhouse in downtown DC right off the Metro. Orion and I had never been to one of these places but had heard good things. I mean it's the perfect restaurant for us as they bring skewers of meat constantly thru the dining area and it's all you can eat. All you can eat meat...the perfect last dinner. We arrive and get seated about 6:30pm. Plenty of time to absolutely wreck the place. I was still not feeling really hungry but I had to make up for the loss to the Vermonster. They had a super salad bar that was part of the meal. I just had a little salad where as Orion had a decent sized one. I immediately turned my coaster to "green" which basically has the folks stop by with their skewers to load your plate with meat. So the first skewer stopped and it was pork sausage. I got a link and then the meat really started to pick up. I got a little pork roast, 3 different cuts of sirloin, ribeye, bacon wrapped chicken, bacon wrapped filet mignon, and filet mignon. I totally destroyed the place. I was still eating when Orion caved in. I had 2 full 8 oz filets and a bunch of ribeye. Orion said there was this other guy who was keeping pace with me for awhile but I put the guy to shame as I kept piling it in. All the meat I ate bodes well for the 72oz steak challenge. I think I'll be able to do that without much problem although I was barely able to walk out of the restaurant. The ride on the metro home was brutal.

We woke up Monday and didn't need to eat. We instead looked at the various challenges we'll be doing after the Ironman. We're going to do the 6lb burger challenge instead of the 15lb unless we can down 10 quarter pounders at McDs easily in training. We found a few more restaurants that have challenges. We found this website, Super-sized meals. It documents a bunch of people doing crazy eating stuff. We definitely need a video person to capture the moment. I took video of the Vermonster but not enough as I was trying to eat that darn thing. We also found that there's a Ben & Jerrys close to Orion's house so we'll be trying again.

2 months 26 days...